Not only do we have vapid debates in America about which beer is better, which sports team is more fearsome than which other sports team, and the like, but in the wake of our nation’s latest mass shooting, in which 20 children under age 7 perished, now we debate about whether it’s appropriate to debate. Now is not the time, many people attested this weekend, to talk about gun control. Some folks threatened to “unfriend” others on Facebook if those people persisted in posting about mental health support or gun laws, saying that they were obviously making it about “political issues.” Never mind the idiom about the personal being political that’s been around for 40 years, perhaps there is a time for mourning and a time for reflection about what’s led us to these moments. I say moments because a 6-year-old died in the Aurora, CO shooting, a 9-year-old in the Tuscon, AZ shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and of course there are hundreds of kids under 14 killed by guns every year in the US that get next to no media coverage. But even when the guns in an incident were purchased legally, even when there is no long history of mental health instability, and even when the majority of victims are defenseless kids, some among us insist on sticking to the same talking points to defend the status quo. Let’s look at these talking points, and hopefully it’s okay, four days later, to start some kind of dialogue about gun violence and gun rights. If I get defriended on Facebook, so be it.
If we don’t have assault rifles, we won’t be able to prevent the government from becoming a fascist state–Let’s see . . . the Department of Defense carries a budget of more than $680 billion. (For a surreal photo image, click the link to their Web site.) They own or control the most advanced fighter jets in the world, the second-largest nuclear arsenal, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thousands of missiles, drone aircraft, not to mention countless biological agents and bioweapons, and they support secret interrogation chambers in foreign countries around the globe where they can waterboard the hell out of anyone. Not to get all paranoid, because I’m not, but if the US Government wanted to crack down on the citizenry en masse, our “right” to assault rifles is not going to stop them. However, proliferating the sale and use of assault rifles does seem to result in lots of people getting killed. Or put another way, this line of “logic” is asking us to let the most paranoid, alienated individuals in our culture set the policy parameters that affect everyone else. Are we okay with that?
If more people carried guns, they’d be able to take out spree killers before the SWAT teams arrived–There is absolutely, without question, no evidence to this claim whatsoever. First of all, it’s never happened that some guy with a handgun thwarted a spree killer. There is no moment in the nation’s history that gun advocates can point to. It’s as unreal as suggesting that sexual predators will wear dresses to assault women in bathrooms if gender identity protections are put in place by a local government. (And yet transphobes bring that idea up all the time anyway.) There are, however, examples of people killed by friendly fire (our same Department of Defense puts a range of 2-20 percent of war deaths as due to same-side fire), and by accidental firings–when folks don’t realize a gun is loaded, don’t realize the safety is off, or a gun mechanism fails, resulting in a misfire. Firing a gun and aiming a gun correctly are, of course, two different things. There is no reason to think that if more people owned guns and carried them to more places that we would somehow have fewer woundings and killings in our society. Also, consider that in several of the most recent spree killings (Tuscon comes to mind), the shooter was taken out with tackles from unarmed bystanders.
If we allow a ban on assault rifles, next it will be handguns and hunting rifles. It’s a slippery slope–This flies in the face of the purpose of guns, by type. Hunters have no need for assault rifles, unless they don’t care about the state of their steaks (see what I did there?). Some handguns have a purpose for law enforcement, or at least I can get there in theory. People who enjoy target practice have their preferences for what they fire, but both skeet shooting or stationary targets were designed with single-shot rifles and handguns in mind. Assault rifles were created by the Nazis to take out as many human targets as a quickly trained soldier could find. Thus that is what they’re good at doing. They don’t fit into the population of other firearms that civilians need, unless those civilians are looking to take out other human beings (or zombies, possibly, but that brings up another issue) as possible. There just is no reason to have assault rifles on the open market outside of war, just as we don’t sell Patriot missiles or C-4 explosive in that way.
If more people carried guns, criminals would think twice about commiting crimes–While it may be true that some criminals prioritize finding the most vulnerable targets to carry out their illicit behavior, say as with a mugging, this does not explain the whole of criminal behavior, which is often influenced by risk of capture, benefit of the behavior, a deficit in personality or empathy, and so on. Criminal activity has actually been shown to decrease in areas where tighter handgun laws exist, possibly because the calculus of commiting a crime shifts. But even if crimes existed at the same rate with an assault weapons ban in place, it is likely that fewer individuals would be injured or killed per attack, precisely because other firearms fire fewer rounds in the same amount of time.
If we ban assault rifles we’re infringing on the Second Amendment–First, this depends on one’s interpretation of that amendment’s “well regulated milita” phrase. The text reads:
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.
Second, yes. It infringes on at least one reading of what the Second Amendment says. Maybe we can get okay with that. Maybe, seeing as the common firearms of 1791, when the amendment was written, looked like this:
…just maybe we can agree that 100 rounds fired in under two minutes and without reloading is not what the framers had in mind. Maybe when we reach 80 people killed every day from guns in the United States it’s time to rethink their access and use, without having one’s patriotism called into question.
I feel for the families in Newtown, the town where my sister works everyday. She was in lockdown Friday morning, as was her younger daughter, at a nearby high school. I haven’t been in lockdown since September 11, 2001, but it was unnerving and changed my life. Certainly that event on that bright September morning spurred our country and its leaders to make sweeping, permanent changes to our homeland security policy. These spree killings, so frequent, and gun violence more generally, so omnipresent in American culture, ought to move us again, not only to improve public safety, but to save lives. There is no defense in keeping assault weapons on the market. And while I would like to see serious debate about the effect of gun violence in neighborhoods and on families across the nation, I’m fine with starting here where the logical arguments are so, so far in favor of restriction.
Thanks for reading.
Trans/plant/portation 
What you, or I for that matter, interpret the Second Amendment to mean is, frankly, irrelevant. What is relevant is D.C. v. Heller where the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of the prefatory and operative clauses to mean that there is an individual right to own a firearm, outside of militia service. Furthermore, U.S. v Miller established that the government could limit the type of weapons one could own to those used by the militia, i.e. “of the kind in common use at the time.” Heller upheld that, making handgun bans unconstitutional. So, short of us visiting Article V to remove the Second Amendment (and you might want to consider removing the Fourth as well, because a lot of gun owners will be shouting ‘Molon Labe’ very loudly, as well as us card carrying ACLU members), there are very few ways you can ban most current firearms with it passing legal muster.
On “Assault Weapons”. I challenge anyone to give me a definition of one. If we’re talking “Assault Rifles”, that being rifles of an intermediate cartridge designed to be fired automatic or select fire, then those have been highly regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1937 for quite some time.
If we’re talking about those regulated under the “Assault Weapons Ban”, well… those of us with firearms knowledge know that the ban did literally nothing other than change the appearance of a certain subset of weapons. It banned such awful characteristics as flash supressors, bayonet lugs, folding stocks, and “grenade launchers” (a small ring around the barrel designed to fire a rifle grenade).
The type of weapon we’re talking about is used in less than 1% of gun homicides. You are literally twice as likely to be kicked or punched to death than killed by one. They are functionally equivalent to a hunting rifle, with the notable exception that the ammunition used in them was generally designed for the battlefield. In other words, the ammunition is meant to generally wound, not kill (the thinking being that a dead soldier removes one soldier from the battlefield while a wounded one removes more than one).
Look. I get the outrage. I really do. And I get that people who are not familiar with firearms and firearms law want something done and it’s really easy to go after a small subset of guns that to the uninformed look 10 shades of scary. But it doesn’t fix the problem and if anything, allows us to get off easy thinking that this is an easy fix.
It obviously isn’t an easy fix. Americans have a bad habit of murdering each other at an insane rate. We saw zero effect on the murder rate during the old Assault Weapons Ban. Both the CDC and NSF did peer reviewed studies on this. Zero demonstrable effect. When we look at other nations and look at their murder and gun ownership rates, we find zero correlation between gun ownership and intentional homicide rates. What we do find a correlation is with the Human Development Index. (see: http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/07/doing-math-guns for source data).
What this tells me, is that if we want to fix the problem we should be focusing on the *why* we kill each other at such a high rate. Hint: Poverty, wage gap, non-livable minimum wage, lack of low cost post-secondary income, underfunded primary schools, lack of universal healthcare, lack of safety net, a culture that glamorizes male violence, a culture that endorses “violence as foreign policy”…. take your pick.
Again, I get the outrage. But I also remember the last time there was something for us to be outraged over (9/11) and remember the knee-jerk call for action that got us (TSA and the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and….)
WordPress just ate my response. Evil WordPress!
So because I can’t come up with the same thoughtful response the second time around, I’ll just say:
Thank you for your comment. I’m not trying to create a definition of assault rifle–certainly we could try to ban things that fire x rounds or more in a minute, or with magazines of x or greater ammunition, but even those boundaries would be debatable–I was trying to open up discussion against the litany of calls not to talk about guns. I’m not trying to avoid a conversation about mental health support or poverty or masculinity or public safety or criminal justice reform, I’m just asking all of us to move away from the bullshit that if we even talk about assault rifles we’re risking fascism. I’m just asking us to use evidence in a nuanced gun right/public safety debate, instead of calling up ideas about gun ownership and use that have no basis in history or fact. It’s not about my outrage over Newtown. It’s about seeing Columbine, and elementary kids bringing guns to school, and Tuscon, and gang violence across America, and the fact that some of the kids killed on Friday had eleven or more bullet wounds in their bodies. I’m no fan of the Patriot Act, especially as a Lebanese American, but I think it’s fascinating that after one single event on our soil we were ready to sell the farm, yet after 30 years of gun violence and tens of thousands of dead people from guns (83 a day on average) we’re afraid to talk about even the most egregiously unhelpful weapons that civilians use to kill people. But I don’t hold out much hope on such a conversation getting off the ground.
And I guess that’s my issue, civilians don’t use assault weapons to kill people generally. Statistics show that Americans kill each other with long guns at a rate of about 370ish deaths per year from *all* long guns, of which so called assault weapons are a small fraction. Again, you’re twice as likely to get beaten or kicked to death than killed by an “assault weapon”. In fact, about the same number of people are murdered by knives than ALL long guns and shotguns combined.
I make no secret that I’m a firearms person and I make no secret that I build “assault weapons” as a hobby. So, don’t think I’m saying this for any personal reasons, but going after so-called assault weapons is barking up the wrong tree. If you wanted to look at the guns that cause the most carnage in the US, you’d be looking at small caliber handguns. Those account for half of all murder weapons. 8,000+ a year.
But, again, to get a ban on that, you’re looking at a Constitutional change and frankly, it’ll never happen.
I hear what you’re saying about prevalence. Which is why I guess I focused on function and capability. I can see arguments against banning handguns because they can be used a variety of tasks outside of killing people. Same goes for shotguns and hunting rifles, even those with semi-automatic capability. But there just is too much capability for mass casualty where “assault weapons” are in play. They may account for a small number of gun-related deaths, which are in the ballpark of 30,000 in total (yearly average), but my point isn’t the overall number, it’s the design of the weapon and its lack of use for anything else. If these spree killers went into crowded places with firearms that had smaller clips, they would do less damage when these kinds of events did occur. It just seems to be the low hanging fruit to me, and I really enjoy skeet shooting. I have several friends who own guns and belong to the NRA, and who preach gun safety to their kids. And I appreciate that you are a firearms person, I honestly do. Like you say, it’s not personal. I just don’t think saying that more guns will equal less gun death is a fair statement to make, just as I don’t think Mike Hukabee’s comment that more prayer in school will have any measurable effect in decreasing the number of gun deaths each year. We are totally agreed that nobody is going to repeal the 2nd Amendment anytime soon.
> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:01:06 +0000 > To: evmaroon@hotmail.com >
And on a side note that I don’t think anyone has touched, can we at least start talking about how like…. 100% of school shootings were committed by 15-25 year old men? And of them the majority were white middle class ones? And how we only pay attention to shootings when it’s in mostly white suburban neighborhoods?
That’s something I think we really need to be spending time talking about and I know that an uncomfortable conversation like that will go over in this society like a lead balloon.
Also agreed. Like I said in my last comment, the number of gun-related deaths last year was approximately 30,000. If we wanted to tackle the roots of gun violence we’d need to look at domestic abuse, poverty, the flaws of postmodern masculinity, runaway sense of entitlement among young men, gangs, a broken criminal justice system, a lack of mental health support, a lack of health insurance, a lack of support systems for children, unchecked bullying, a lack of child psychologists nationwide, national drug policy, cuts in music, arts, and sports programs, and on and on. I’m not trying to demonize gun owners, certainly, but please, we can’t avoid talking about gun violence forever. Having gun ownership in our constitution is one thing–being silent on gun violence is quite another. > Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:06:01 +0000 > To: evmaroon@hotmail.com >
Again. And I’m going to keep saying this because I keep seeing reference all over the place to the rate of fire and deadliness and it’s wrong wrong wrong.
There is NO and I mean, NO difference between a semi-automatic hunting rifle of the same caliber and an assault rifle of the same caliber other than looks. I don’t mean to harp on this, but, as someone who actually knows quite a bit about firearms technology, it’s one of those things that set me on edge and make me cringe when people make this statement and then want to have input on firearms policy changes.
Example. A Saiga-M (fairly common hunting rifle for boar and deer) and a semi auto AK-47 can both fire at the same rate, both take the same amount of ammo, both take the same kinds of ammo. One was classified as an assault weapon. One was not. One was banned. One was not.
The difference between the two? Nothing other than a pistol grip, a muzzle break and a slightly different stock. Nothing that would have changed the function dramatically. They literally utilize the same technology to the point where you can exchange parts between the two. This is not an unusual thing. Hunting rifle after hunting rifle has a military predecessor. Mini-30’s predecessor was the M-1 Garand. Remington 700 is the M24 Army Sniper System. Remember, engineers are lazy like that ;). We like to reuse stuff.
Okay, I get you. So I thusly rephrase all of my earlier text to say that I don’t see a point to any gun that can fire 100 rounds a minute. We can call those weapons assault rifles or fully automatic rifles, or something else. I’m not trying to get into the hardware, because obviously I have very limited firearms experience. It’s fine for hunting rifles to have a military history — camping food has a military history, as do M&Ms. So I get why you’re harping on it… I’m sorry I’m not more educated about talking about guns. I’m really trying to have a conversation about getting away from disingenuous arguments about gun policy. > Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 05:52:36 +0000 > To: evmaroon@hotmail.com >
Also also, I don’t expect you to explain everything there is to say about gun hardware to me. Because I’m betting that since Friday, that’s come up a couple of times for you.
It’s come up… a lot since Clackamas. More than a lot. So much so that the vast amount of disinformation is staggering and honestly, I’m tired of trying to correct it from people who should know better. And I think that’s the thing that pisses me off the most. So, if I come across as crabby, forgive me. It’s been a long week.
We all bemoan policy decisions based on bad information. If we wouldn’t want some of the chuckleheads in congress who believe in “legitimate rape” to make policy around abortion then we shouldn’t be calling for policy based on bad data and false claims and we shouldn’t have politicians putting forth laws to ban things on something they’re entirely misinformed about. Ask any firearms person on how much we trust any of the advocates for gun control to know what they’re talking about (or even better, look up what Carolyn McCarthy had to say about barrel shrouds).
As for the 100 rounds a minute claim. Sure, I can fire any semi-automatic rifle very fast, be it an assault rifle or a semi-auto hunting rifle. 100 rounds a minute fast? Sure, if I wanted a 100 round 15 lb magazine hanging off my gun and I didn’t care if I didn’t hit anything. If anything, the people who are most deadly during a rampage killing are those who are taking their time to aquire target and fire. As sick and gruesome as it is, remember, the guy in Clackamas was walking though, picking people off, taking his time. He very well have could have done it with a much larger caliber deer rifle and have been much more deadly.
I guess my point is, is that if people want to have this discussion and for it to be an honest conversation, we’re going to need to have people who deal with firearms and people who don’t deal with firearms are going to need to listen to them when we explain that things don’t work the way the movies show them to work. We know this stuff like the back of our hands and are generally informed both from a technical and legal perspective.
Want to make it so NICS is stronger? We’re going to be all for that as long as it’s accurate, accountable and doesn’t violate our fourth amendment rights. Want to put massive penalties for straw purchases. Please do. Go for it. We’ll back that 100 percent. Make it so we have more complete data on felons and domestic abusers in NICS. Yup, you want to talk to us. Want to make it so that we can run NICS checks on private sales? As long as records aren’t kept and they lower the cost of a check, I doubt many of us would complain if there was a way we could make sure the private sale we were engaged in wasn’t to a felon.
But when the discussion starts with “Hey, we’re going after this type of gun that is rarely used in crime but a lot of you own and shoot. But don’t worry, we’re not going to ban guns.” firearms folks think back to Dianne Feinstein when she said “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ’em all in, I would have done it.” So, yeah, when that happens is it any surprise we dig our feet in and shout “Molon Labe”.
Which is sad. Because there are *real* things we could do, that do have to deal with firearms, that would get support from the firearms community but eveyone is so focused on Scary Black Rifles that it’s pointless to point it out.
Ok, I came here to talk about Evil Black Rifles being the wrong target for gun reform, but I see it has been covered.
If you are going to do a mass shooting of any sort, handgun is the way to go. You can easily carry multiple of them. They can be concealed easily and are quite accurate at short range (at one point, I even had a laser sight on mine, but my husband removed it because he felt I was being spoiled and wanted me to get good at using iron sights only so I can shoot IDPA with him). “But what about the clip size?” You may ask. Let me tell you that at the IDPA matches I have seen guys drop and switch clips at an alarming speed. Fast enough that you should be concerned about the number of bullets and rate of fire just as you are with rifles.
Assault rifles (or any rifles really) are just better at long range stuff (which is why the army likes them), but the mass shootings tend to be short range.
I also wanted to point out that there was one High School shooting where the principal ran out to his car, grabbed his handgun from his glove box and subdued the shooter. I had a link to it yesterday, I will try to find it again.
I know you don’t think ordinary people can make a difference, but let me just say, that if I was an aide in that classroom at the time of the shooting and had my gun on me, a lot less kids would have been killed. Of course that will never happen because schools are gun free zones so I can’t and don’t carry on school property.
I’m sure I misread the comment you made, Ev, but full auto weapons are already banned.
I agree that something needs to happen. I am not familiar enough with gun laws to say what that should be, but it seems like we do need some better way to screen people buying handguns. I think there really is room for reform here, but banning assault rifles is not an effective solution.
I also agree that there has to be a conversation around this. The problem is that most of the folks that bring up this issue don’t want to talk. It’s like religion. Or Obama vs Romney. Everyone has their view point and they don’t want to hear anything the other side has to say.
I deactivated my facebook account yesterday because so many people were throwing out misinformation or ineffective ideas but none of them wanted to actually HAVE A CONVERSATION and God forbid absorb new information. They just wanted to spew venom and attack gun owners without listening to what people who actually own guns and know stuff about them had to say.
Ok, I’m done. I have way too much work to do today to get sucked into a conversation on this unfortunately.
So you know, clearly you and Elizabeth are pretty responsible gun owners. And if you were getting really stressed out about your life circumstances you still wouldn’t run into a classroom, church, movie theater, local Safeway, etc., and start picking off human targets with a firearm. I get that. I’m more concerned about the calls among media talking heads for more people to own guns. Not everyone is as thoughtful or careful as you are. Alexis, I know you’ve taught your kids gun safety, but many parents don’t, or do it once and hello, it’s taking my son 7,000 tries just to figure out spoons. Guns are complicated. To the uneducated gun buffoon, they’re all kind of different. Chambers that hold one or more bullets. Release buttons for clips, safeties, specs on how the barrel is grooved or twisted, and on and on.
We’re a culture where a sizable percentage of adults pays for a gym membership every month but only manages to get into the gym once or twice a year. We’re lazy, we think we know more than we do, we’re not very willing to own up to the underbellies of our lives, when we skip brushing our teeth for a day, or reuse dirty underwear, or fly through a stop sign after glancing at the intersection. Our daily shortcuts don’t take up a lot of space in our minds because most often there are no consequences. But that fifth time the average bear brings home their new Sig Sauer from the firing range, are they as careful that it’s really unloaded before they put it away? Did they misplace the key to the gun box, so now they store it somewhere more accessible? Did they get talked into leaving it loaded because there’s been a spate of burglaries in their neighborhood? Call me overimaginative–I know I am–but when a United States Senator gets out in front of the cameras saying, well, more people need guns, this shooting isn’t about gun control, it’s not the thoughtful people who say yeah, more guns, me. It’s the folks who are more prone to acting off of one sound bite. The mother who owned those guns used last Friday was stockpiling them because she believed the world was about to end. How about the irony there?
Anyway, I am all for responsible gun owners getting into a conversation about gun safety and gun violence. I am all for people who know less about guns learning more, but still being able to ask questions about how we can structure policy to try decreasing this massive amount of death. Maybe it’s as simple as saying no gun should fire bullet after bullet by just holding down the trigger — not being able to single fire, or whatever it’s called — certainly it’s about background checks and waiting periods, but I want it to be fair terrain in a conversation that we talk about the purpose and point of guns, demystify why some folks really like them, and give some voice to why they scare the shit out of so many others of us. The right wing has found all kinds of ways to make abortion practically unobtainable in many states, even though the federal government tells us it must remain legal — why can’t we find ways to restrict guns? Why should the gun lobby have more political machinery than women’s reproductive rights? Or am I crawling out too far on my bleeding heart ledge now?
Here’s the link I was looking for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
(I don’t see my previous comment. Here’s hoping it is just awaiting moderation and wasn’t swallowed by wordpress!)
It was about moderation, but I don’t understand why because you’ve commented on my blog before. Maybe you used a new email address.
I don’t think you are wrong in a lot of what you say. First off, *encouraging* the general public to go out and buy guns is insane. Everything you say about the average Joe, uneducated about gun safety and ownership, is true. Therein lies the road to chaos.
Alex filled out my LTCF years ago. YEARS. It sat and I didn’t submit it for all that time because I felt I was not well educated enough nor was I accurate enough with a handgun to carry one. I only finally submitted the application once I educated myself and put enough time in at the range that I was comfortable I could hit what I was aiming at.
But you know what? When I did finally go to the Sheriff’s office to get it, it was frighteningly easy. I walked out thinking, “What the hell? How do they know I am now completely insane?”
So yeah, we probably need some sort of reform. But truly I don’t know what an effective change in the laws would look like.
Susanne and I were appalled that nobody asked to see our photo ID when we applied for or signed our wedding license. It was ridiculously easy. And that license doesn’t get me access to a deadly weapon. Gun ownership should come with a class in safety, which could also serve as way to identify people who are really off-kilter. Maybe we could look to how pilots get licensed for some ideas? It could be a dumb idea, or like, totally out of the box BRILLIANT.
I’m not a big fan of government licensing. Frankly, I don’t trust them to not, at a future date, attempt a gun grab and base it on a licensing database. This has occurred time and again and not just in Hitlers Germany (The day after Kristallnacht, it was made illegal for Jews to own firearms. The gun registry was used to pick them up and send them to the camps).
New Zealand. Registration law in 1921 is used to confiscate all handguns in 1970. Austrailia for semi-auto hunting rifles. Canada. UK. Chicago. California (who couldn’t decide if the SKS was or wasn’t an “assault rifle”. They waited until the registration grace period was closed, decided it was, and then sent cops to confiscate them). These aren’t outliers. Every country that has had a registration system has eventually utilized it to disarm the populace.
So yeah, give me a licensing system where firearms owners police it, where we hold the keys to it, where no ownership records are kept and ensure me that it can never ever be used for gun confiscation and make it so possession of a license means you don’t have to deal with FFL interstate transfers and NICS checks and I’ll be happy to sign up.