Guns, Yet Again

 I have blogged about the problem of gun violence in America, over and over, to where I am tired of writing on that subject and have resolved,  more than once, to say no more about it.

Yet mass shootings, particularly  school shootings, incredible and of course tragically, continue. And, they're even getting worse. Last year there were 270 school shootings, the most since 1970.

I believe the chief cause of the high rate of homicides in America is the prevalence of guns. (Yes, you can kill people with a knife, but if you intend to kill a number of people, a gun is much more efficient.) The United States has the loosest gun laws in the world. Coincidence?

You don't hear too much about the experience of Australia. The national government of Australia created an incentive for Australian citizens to turn in their guns. The result? Homicides decreased 97%. Ninety-seven percent!

Yet, time after time, it seems we absorb these experiences with little or nothing happening. Why, in heaven's name? Other countries shake their heads in disbelief and probably are even afraid to visit the United States.

The reason is because we have a powerful gun lobby—the NRA, other gun owners' organizations, gun manufacturers—and legislatures and governors—chiefly Republican—who have thwarted meaningful gun control.

True, we have the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Yet jurisprudence has held that the gun-owning right is not absolute and can have limitations imposed. At one point--for a few years--assault rifles were illegal. Then that law expired and was not renewed.

Not Again!? Yes, More on Guns and School Shootings

I have said I am tired of blogging about guns, mass shootings, and school shootings. But they keep happening and I for one can't ignore them or keep silent (nor should anyone be able to).

After student survivors of the Parkland, FL, school shooting met with President Donald Trump, he was pledging action. But anything he has done has been completely ineffective. What happened is that, after his meetings with the Parkland students, Trump had a late-night meeting with representatives from the NRA (National Rifle Association)--and it's well-known that Trump is persuaded by whomever he last spoke to.

There have been over 150 school shootings in 30 years. What is it going to take to stop this ridiculous and intolerable phenomenon? We need widespread public outrage, and we need that to translate to people ceasing to vote for pro-gun legislators--those who accept money from the NRA and any and all other pro-gun lawmakers (which pretty much means Republicans).

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently said that we might need to think about repealing the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment to the Constitution states that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The Founding Fathers who wrote and approved the Second Amendment were thinking in terms of muskets that could do a limited amount of damage. They did not foresee such progress in weapons that we would one day have semi-automatic and automatic assault rifles that could kill many people in literally a matter of seconds--let alone that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could easily buy and even stockpile six or 10 or 14 of these weapons.

Copyright © 2018.

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

Tired of Hearing about Mass Shootings

I am really, really tired of blogging about the problem of gun violence in America. Of course it's much more strain, pain, etc., for those whom it has touched more directly.

Let me simply say, once more and maybe for the last time, that I cannot understand how anybody (e.g., the NRA and Republican congressmen and senators) cannot see, or refuse to admit, that there should not be such easy access to assault weapons as we have in the US. It's just ridiculous. In Great Britain it is not permitted to own guns, period.

Copyright (c) 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.


______________
*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

Are More Guns the Answer?

Some people think that the answer to our problem with guns is more guns. Gun sales are booming after the tragic Newtown shootings, and some people say "Arm the teachers."
That makes no sense to me. One, it's just an arms race, as we had between nations during the Cold War; and, as some of the world's leaders had the sense to realize, that does not make anyone more secure. Quite the contrary.Some people think that the answer to our problem with guns is more guns. Gun sales are booming after the tragic Newtown shootings, and some people say "Arm the teachers."
That makes no sense to me. One, it's just an arms race, as we had between nations during the Cold War; and, as some of the world's leaders had the sense to realize, that does not make anyone more secure. Quite the contrary.
Second, if I, for example, owned a gun, and someone invaded my house, I'm sure I'd get shot before I successfully shot the intruder.
Third, the United States is not the world. Look at the rest of the developed world, where there is neither the rate of gun ownership nor anything like the rate of gun violence that the United States has. As far as I'm concerned, that says it all. People in other countries believe the United States is still the Wild West; and, as far as our attitude toward guns is concerned, they are right.
Here is a quote from the web site Bloomberg View ("Concrete Ways to Turn Back the Gun Lobby"), which says it perhaps better than I can:

[T]he widely successful push to bring guns into schools, churches, bars, sporting events -- essentially every public venue in American life -- is part of a narrow political campaign that romanticizes and fetishizes firearms, all the better to sell them. In all of these instances, we are told the right to carry a gun is paramount to all others, including an employer’s right to maintain a safe workplace.

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

And Still Another Gun Massacre

America is currently reeling from yet another massacre by gun.

Readers of my blog know where I stand on gun control. There has been jurisprudence that has affirmed government's right or power to place some limits on so-called "Second Amendment rights" (gun ownership). But, with the current conservative Supreme Court, and enormous lobbying power by the NRA (National Rifle Association), enacting any meaningful gun control--even over assault weapons, which are certainly not needed or used by hunters--is extremely unlikely.

At this moment I don't intend to take on the arguments of the pro-gun segment of the population. I have done so numerous times, in various places. I just want to point out one effect of this most recent event on the collective consciousness of Americans, which is that now people can no longer feel safe even going to the movies.

There are more and more places where we can no longer feel safe. When I was in school, some 55 years ago, there was no such thing as school shootings. Lockdown was not a word in our vocabularies, back then. We may legitimately wonder what has happened, what is going on with our society.

Is this the kind of America that we want?

It should be clear enough what the problem is: guns, and even assault weapons, are too readily available and can get into the hands of mentally unstable people who will use them to create havoc. The American people must cry out, and cry out loudly.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein

Responsibility for Shootings: It's Not Just a Guns Issue

Lest anyone say I'm not fair minded, I'm going to give some credence to the other side of the gun-ownership debate.

The gun-rights advocates are fond of saying, "Guns don't kill people, people do." Well, it's true that before there were guns, people could and did kill other people.

I can't even say that the invention of guns made it easier to kill people at a distance, because bows and arrows and even spears meant you didn't have to be face-to-face with a person to kill him or her. And Homo sapiens has had spears for a long time.

Okay, so if we take the position that people kill people, then this is what logically follows: When, as in the case of many of the killings of multiple people that the U.S. has suffered in the last few years, it seems that the shooter was suffering from mental illness, we have to say that there was a lack of action, a lack of responsibility on the part of those persons around the shooter before he tipped over the edge and killed people.

Parents, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, schoolmates, neighbors, teachers. All these are people who had some opportunity, at least, to observe the developing erratic behavior in the person. And too often, they did nothing. I think it's especially important to point out that parents should urge troubled children to get help. Easier said than done, perhaps. But if the person in question is seriously troubled, parents can ultimately have recourse to their power to have the person committed to a mental institution.

I know that many parents, friends, etc., in retrospect have said, Yes, they saw the signs. They saw the erratic behavior. They saw the progression into irrationality. Yet they did nothing. I don't want to lay a burden of guilt upon any individual. It is more a matter of a collective responsibility on the part of whole communities that was abrogated. People need to be more vigilant and more willing to take action when they know of a person who might become dangerous to himself and to others.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

I Have to Speak Out on Guns Again Because the Problem Is So Dramatic

Yet another of those tragic, shocking shootings. When, when, WHEN will there be a loud outcry from the public saying that this has to stop?

As I have said before, the problem as I perceive it is that there are too many guns around, and guns are too easily obtainable, to the extent that mentally unstable people can (and do, very sadly) get their hands on guns.

It's terribly tragic that a recent US Supreme Court decision has undermined attempts of government jurisdictions to have gun control laws (this reverses years of jurisprudence that had held that some degree of regulation of firearm ownership was permissible).

Aside from this unfortunate Supreme Court ruling, most of the remainder of the problem is the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which, despite its name, seems just as concerned that there be completely unrestricted access to handguns and even assault weapons as it is with rifles.

The NRA is a very powerful, well financed, and vocal special-interest lobby in the U.S. Congress. According to a 2009 article, "The group's political action committee spent $15.6 million on campaign donations during the past two years, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission." (Source: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/30/nra-lobbyists-hold-strong-influence-policy-agenda#ixzz1AeRrW2FG) Read more of this article for information on just one instance of the influence of the NRA, which ended up killing voting rights in Congress for the District of Columbia because the NRA wanted the abolition of DC's gun control laws to be a part of that measure.

To tie in with another posting of mine on this blog, if the U.S. did not incorporate the South, we would not have as much influence by the NRA. This is because support for the NRA comes largely from rural areas and from the South.

Those who want to see some restraint on gun ownership have not only the NRA in the way—a not insignificant obstacle—but also the Second Amendment to the Constitution. As I said above, a recent Supreme Court decision lends greater influence to that amendment, or at least a certain interpretation of it. The Amendment itself is quite concise, but (despite what some people think), the interpretation of law (or of anything else written) is never simple and self-evident. I won't go into issues of interpreting the Second Amendment here; I'm not a law professor or a Constitutional scholar. However, I'd even go so far as to say that if gun ownership cannot be curbed because of the Second Amendment, the Amendment should be repealed. But I'm pretty sure that can't happen in today's America.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein