Guns Yet Again (Maybe One Last Time)

I have blogged about guns so many times that I am sick of the subject--and any faithful followers that I might have are probably sick of it, too.

So this is kind of a summation.

I don't understand how many shootings it's going to take before the American populace demands that something be done about the problem.

I also don't understand why this is not apparent to people: that the problem is one of the prevalence of guns and the easy availability of guns.

As to the first: According to statistics available on the Internet, in 2017 and 2018, 42% and 43% of American households owned one or more firearm.

When guns are prevalent, there will be accidents such as children shooting themselves or other children, or accidentally being shot by their parents or other adults. Also, episodes of anger, such as an argument in a bar or road rage, all too often mean that someone whips out a gun and shoots someone else. If you pay attention to the news, you know that these things are in fact happening, and at a rate of several per week, with hundreds being murdered by guns annually.

And easy availability of guns in America has given us the school shootings and other mass shootings where someone mentally or emotionally unstable kills numerous innocent people--children and others.

America mourns these occurrences but at the same time seems to accept them as a fact of life in the US. (If I were Donald Trump writing a tweet, I'd summarize with a term like "sad" or "tragic" or "shameful" or "disgusting.") I'm about to become cynical and conclude that nothing will be done any time soon.

Copyright © 2019.

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

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