Guns Yet Again

I am truly tired of blogging about guns--and Americans should be more than tired of this never-ending series of mass shootings. But this will never change until and unless America gets over its love affair with guns, abandons the idea that everybody is entitled to own a gun, and gets some resolve to rein in the NRA (National Rifle Association) and somehow diminish its influence over our legislators. Maybe this will happen at the state level first--but then the Supreme Court, now more conservative than ever, will rule the state law unconstitutional because of the Second Amendment.

When I think this, I think it's hopeless. Meanwhile I am sure Europeans (and people everywhere else in the world) shake their heads about those crazy Americans who go on killing one another.

Copyright (c) 2019.

Yet Another Shooting

Yet another shooting.

It just goes on, even getting more frequent. And the National Rifle Association, which has lots of members, lots of money, and a very effective lobbying apparatus, nips in the bud any talk about imposing new restrictions on gun ownership.

Donald Trump said, "It's a mental health issue, not a gun issue."  Speaking from Tokyo, he said, "We have mental health issues, just like any other country." Yes, Mr. Trump, but have you thought at all about the fact that most other countries don't have these mass shootings? If every country has mental health issues, and mental health problems in the population cause these shootings, then why don't those other countries have numerous and frequent mass shootings similar to ours? Simple logic shows that Trump is wrong.

In Great Britain, just as an example, it is illegal to own a gun. There are still a few guns anyway, and no doubt guns are sometimes used in the commission of a crime. But do we hear about mass shootings in Great Britain? If my rhetorical question needs an answer, No, we do not.

In fairness, it must be admitted that it's not quite so simple as just widespread ownership of guns. I understand that, on a per capita basis, there are a lot of guns in Canada. There are a lot of guns in Switzerland. But those countries don't seem have the equivalent gun use in shootings.

One thing that may make a difference: I have said before, the United States has a gun culture. Possibly this is as simplistic as some other comments on our mass shooting problem, but I think that Western movies glorified, and normalized, using guns to shoot people. Some people in other countries think all of America is the Wild West; and to some extent that's true.

If we look at other countries' experience with gun control laws, it looks like they do work. Australia had a problem with mass shootings. For example, motorcycle gangs were engaging in wars with guns. A turning point came in 1996. "The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. 35 people were killed and 23 wounded when the gunman opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two semi-automatic rifles. This mass killing horrified the Australian public [Wikipedia, s.v. Gun laws in Australia]."

Under Australia's new laws, no one may own a gun without showing a good reason. With money raised from a levy, a million guns were bought back by the government. The result?

Between 2010-2014, gun related homicides across all of Australia had dropped to 30-40 per year. Firearms in 2014 were used in less than 15% of homicides, less than 0.1% of sexual assaults, less than 6% of kidnapping/abductions and 8% of robberies.
Since the 1996 legislation the risk of dying by gunshots was reduced by 50% in the following years and has stayed on that lower level since then [Wikipedia, s.v. Gun laws in Australia].

I don't understand why no one in the US Congress calls the attention of the public and the rest of the government to the experience of Australia.


Copyright © 2017

Guns--Yet Again

I have blogged about the problem in the US of gun violence a number of times. But the shootings just go on, so I go on thinking and writing about this same subject.

In England (or, to be more accurate, the United Kingdom, thus including Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales), they do not have large numbers of people killing one another with guns. 

Why? Maybe it's because it's illegal to own firearms in England. Remarkably (to us Americans), even the police in England do not routinely carry guns.
 

People in American who own guns often say that their gun ownership is a matter of their "freedom," expressing some sort of freedom and independence, or maybe self-reliance--even protection of themselves against a tyrannical government (and, after all, that is in keeping with the spirit of the very founding of the United States).
 

I think it's part of a lingering "wild west" mentality that we have in the US. In the nineteenth century, law enforcement in the West was often weak or ineffectual, so a man's owning a gun might in fact be necessary for his self-defense.
 

Today people who own guns say they want them for self-defense. The chief (and very powerful) gun lobby organization in the US, the NRA (National Rifle Association), believes the solution is more guns, not less; they want to see more people owning guns. Their argument is that people who currently don't own guns need to acquire guns to protect themselves against the bad guys.

 

Well, first of all, we have stronger law enforcement, nowadays, than they had in the days of the Old West, and I, for one, hope to rely on the police to protect me against the "bad guys." And I feel that, when everyone owns guns, we are less safe, rather than more safe. I think we see this every day in the US: people being shot during drunken rages in bars. Children getting their hands on their parents' guns and accidentally shooting themselves or others.

Are people in England, barred from owning guns, less safe than Americans?  Well, they have a much lower rate of homicides. In a decade, they have fewer than the US has in one year. Are they somehow less free? I'm not sure what the metric is to determine that, but I suspect not.

 

The legal/constitutional difference between the two countries is that we in the US have the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which says,

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

For quite a while jurisprudence generally held that some restrictions on gun ownership were permissible under the Constitution and the Second Amendment. However, recent decisions by the US Supreme Court, which these days is frequently dominated by conservatives, have overturned many gun-regulation or -restriction laws. And, regardless of what issues of interpretation the Amendment may raise, the pro–gun ownership lobby feels that the Amendment confers an absolute right and admits of no abridgements whatsoever.
 

Interpreting the law is never as simple and clear-cut as some people want to believe. So, some rulings that guns may be restricted might help. Even better, it is in principle possible to amend the Constitution with a new amendment that would basically repeal the Second Amendment. But I doubt that this will happen any time soon.

Note added 8/26/2015: Please check out this link to some interesting statistics on gun violence in America. 

Copyright © 2015.

The Newtown, Connecticut, School Shooting--After We've Had a Week to Gain Perspective

It's now been over a week since the occurrence of the terrible, tragic shooting of first-grade pupils and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut; and the nation and the world has had, not a chance to recover but a chance to contemplate, discuss, and try to analyze this shocking event.

As was well shown in a special program on PBS (the American public TV broadcasting network), there are two components or ingredients to an event like this.

1. Mental illness on the part of the perpetrator.
2. The availability of guns.

The current state of our science is such that we can't confidently identify individuals who are going to do something like that. There are factors which might be considered risk factors, but the group possessing such risk factors is large, and it's only a statistical matter and would not clearly focus attention on specific individuals.

However, much thought needs to be given to the second factor, the availability of guns. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, 88.8 guns per 100 population. And, as a Harvard study showed, more guns mean more homicides.

The gun lobby—mainly the National Rifle Association and a few other, smaller gun owners' or gun rights groups—wants to tell us that what we need is more guns. But that is contradicted by the experience of our own country, first; and by that of Australia.

The United States had a federal ban on so-called assault weapons for ten years, which expired in 2004. Mass shootings using assault weapons have increased since the ban expired. Also and at the same time—due to the influence, power, and legislative success of the gun lobby--gun laws have been loosened in many states.

Second, since Australia enacted tough gun-control laws, their experience of mass shootings such as we have been having has been nearly nonexistent.

A third factor needs to be added to the two I enumerated above:

3. The gun culture in the US.

There are countries with a high—though not as high as America's—rate of gun ownership. One such is Switzerland. But you simply do not hear of mass shootings in Switzerland.

Or take England. England has maybe 50 homicides a year. The US has roughly 12,000.* On a single summer weekend in Chicago, there might be 20 or more homicides committed with guns.

In the US, guns are glamorized and may be, for young urban gang members, a symbol of manhood. Guns are identified with heroically depicted characters in western movies.

Video games have also been blamed for our gun violence. At first blush it makes sense: many video games feature killing people (albeit not real people) by shooting them, and I understand that some video games even show assault weapons being used, weapons with visible brand names.

However, England gets the same video games. And they surely get American movies, including all those American westerns. Yet somehow those factors have not caused the English to be enamored with guns the way Americans are. We need to figure out what accounts for the difference. It would be too easy to simply say, "Well, the English--or the Swiss--are just more peaceable and civilized people." But as I write that, I'm almost tempted to say, Well, maybe that is simply the case. It just does not occur to them to go around shooting one another.


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*Update, January 8, 2013. Last night ABC TV news said the figure is 30,000 gun homicides a year. Today they said that there have been 57,000 gun homicides in two years; and that 85% of the world's deaths of children from guns occur in the US.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Guns--Yet Again

It's happened yet again: another mass shooting in the United States. I'm getting tired of writing about these things.
What kind of sick, crazy society is it in which these things can occur? What kind of sick, crazy society permits it?
I wish I could say you never hear about these things occurring in other countries. It's almost true. Within the last couple of years there was a mass killing of 47 people by a man named Breivik in Norway—even peaceful Norway; and I believe there's been one in New Zealand.
But when something like that occurs in another country it is even more shocking and startling because it is rare almost to the point of being nonexistent. Nothing of the sort had ever happened in Norway before, and nothing of the sort has happened since.
Yet here in the US it seems we have this kind of thing occurring every few months.
It should be clear to nearly any one that the problem is the gun culture* in the US. There are too many guns among the population, they are too easy to get, and crazy people can get guns, even so-called assault weapons.
The US state in which I live, Illinois, has been the only US state out of 50 in which it was not legal to carry a concealed gun out of doors. And now that law has just been overturned by a court. This means that if I should piss off some stranger—and yes, I've done that—I might well get myself shot.
If that happens, please, somebody, say "He told us so."
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* Maybe I should define what I think "gun culture" means. It means a lot of people think guns are a good thing, want to own a gun, want to shoot a gun (at shooting ranges). The argument goes, I need a gun to protect my person and my property.
Well, if literally everybody owns a gun, then maybe you do need to own one, too. That, to me, conjures up an image of some kind of dystopian world that I don't think I'd want to live in.
On the other hand, if nobody owns a gun, you don't need one.
The US is quickly becoming a country where everyone owns a gun. And with this concealed-carry business, well, that's not a world I ever thought I'd have to live in.
Update, December 14, 2012. The above was written after, and prompted by, the mall shooting in Oregon. Therefore, it was written before still another shooting, that of some 26 school children and teachers in a Connecticut elementary school.
Regrettably, these killings almost surely will continue until there is a very loud public outcry, an outcry loud enough to drown out the pro-gun voices of the National Rifle Association, which is very powerful and has been hugely successful in opposing gun-control measures.
Personally, I would even favor repeal of the Second Amendment (the infamous "right to bear arms" amendment), although I'm pretty sure that is not going to happen any time soon.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein