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Javier E

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hootings-us-international.html

guns debate international

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?
  • Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
  • Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.
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  • The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.
  • Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American
  • Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
  • Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country
  • And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.
  • If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.
  • A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues
  • countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.
  • Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country
  • Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.
  • They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
  • the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.
  • America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership
  • More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.
  • From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
  • But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.
  • In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.
  • By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
  • In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.
  • This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s.
  • That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.
  • The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
  • Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people
  • Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
  • The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.
  • The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.
  • After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
  • That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
  • “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
Javier E

Gun Violence in America: The 13 Key Questions (With 13 Concise Answers) - Jonathan Stra... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...272727

guns facts violence statistics history

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm
  • Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars.
  • 19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.
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  • There were 606 firearm-related accidents in the same year -- about 5% of the number of intentional gun deaths.
  • There are about 310 million guns in the country. About 40% of households have them, a fraction that has been slowly declining over the last few decades, down from about 50% in the 1960s.
  • gun ownership has gotten much more concentrated among fewer households: if you own one gun, you probably own several
  • The most comprehensive public list of U.S. mass shootings is the spreadsheet of 62 incidents from 1982-2012, compiled by Mother Jones. Their list shows:
  • Mass shootings happen all over the country. Killers used a semi-automatic handgun in 75% of incidents, which is about the same percentage as the 72% in overall gun violence. Killers used an assault weapon in 40% of incidents. This is much higher than overall assault weapon use in crimes, estimated at less than 2%. The guns were obtained legally in 79% of mass shootings. Many of the shooters showed signs of mental illness, but in only two cases was there a prior diagnosis. There were no cases where an armed civilian fired back.
  • they account for only a small fraction of gun violence in the United States.
  • It's also possible that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime, because criminals must consider the possibility that their intended victim is armed.
  • . In 2010, different researchers re-examined Lott's work, the NRC report, and additional data up through 2006, and reaffirmed that there is no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime.
  • The most comprehensive estimate is that a 10% reduction in U.S. households with guns would result in a 3% reduction in homicides.
  • current federal gun regulation (see above) contains an enormous loophole: While businesses that deal in guns are required to keep records and run background checks, guns can be transferred between private citizens without any record. This makes straw purchases easy.
  • There's abundant evidence that under the current system, guns flow easily between legal and illegal markets.
  • guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense.
  • Won't criminals kill with other weapons if they don't have guns? The crux of this question is whether most homicides are planned, or whether killers more often confront their victims with no clear intention. In the second case, adding a gun could result in a fatal shooting that would otherwise have been avoided.
  • In 1968, Franklin Zimring examined cases of knife assaults versus gun assaults in Chicago. The gun attacks were five times more deadly
  • Here are some approaches that don't seem to work, at least not by themselves, or in the ways they've been tried so far: Stiffer prison sentences for gun crimes. Gun buy-backs: In a country with one gun per person, getting a few thousand guns off the street in each city may not mean very much. Safe storage laws and public safety campaigns.
  • We don't really have good enough evidence to evaluate these strategies: Background checks, such as the Brady Act requires. Bans on specific weapons types, such as the expired 1994 assault weapons ban or the handgun bans in various cities.
  • These policies do actually seem to reduce gun violence, at least somewhat or in some cases: More intensive probation strategies: increased contact with police, probation officers and social workers. Changes in policing strategies, such increased patrols in hot spots. Programs featuring cooperation between law enforcement, community leaders, and researchers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods.
  • Removing legal restrictions that prevent the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies from tracking and researching gun violence is also a sensible idea, and follows a long history of calls from scientists (see: what don't we know).
  • We lack some of the most basic information we need to have a sensible gun policy debate, partially because researchers have been prevented by law from collecting it. The 2004 National Research Council report discussed above identified several key types of missing data: systematic reporting of individual gun incidents and injuries, gun ownership at the local level, and detailed information on the operation of firearms markets. We don't even have reliable data on the number of homicides in each county.
  • Centers for Disease Control, the main U.S. agency that tracks and studies American injuries and death, has been effectively prevented from studying gun violence, due to a law passed by Congress in 1996.
  • anonymized hospital reporting systems are the main ways we know about many other types of injuries, but the Affordable Care Act prevents doctors from gathering information about their patients' gun use. A 2011 law restricts gun violence research at the National Institutes of Health. The legal language prevents these agencies from using any money "to advocate or promote gun control."
Brian Zittlau

The Secret History of Guns - Adam Winkler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...308608

shared by Brian Zittlau on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
  • For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.
  • Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.”
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  • Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”
  • Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”
  • the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”
  • Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.
  • One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.”
  • Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship.
  • As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”
  • The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.
  • In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”
  • Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.
  • The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”
  • In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
  • In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.
  • Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”
  • In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.
  • True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.
Javier E

Children and Guns - The Hidden Toll - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-and-guns-the-hidden-toll.html

guns children research accidental

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities.
  • The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher.
  • The rifle association’s lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms — as opposed to law-abiding gun owners — are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times’s review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children’s access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child.
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  • In all but a handful of instances, the shooter was male. Boys also accounted for more than 80 percent of the victims.
  • The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.
  • Even in accidental shootings where criminals were in some way involved, they usually were not the ones pulling the trigger. Rather, they — like many law-abiding adults in these cases — simply left a gun unsecured.
  • Another important aspect of firearm accidents is that a vast majority of victims do not die. Tracking these injuries nationally, however, is arguably just as problematic as tallying fatalities, according to public health researchers. In fact, national figures often cited from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site are an estimate, projected from a sampling taken from hospital emergency departments. Nevertheless, in 2011, the most recent year with available data, the agency estimated that there were 847 unintentional nonfatal firearm injuries among children 14 and under.
  • More concrete are actual counts of emergency department visits, which are available in a small number of states. In North Carolina, for instance, there were more than 120 such visits for nonfatal gun accidents among children 17 and under in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.
  • While about 60 percent of the accidental firearm deaths identified by The Times involved handguns as opposed to long guns, that number was much higher — more than 85 percent — when the victims were very young, under the age of 6. In fact, the average handgun victim was several years younger than long gun victims: between 7 and 8, compared with almost 11.
  • Over all, the largest number of deaths came at the upper end of the age range, with ages 13 and 14 being most common — not necessarily surprising, given that parents generally allow adolescents greater access to guns. But the third-most common age was 3 (tied with 12), a particularly vulnerable age, when children are curious and old enough to manipulate a firearm but ignorant of the dangers.
  • About half of the accidents took place inside the child’s home. A third, however, occurred at the house of a friend or a relative, pointing to a potential vulnerability if safe-storage laws apply only to households with children, as in North Carolina.
  • In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data.
  • But Taurus backed out within a few months, citing competing priorities, and the project fell apart. Charles Vehlow, Metal Storm’s chief executive at the time, said that while he did not know exactly what pressures Taurus faced, there was a general wariness of smart-gun efforts among manufacturers and pro-gun groups. “There was no question that the N.R.A. was very sensitive and was aware of what we were doing,” he said.
  • Under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, in fact, gun accidents were the ninth-leading cause of unintentional deaths among children ages 1 to 14 in 2010. (The agency reported 62 such killings that year.) If the actual numbers are, in fact, roughly double, however, gun accidents would rise into the top five or six.
  • The rifle association and its allies also often note that studies on the impact of safe-storage laws have found mixed results. But those studies are based on the flawed government statistics. “When we’re evaluating child access laws, we’re using total trash data,
  • A safe-storage bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature in February, prompted by a shooting that killed three students at a high school in suburban Cleveland. But the measure, which would prohibit storing a firearm in a residence in a place readily accessible to a child, has encountered skepticism from the Republicans who control the legislature. “The tenor was, somebody breaks in, do I have time enough to get to my gun?” said State Representative Bill Patmon, a Democrat who introduced the bill.
  • The N.R.A. has long argued that better education is the key to preventing gun accidents, citing its Eddie Eagle GunSafe program, which teaches children as young as 3 that if they see a gun, they should “stop, don’t touch, leave the area and tell an adult.” The association, which did not respond to a request for comment, says its program has reached more than 26 million children in all 50 states and should be credited for the deep decline in accidental gun deaths shown in federal statistics dating to the mid-1980s.
  • Beyond the unreliability of the federal data, public health experts have disputed the N.R.A.’s claims, pointing to other potential explanations for the decline, including improvements in emergency medical care, along with data showing fewer households with firearms. They also highlight research indicating that admonishing children to stay away from guns is often ineffective.
  • As part of Dr. Kellermann’s study, researchers watched through a one-way mirror as pairs of boys ages 8 to 12 were left alone in an examination room at a clinic in Atlanta. Unknown to the children, an inoperative .38-caliber handgun was concealed in a cabinet drawer.
  • Playing and exploring over the next 15 minutes, one boy after another — three-quarters of the 64 children — found the gun. Two-thirds handled it, and one-third actually pulled the trigger. Just one child went to tell an adult about the gun, and he was teased by his peers for it. More than 90 percent of the boys said they had had some gun safety instruction.
  • Other research has found that simply having a firearm in the household is correlated with an increased risk of accidental shooting death. In one study, published in 2003 in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, the risk was more than three times as high for one gun, and almost four times as high for more than one.
  • requiring, or even encouraging, efforts to introduce “smart gun” technology remains unpopular with the gun lobby, which has worked to undermine such research and attempts to regulate firearms as a dangerous consumer product.
  • In state after state and often with considerable success, gun rights groups have cited the federal numbers as proof that the problem is nearly inconsequential and that storage laws are unnecessary. Gun Owners of America says on its Web site that children are “130 percent more likely to die from choking on their dinner” than from accidental shootings.
  • The Colt’s Manufacturing Company and Smith & Wesson experienced a backlash against their own smart-gun programs, which were abandoned amid financial problems caused, in part, by boycotts from gun groups and others in the industry. So unpopular was the whole smart-gun concept that Colt’s Manufacturing later could not even find a buyer for its patents, said Carlton Chen, a former lawyer for the company.
  • Gun rights lobbyists have also helped keep firearms and ammunition beyond the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has the power to regulate other products that are dangerous to children. The N.R.A. argues that the commission would provide a back door for gun control advocates to restrict the manufacture of firearms. Proponents of regulation say guns pose too great a hazard to exclude them from scrutiny.
runlai_jiang

Trump Bucks Republican Orthodoxy on Guns - Washington Wire - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...capital-journal-guns-thursd

gun control

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ
  • He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.
  • he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,
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  • he continued to seek a legislative response to the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school two weeks ago
  • His comments came the same day&nbsp;Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods–two of the country’s biggest gun sellers–said they both would no longer sell guns to anyone under 21 years old.
  • with Democrats saying they doubted the president’s words would yield immediate results, and several key Republicans saying they remained opposed to the Manchin-Toomey legislation that the president said he favored.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Trump has staked out positions on controversial issues in the past, only to surprise some lawmakers with an apparent change of heart later.
  • &nbsp;For more than 20 years, federal law has effectively halted the government’s ability to research gun violence. Now,&nbsp; a bipartisan group of lawmakers&nbsp;is taking another look at the restrictions…C
  • Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump confidant and White House communications director, is resigning. Ms. Hicks, 29 years old, told the president in recent weeks that she wanted to leave the White House to explore outside opportunities, Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report.
  • The bipartisan legislation would relax dozens of rules for small to medium-size banks, shaking up the banking sector with policy changes that could encourage deal-making and make it easier for banks to exp
  • several banks for information about their relationships with Jared Kushner and his finances, Emily Glazer, Erica Orden a
  • News of federal inquiries concerning Kushner Cos. has emerged in recent months, including by prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and by the Securities and Exchange Commission report
  • The Pentagon is pushing to make the F-35 combat jet cheaper and will take over some repair work to prevent the world’s most expensive military program from becoming unaffordable.
  • runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18
     
    Trump promised to restrict gun purchase but the reliability is still a question mark
Javier E

Opinion | Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gun-safety-republicans.html

guns debate politics crisis culture response shooting

shared by Javier E on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • I find that the gun safety debate lacks candor.
  • People believe it is savvier to tell only part of the truth, to soft-pedal the sell in an effort to get something — anything — done.
  • The truth that no one wants to tell — the one that opponents of gun safety laws understand and the reason so many of them resist new laws — is that no one law or single package of laws will be enough to solve America’s gun violence problem.
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  • The solution will have to be a nonstop parade of laws, with new ones passed as they are deemed necessary, ad infinitum. In the same way that Republicans have been promoting gun proliferation and loosening gun laws for decades, gun safety advocates will have to do the opposite, also for decades.
  • Individual laws, like federal universal background checks and bans on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, will most likely make a dent, but they cannot end gun violence. Invariably, more mass shootings will occur that none of those laws would have prevented.
  • Opponents of gun safety will inevitably use those shootings to argue that the liberal efforts to prevent gun violence were ineffective. You can hear it now: “They told us that all we needed to do was to pass these laws and the massacres would stop. They haven’t.”
  • It makes people fearful and convinces them that guns provide security. More guns equate to even more security. But in fact, the escalation of gun ownership makes society less safe.
  • But I am on the same page as they are on one point. They see the passage of gun safety laws as a slippery slope that could lead to more sweeping laws and even, one day, national gun registries, insurance requirements and bans. I see the same and I actively hope for it.
  • When I hear Democratic politicians contorting their statements so it sounds like they’re promoting gun ownership while also promoting gun safety, I’m not only mystified, I’m miffed.
  • Why can’t everyone just be upfront? We have too many guns. We need to begin to get some of them out of circulation. That may include gun buybacks, but it must include no longer selling weapons of war to civilians.
  • Gun culture is a canard and a corruption.
  • I understand that Republicans are the opposition, that they have come to accept staggering levels of death as the price they must pay to advance their political agenda on everything from Covid to guns.
  • In our gun culture, 99 percent of gun owners can be responsible and law abiding, but if even 1 percent of a society with more guns than people is not, it is enough to wreak absolute havoc. When guns are easy for good people to get, they are also easy for bad people to get.
  • We have to stop all the lies. We have to stop the lie that fewer gun restrictions make us safer.
  • And we have to stop the lie that gun safety can be accomplished by one law or a few of them rather than an evolving slate of them.
kennyn-77

Key facts about Americans and guns | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...facts-about-americans-and-guns

americans guns pew gop democrats

shared by kennyn-77 on 12 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • For instance, 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they personally own a gun, compared with 20% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
  • Men are more likely than women to say they own a gun (39% vs. 22%).
  • And 41% of adults living in rural areas report owning a firearm, compared with about 29% of those living in the suburbs and two-in-ten living in cities.
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  • Roughly six-in-ten (63%) said this in an open-ended question.
  • including hunting (40%), nonspecific recreation or sport (11%), that their gun was an antique or a family heirloom (6%) or that the gun was related to their line of work (5%)
  • Around half of Americans (48%) see gun violence as a very big problem in the country today
  • Only one issue is viewed as a very big problem by a majority of Americans: the affordability of health care (56%).
  • About eight-in-ten Black adults (82%) say gun violence is a very big problem
  • Hispanic adults (58%) and 39% of White adults view gun violence this way.
  • Republicans and GOP leaners to see gun violence as a major problem (73% vs. 18%).
  • Republicans are currently more likely to say gun laws should be less strict (27%) than stricter (20%).
  • About half of adults (49%) say there would be fewer mass shootings if it was harder for people to obtain guns legally, while about as many either say this would make no difference (42%) or that there would be more mass shootings (9%).
  • Around a third (34%) say that if more people owned guns, there would be more crime. The same percentage (34%) say there would be no difference in crime, while 31% say there would be less crime.
  • preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns (85% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats support this)
  • subjecting private gun sales and gun show sales to background checks (70% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats).
  • While 80% or more Democrats favor creating a federal database to track all gun sales and banning both assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, majorities of Republicans oppose these proposals.
  • support allowing people to carry concealed guns in more places (72%) and allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools (66%). These proposals are supported by just 20% and 24% of Democrats
  • Republicans
  • gun owners are generally less likely than non-owners to favor policies that restrict access to guns.
  • Democratic non-gun owners are generally the most likely to favor restrictions.
  • Republicans who don’t own a gun (57%) say they favor creating a federal government database to track all gun sales, while 30% of Republican gun owners say the same.
Javier E

Knocking on the Wrong House or Door Can Be Deadly In a Nation Armed With Guns - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rong-house-shootings-guns.html

guns errors threat fatal crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Each of them accidentally went to the wrong address or opened the wrong door — and each was shot. They had made innocent mistakes that became examples of the kind of deadly errors that can occur in a country bristling with guns, anger and paranoia, and where most states have empowered gun owners with new self-defense laws.
  • The maintenance man in North Carolina had just arrived to fix damage from a leak. The teenager in Georgia was only looking for his girlfriend’s apartment. The cheerleader in Texas simply wanted to find her car in a dark parking lot after practice.
  • many other cases have attracted far less attention. In July 2021, a Tennessee man was charged with brandishing a handgun and firing it after two cable-company workers mistakenly crossed onto his land. Last June, a Virginia man was arrested after the authorities say he shot at three lost teenage siblings who had accidentally pulled onto his property.
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  • “It’s shoot first, ask questions later,”
  • Each one of these incidents resulted from unique events. But activists and researchers say they stem from a convergence of bigger factors — increased fear of crime and an attendant surge in gun ownership, increasingly extreme political messaging on firearms, fearmongering in the media and marketing campaigns by the gun industry that portray the suburban front door as a fortified barrier against a violent world.
  • “The gun lobby markets firearms as something you need to defend yourself — hammers in search of nails,”
  • The perception that crime, especially violent gun crime, has increased is not a manufactured myth. National murder rates have climbed by about a third since 2019, according to government data, even accounting for modest declines in fatal shootings over the past 18 months.
  • Gun purchases rose during the pandemic and the unrest and racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd. Nearly 20 percent of American households bought a gun from March 2020 to March 2022, and about 5 percent of Americans bought a gun for the first time,
  • More than 30 states also have “stand your ground” laws. Some have recently strengthened their “castle doctrine” laws, making it more difficult to prosecute homeowners who claim self-defense in a shooting.
  • “People become paranoid and over-worried — and then comes an unannounced knock on their door,”
  • But several large-scale studies have suggested that the laws have few benefits, increase the likelihood of gun violence and might discriminate against minority groups, especially Black people.
  • The effect of self-defense laws protecting homeowners and gun owners is fiercely debated, with proponents arguing that their mere presence deters criminal behavior or civil disorder
  • shootings in which white people shot Black people were nearly three times as likely to be found “justified” compared with cases where white people shot other white people.
  • A 2023 analysis of recent academic research by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation found no evidence that such laws had the deterrent effect that their sponsors claimed, and there was some indication, while not conclusive, that the laws might account for some increases in gun violence.
  • weapons were actually more likely to be used in suicides, discharged accidentally, stolen or brandished in domestic disputes, than used to fend off an external attack.
  • The National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups have long disputed such assessments, citing surveys that show far greater use of weapons for legitimate self-defense.
  • About a third of the roughly 16,700 gun owners surveyed in a study led by William English, a Georgetown University business school professor, said they had used their guns for self-defense, prompting Mr. English to estimate that as many as 1.6 million people in the country had defended themselves with a weapon that year.
redavistinnell

Senate rejects gun control amendments offered following San Bernardino shooting - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...of-the-san-bernardino-shooting

senate gun control offered following san bernardino shooting washington post

shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Senate rejects gun control amendments offered following San Bernardino shooting
  • The Senate on Thursday&nbsp;voted down&nbsp;two gun control proposals put forward by Democrats in response to this week’s deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in a series of votes that highlighted the intractable party divide over how to respond to gun violence.
  • “To use Sen. Kennedy – let him be on the watch list, he’s not going to go buy a gun and hurt anybody,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) argued, calling Cornyn’s alternative “dangerous” and “ridiculous.”
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  • “We have an opportunity to do it now with the height of &nbsp;everything happening,” Manchin said. “For us not to do anything, just sit here and be mum would be just as bad.”
  • “We need to renew the assault weapons ban. We need to end the sale of high capacity magazines. We need to make gun trafficking a federal crime and give law enforcement the tools they need to get illegal guns off of the streets. We need to close the gun show loophole as well as loopholes that allow gun purchasers to buy a gun after the waiting period expires without a completed background check.”
  • That episode&nbsp;remains the closest the Senate has come to a consensus on gun control and will likely remain a big part of the debate.
  • “The problem with these mass shootings, which seem to be happening with increasing frequency, is too often we propose either more restrictions on gun ownership or more background checks for gun purchasers, versus mental health reform — when in fact we need both. That’s what I would like to see.”
  • To counter Feinstein’s amendment, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) proposed a measure that would give the attorney general the power to impose a 72-hour delay for individuals on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun and it could become a permanent ban if a judge determines there is probable cause during that time window.
  • Feinstein’s amendment was identical to legislation she previously filed on the same topic, while the expansion of background checks for gun purchases mirrored language championed by Sens. Manchin and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2013, following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago this month.
  • Democratic leaders said Grassley’s proposal would roll back gun laws, not improve them
  • Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Collins and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) also voted in favor of Manchin’s amendment to expand background checks. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), who is facing a tough reelection campaign in 2016, abstained from the vote on Manchin’s proposal, though he voted with Republican Party on the other gun control amendments Thursday.
  • Pelosi said she&nbsp;believes there are sufficient votes in the House to expand background checks to Internet sales and gun shows and to block individuals on the terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons.
  • Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chair Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) pledged Democrats won’t give up the&nbsp;battle.
  • With the San Bernardino rampage marking the 355th mass shooting this year, Congress has repeatedly talked about action but hasn’t taken it.&nbsp;Senate Democrats recently tried unsuccessfully to jump-start a campaign to pass gun control legislation in the wake of a deadly shooting at a college campus in Roseburg, Ore.
  • “To be honest with you, I don’t see it moving now,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who noted he has been sponsoring the bill for the last nine years.
  • Overall, Democrats do not support the budget reconciliation package, which would repeal large portions of&nbsp;Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood.
katyshannon

Connecticut to Ban Gun Sales to Those on Federal Terrorism Lists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-federal-terrorism-lists.html

ban gun sales federal terrorism lists new york times politics us crisis

shared by katyshannon on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • “Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”
  • Connecticut to Ban Gun Sales to Those on Federal Terrorism Lists
  • While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.
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  • “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Mr. Obama said. “This is a matter of national security.”
  • “Seems to me that the greatest importance of this is to get the ball rolling so more people follow, and ideally the federal government,” Mr. Webster said. “I suspect more states will do this.”
  • own a gun.
  • Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.
  • The National Rifle Association “does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have access to weapons,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the organization’s lobbying arm. “But this is a constitutional issue,” she said, adding that mere suspicion should not be enough to take away the righ
  • The no-fly list is a subset of the watch list.
  • Correction: December 10, 2015 An earlier version of this article, using information from state officials, erroneously attributed a distinction to the proposed measure in Connecticut. It would not be the first such law in the nation; at least one other state has such a ban.
  • “These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican candidate for president, told CNN. “They wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon.”
  • Abe Mashal, a former Marine and a Muslim of mixed Palestinian-Italian background who lives in the Chicago area, was on the no-fly list until last year, for reasons he said were still a mystery to him.
  • “Never had any trouble with that,” he said of the gun purchase.
  • Since 2004, there have been 2,233 people who, like Mr. Mashal, landed on the government’s no-fly list because of terrorism suspicions and applied to buy a gun, according to a recent review of F.B.I. data by the Government Accountability Office.
  • But only rarely are legal reasons found to prohibit the sale, according to federal auditors. Since the F.B.I. began tracking the data, only 190 gun sales to people on the list — or 8.5 percent of all the attempted sales — have been blocked for other reasons, including mental illness or criminal convictions, auditors found.
  • But Democrats say increased fears of domestic terrorism stoked by the recent gun attacks in San Bernardino and in Paris are reason enough to stop people on a watch list from being able to buy a gun.
  • Mr. Malloy has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue. “I have previously written to Congress on this matter,” he said. “But inaction is not an option. So here in Connecticut, we are acting.
  • The federal government’s terrorism watch list is a database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
  • “Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris,” Mr. Malloy, a Democrat, told reporters. “This should be a wake-up call to all of us. This is a moment to seize in America, and today I’m here to say that we in Connecticut are seizing it.”
  • With his decision, Mr. Malloy has stepped into a fiery debate that has stretched from the Oval Office to the contest to become its next occupant: Should being a terrorism suspect prohibit a person from buying firearms? At the moment, it does not.
  • With the mass shooting in California last week focusing attention on terrorism and guns, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced on Thursday that he intended to sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in the state.
  • President Obama has moved it to the front of his continuing push for stricter gun restrictions. “Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun,” he said in
  • While Democrats in Congress have been calling almost daily for a fix to the so-called watch list loophole, Republicans have succeeded in defeating measures that would prevent people on the lists from buying guns. Democrats say they intend to keep pushing the issue, and on Thursday the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, introduced a motion demanding a vote to restrict the sale of guns from anyone on a federal terrorism watch list. House Republicans swiftly shelved it.
  • What some critics have called a startling gap in the law has gnawed at counterterrorism officials for years. But it has now emerged as a flash point following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in which a married couple who the authorities believe were inspired by foreign extremists killed 14 people using legally obtained firearms.
  • But the argument, gun rights advocates say, is a matter of due process. They say that the no-fly list — with tens of thousands of names on it — is unreliable, with innocent people like Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who died in 2009, and other well-known Americans wrongly placed on the list.
  • While federal gun control legislation has gone nowhere in recent years, certain states have had more success. Connecticut has passed some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including measures enacted after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members before killing himself.
  • Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it was unclear what the practical implications of Connecticut’s proposed ban would be in stopping someone who is determined to carry out an act of terrorism. That person could simply travel to another state.
Javier E

The Poverty of "Data Journalism" and the Irony of Gun Control - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...m-and-the-irony-of-gun-control

guns debate 2nd amendment culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the biggest victory of the NRA over the last generation isn’t so much making even the slightest and most modest gun control measures a political impossibility. The bigger win is the strategic victory of focusing the ‘debate’ on to such small-bore measures.
  • what we might call extreme gun ownership – individuals owning large numbers of often quasi-military firearms – is quite new. The mass casualty shooting is no longer a random freak out by a troubled person: it’s an established American idiom of violence, a way certain people choose to make a statement to the society at large.
  • 78% of Americans own no guns.3% own fully 50% of the firearms in the country.
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  • Would a ban on “assault weapons” prevent a depressed man from killing himself with the handgun he’s owned for twenty years? Of course, not
  • the fact that we have vastly more gun suicides in the US is obviously due to the fact that guns are easy to buy, almost totally unregulated and pervasive, familiar and embedded in our culture. The idea of firearms is deeply embedded in many Americans understanding of their own identity, their sense of their safety and even the way they face or contemplate their own deaths. All of those are true.
  • In most parts of America, it doesn’t seem odd that one person is collecting a small arsenal of dozens of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition or that the guns are capable of firing huge amounts of rounds quickly. It’s not just legal. It doesn’t raise any questions or need for scrutiny about a person’s mental state, or about what they plan to do with the weapons. Guns and now extreme gun ownership are&nbsp;deeply embedded in our culture in a way that laws alone, certainly not marginal measures, cannot easily change. This cultural component of the gun problem undergirded and structured by laws, but existing as a reality beyond it is the undiscussed factor in America’s mass violence problem.
  • step back from the small-bore specifics. The clearest factor separating the US from comparable, wealthy industrialized countries is the sheer number of guns we have, the almost total absence of regulation of those guns and the high rates of violence which has been a key component of American culture outside the Northeast for centuries.
  • the problem isn’t the NRA. It’s that support for unfettered rights to guns has grown tremendously over the last generation and politicians in most parts of the country don’t want to go up against that
  • the first step to creating change is to understand and think about – even if only in the minds of those who wish it – what change would actually look like, what it would mean, what would be ideal.
  • We’re now actively debating things that no civilized country has ever even contemplated – the right to take a semi-automatic weapon into a family restaurant or shopping mall. Meanwhile, mass ownership of guns has become and is becoming more and more deeply embedded into the political culture of a vast segment of the population.
  • Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start thinking way beyond things like closing the gun show loophole.In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them.
  • that fact out into the open. More than thirty thousand Americans die every year from firearms injuries because we find that an acceptable price to pay for unregulated, mass gun ownership
  • It is also important to accept that to really change the prevalence of firearms deaths in the United States and the scourge of mass casualty shootings would require many fewer guns, a culture of regulation of gun ownership and less prevalence and less social acceptance of people who find their identity and sense of well-being intrinsically tied to the free and mass ownership of firearms
  • Do I think this is likely anytime soon? No, I don’t. But the US has undergone numerous revolutions of values, social acceptability, and laws before. So is it possible? Absolutely. The first step to creating a different, better future is understanding what it would look like and what it would take to get there. For now, we just choose not to do it. We need to accept that.
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Why America Can't Fix Its Gun Violence Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-gun-violence.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
  • In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
  • he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”
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  • Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
  • It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
  • “The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
  • Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
  • This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
  • But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”
Javier E

Readers on Guns: The Lynching Parallel - James Fallows - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...266584

gun violence control history comparison

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Let's begin with a comparison to a previous "uncontrollable" phenomenon of mass American violence: the wave of lynchings in the early 20th century
  • you'll find many parallels between lynchings and mass killings. First and foremost is the irrationality of the violence, the notion that it's a uncontrollable condition that comes over the killer or killers. Both are a subset of violence in a violent culture carried out by people not considered professional criminals.&nbsp;
  • lynchings had common catalysts, just like mass shootings do. And in each, individual incidents seem to seed the air and feed each other &nbsp;psychologically. Each new lynching or shooting increases/or increased the odds of the next one, it seems to me. And lynchings were considered just as inevitable and eternal as mass shootings are in America's modern gun culture.
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  • lynchings and mass shootings are almost photo negatives of each other. An individual doing to an anonymous crowd what an anonymous crowd does to an individual....
  • 1) Clean the air: We need "responsible" gun owners to help police the
  • Legislators and courts and law enforcement had clear and major roles -- once they decided to play them -- in suppressing the mob. It's much less clear, obviously, what will work on mass shootings.
  • I have some thoughts:
  • From the time that serious pieces of the establishment began to condemn and try to systematically stop lynchings (around World War I) to the time that real progress was made -- after World War II -- was 30 years. This is a long-term project.
  • bullshit bravado that dominates right wing gun culture. All of that bravado, like almost all bravado, is based on an irrational fear. The government is going to take my gun. Bullshit. And we all need to attack it as bullshit. It is the same level of bullshit as That negro is gonna rape my daughter. It's the exact same irrational fear of the other.
  • While the angry gun culture may not carry out most shootings, they are willing to tolerate them, just as much of America was long willing to tolerate lynchings, because of this primal/tribal fear. The NRA, like the Klan before it, is kind of a shiny object. It's hugely important, but it's the wider bullying gun culture that is the core of the problem.
  • If we can reduce the gun rhetoric pollution in the air somewhat through shaming, that may make these explosions less common.
  • 2) Licensing v. Bans: Along those lines, your gun safety vs. gun control distinction is precisely correct. This is about meaningful licensing measures. Ways to assess the intersection of people and guns. Use the gun culture's own language. If you think people kill people, not guns, why do you object to closer monitoring of people? And I'd suggest working through concealed carry expansion. I would absolutely trade concealed carry expansion for stricter licensing and background measures
  • 3) The Drug War: So much of our gun culture and violence organizes itself around drug prohibition -- both through tools of business and means of enforcement -- that any act of violence, especially gun violence, is inseparable from it
  • We'll never fully clean the air today without ratcheting down the drug war and moving toward as much legalization as possible
  • 4) Seize this moment: One place where I think this moment is different than others is the growing sense in the country -- even among conservatives -- that right wing cultural nihilism is the greatest short and long-term challenge we face
  • The resistance to any effort to combat gun violence with something other than guns needs to be understood -- the NRA needs to be understood -- as a subsidiary of right-wing nihilism.
  • Over and over again, we ask what constructive suggestion do you offer to help govern your country to the benefit of all its people? And we get, fuck you, 47 percent. Arm yourself.
Javier E

Why I Carry a Gun - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554351

gun guns debate culture violence fear history hobbes

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Miles’s law states, “Where you stand is based on where you sit.” In other words, your political opinions are shaped by your environment and your experience. We’re products of our place, our time, and our people. Each of these things is far more important to shaping hearts and minds than any think piece, any study, or certainly any tweet.
  • And it strikes me that many millions of Americans don’t truly understand how “gun culture” is built, how the process of first becoming a gun owner, then a concealed-carrier, changes your life.
  • It starts with the consciousness of a threat. Perhaps not the kind of threat my family has experienced. Some people experience more. Some less. And some people don’t experience a threat at all—but they’re aware of those who do
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  • With the consciousness of a threat comes the awareness of a vulnerability. The police can only protect the people you love in the most limited of circumstances (with those limits growing ever-more-severe the farther you live from a city center.) You want to stand in that gap.
  • So you take a big step. You walk into a gun store. Unless you’re the kind of person who grew up shooting, this is where you begin your encounter with American gun culture. The first thing you’ll notice—and I’ve seen this without fail—is that the person behind that counter is ready to listen.
  • Often the person behind the counter is a veteran. Often they’re a retired cop. Always they’re well-informed. Always they’re ready to teach.
  • something else happens to you, something that’s deeper than the fun of shooting a paper target. Your thought-process starts to change. Yes, if someone tried to break into your house, you know that you’d call 911 and pray for the police to come quickly, but you also start to think of exactly what else you’d do. If you heard that “bump” in the night, how would you protect yourself until the police arrived?&nbsp; You’re surprised at how much safer you feel with the gun in the house.
  • Next, you realize that you want that sense of safety to travel with you. So you sign up for a concealed-carry permit class. You gather one night with friends and neighbors and spend the next eight hours combining a self-defense class with a dash of world-view training.
  • nd when you carry your weapon, you don’t feel intimidated, you feel empowered. In a way that’s tough to explain, the fact that you’re so much less dependent on the state for your personal security and safety makes you feel more “free” than you’ve ever felt before. &nbsp;
  • And as your worldview changes, you expand your knowledge. You learn that people defend themselves with guns all the time, usually without pulling the trigger.
  • At the end of this process, your life has changed for the better. Your community has expanded to include people you truly like, who’ve perhaps helped you through a tough time in your life, and you treasure these relationships
  • It’s a myth that gun owners despise regulation. Instead, they tend to believe that government regulation should have two purposes—deny guns to the dangerous while protecting rights of access for the law-abiding. The formula is simple: Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill make our nation more violent. Law-abiding gun owners save and protect lives.
  • Thus the overwhelming support for background checks, the insistence from gun-rights supporters that the government enforce existing laws and lock up violent offenders, and the openness to solutions—like so-called “gun violence restraining orders” that specifically target troubled individuals for intervention.
  • Progressive policy prescriptions, like assault-weapons bans and bans on large-capacity magazines, are opposed because they’re perceived to have exactly the wrong effect. They’ll present only the most minor of hurdles for the lawless, while the law-abiding experience the law’s full effect. It’s a form of collective punishment for the innocent, a mere annoyance—at best—for the lawless.
  • Because of the threats against my family—and because I don’t want to be dependent on a sometimes shockingly incompetent government for my family’s security—I carry a weapon. My wife does as well. We’re not scared. We’re prepared, and that sense of preparation is contagious. Confidence is contagious. People want to be empowered. That’s how gun culture is built. Not by the NRA and not by Congress, but by gun owners, one free citizen at a time.
hannahcarter11

Illinois gun sales are outpacing the rest of the country amid nationwide surge - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

illinois gun surge background check

shared by hannahcarter11 on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • Concerns about looming gun control legislation and rising crime continued to fuel gun sales in America throughout the month of April, according to industry observers.
  • No state has seen more gun sales this year than Illinois.
  • Nearly 1.7 million of those gun background checks were specifically for gun purchases,
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  • "Firearm sales spiked in March 2020 and have remained at unprecedented levels since. It's a remarkable feat of firearm manufacturers to keep pace with this blistering demand."
  • The FBI conducted more than 3.5 million gun-related background checks last month, a 20% year-over-year increase from April 2020, according to the latest FBI figures released Monday.
  • Illinois' FOID Act, which requires gun purchasers to obtain a special ID from state police, was established in 1968, but the system was overwhelmed with requests a year ago when the pandemic fueled a national surge in first-time gun buyers.
  • "We continue to sell everything that comes into the store within a couple of days," Eldridge said. "When people that live in high crime areas hear a lot of talk and even legislative action to defund the police, it's reasonable for them to take steps to protect themselves."
  • Eldridge and Oliva said gun sales have been limited by supply. Since the panemic began, Americans buying firearms faster than gun makers can manufacture them.
  • April gun sales across the nation were down 25% from March, which set a new record for monthly gun sales thanks to a series of high-profile mass shootings that spurred President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to push for passing new federal gun control measures that would expand background check requirements and limit or ban future sales of so-called assault weapons.
katyshannon

Tearful Obama Outlines Steps to Curb Gun Deaths - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-control-executive-action.html

obama steps gun deaths new york times politics history US policy

shared by katyshannon on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — As tears streamed down his face, President Obama on Tuesday condemned the gun violence that has reached across the United States and vowed to curb the bloodshed with or without Congress.
  • “In this room right here, there are a lot of stories. There’s a lot of heartache,” Mr. Obama said in the White House East Room, flanked by relatives of those struck down in mass shootings, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. “There’s a lot of resilience, there’s a lot of strength, but there’s also a lot of pain.”For all the emotion he showed, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces legal, political and logistical hurdles that are likely to blunt the effect of the plan he laid out.
  • A number of the executive actions he plans are only suggested “guidance” for federal agencies, not binding regulations. They were framed mostly as clarifying and enforcing existing law, not expanding it. And many of those measures rely on hefty funding increases that a Republican-led Congress is almost certain to reject.
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  • Among other measures, the plan aims to better define who should be licensed as a gun dealer and thus be required to conduct background checks on customers to weed out prohibited buyers.
  • Even the administration said it was impossible to gauge how big an effect the steps might have, how many new gun sales might be regulated or how many illegal guns might be taken off the streets.
  • Proposals that would have the biggest effect have long been shelved by even the most ardent gun control advocates who now see an assault weapons ban or mandatory gun buyback programs like ones in Australia in 1996 and 2003 as political fantasy.
  • “Each time this comes up,” Mr. Obama said in his speech, “we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying. I reject that thinking. We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
  • Nearly 21 million gun sales were processed through the background check system in 2014, but some industry analysts say as many as 40 percent more firearms could have been sold through private transactions not subject to background checks. Even the most hopeful advocates say the new plan would affect only thousands of sales.
  • Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told reporters Monday that she could not say whether the new restrictions would have had any effect in a series of recent mass shootings, including last month’s attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead. But in the massacre of nine people at a South Carolina church in June, the man charged, Dylan Roof, was able to buy a .45-caliber handgun despite admitting to drug use. The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said at the time that a breakdown in the background check system had allowed Mr. Roof to buy the gun.
  • Modest as the new measures may prove to be, the response was unrestrained. Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders greeted them with peals of protests and angry claims of a “gun grab” that would violate Second Amendment rights. Gun control advocates hailed them as a breakthrough in what has often been a losing battle to toughen firearms restrictions.
  • The families of gun victims and gun control activists crowded into the White House and watched Mr. Obama break down as he recalled the young children gunned down by an assailant in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
  • By taking action, Mr. Obama is purposely stoking a furious political debate that has roiled Congress and spilled over into the presidential campaign. Vowing last year to “politicize” the gun issue after a mass shooting at an Oregon community college, Mr. Obama on Tuesday made good on that promise.
  • The National Rifle Association, targeted by Mr. Obama in his speech, mocked his tears.“The American people do not need more emotional, condescending lectures that are completely devoid of facts,” said Chris W. Cox, the group’s top lobbyist.
  • Republican presidential candidates also raced to condemn Mr. Obama, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas putting up a web page with a menacing, altered picture of the president in a commando outfit. A caption read “Obama Wants Your Guns” next to a fund-raising appeal.
  • Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin posted his opposition on Twitter as the president spoke, saying Mr. Obama’s “words and actions amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty.” But Mr. Obama’s allies were equally intense in their defense.
  • Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, posted on Twitter from the East Room: “President wiping tears. So am I. One of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.”
maddieireland334

The Quest For a Safe Gun - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...423909

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Gun-safety technology has barely improved over the decades, even as many firearms have become more powerful.
  • n a speech at the White House earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced he’s directing the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to conduct or sponsor research into what it would take to make guns harder to use without authorization, and less likely to fire accidentally.
  • For one thing, gun owners often want their weapons to be instantly accessible and usable. That’s why so many people choose not to store their firearms in safes
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  • Making guns personalized so that they only work for approved users is a major theme in gun-safety technology today, but not everyone agrees that fingerprint sensors are the way to go
  • A review by America’s 1st Freedom, a publication run by the NRA, called Armatix’s smart weapon “sleek” but unreliable and ultimately “disappointing.” The review also raised questions about remote hacking, an aspect of personalized authentication that is likely to continue to come up.
  • TriggerSmart is developing its own RFID-enabled gun, one that he hopes—like many of the people developing advanced gun-safety technologies—will appeal to law enforcement
  • If gun enthusiasts see police officers and members of the military using a certain weapon, they’re more likely to buy the same thing.
  • That’s the idea, anyway. TriggerSmart is still testing its product, a painstaking process, and one that McNamara estimates will take a couple more years. “Because they’re such serious weapons,” he said. “We need to go and test technology rigorously in extreme conditions—in the desert in Africa and in the snow up in Alaska—to make sure that they perform perfectly well.”
  • “Nobody’s trying to take away guns,” McNamara said. “This is just offering another kind of gun. There’s thousands of types of guns. This is just another one. I don’t think, in any stretch of the imagination, that there’s anything in the president’s announcement that we’re taking away anybody’s guns. But of course there’s the fear-mongering. Paranoid fantasies.”
  • In the United States alone, there are some 350 million firearms—or, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, more guns than people. “The majority of gun owners are responsible,” Hirsch said. “I don’t know if guns are any more lethal than they used to be. The problem is they’re falling into the wrong hands.”
  • That’s true. People do kill people, just like guns-rights advocates like to say, but they wouldn’t always be able to without guns.
  • “Just the simplicity, pulling the trigger. It’s not something like a construction machine, where if you make a mistake you might lose a hand. You’re playing on a much higher level when talking about safety.”
Javier E

It's the Guns - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560771

guns debate guns

shared by Javier E on 19 May 18 - No Cached
  • here is a simpler and more powerful explanation of why there has been no similar school shooting in Germany since 2009; or in Canada since 2007; none in the United Kingdom since 1996—while conversely, more young Americans have died in school shootings in 2018 than in all the nation’s combat operations all over the world.
  • The answer is almost insultingly simple and has the virtue only of being true: It’s the guns.
  • Back in 2012, Nate Silver observed: "Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South, or a number of other demographic characteristics.”
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  • More than 70 percent of Trump voters in 2016 described guns as “very important” to their vote, versus only 40 percent who described abortion as “very important” to their vote and only 25 percent who felt that way about gay rights
  • With the slow fading of battles over same-sex marriage and abortion, and the rapid collapse of other aspects of conservative ideology, guns may now rank as the single most important political dividing line in 21st century America.
  • Only 30 percent of Americans own guns. Thus far, that minority has sufficed to block substantial federal action on guns. But a one-third minority—and especially a non-urban one-third minority—may no longer suffice to shape American culture.
  • The outrage after Parkland looked less like a political movement, more like the great waves of moral reform that have at intervals since the 1840s challenged the existing political order in the name of higher ethical ideals.
  • The most important success of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, was not to change laws (although they changed some), but to change hearts: to persuade Americans that drunk driving was not funny, not charming, and not acceptable.
  • American gun culture in the 2010s is as blithely irresponsible as American alcohol culture in the 1960s.
  • According to a Pew survey, only about one-quarter of gun owners think it essential to alert visitors with children that guns may be present in the home.
  • Only 66 percent of gun owners think it essential to keep guns locked up when not in use. (Ninety percent of non-gun-owners think so.) Only 45 percent of them actually do it.
knudsenlu

Why is the gun industry so afraid of the long arm of the law? | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-industry-lawsuits-protection

gun industry law Politics US history crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A 2005 law protects the companies from lawsuits over gun crime – but if the case against them is as weak as they claim, why do they need such coddling?
  • n the wake of the mass killing at a school in Parkland, Florida, Americans are again embroiled in a debate about guns, and the consensus (at least outside of Congress) seems to be that it’s beyond time for sensible and effective gun laws.
  • Less clear is what those laws might be. Which ones would be the most effective in preventing the kind of killing sprees to which Americans have grown far too accustomed? And which ones would prevent the thousands of deaths that don’t grab headlines, but still make the United States’ gun-slaughtered body count an outlier among peacetime nations? Some are obvious: banning the bump stocks that make it possible to turn a legal gun into what amounts to an automatic machine gun; barring convicted violent criminals and those with domestic violence restraining orders against them from owning guns; requiring robust background checks for every single gun purchase; and strengthening licensing requirements so that, like driving a car, anyone who owns a gun has to actually know how to use one. Perhaps less obvious, but just as important: treating gun manufacturers like any other company
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  • The question is what liability gun manufacturers or sellers have in making, marketing a selling a product that kills thousands every year, and whether, for example, they are negligent in selling weapons, like the AR-15, that many argue have no place outside of a combat zone and are predictable weapons of mass death.
  • And yet they seem awfully nervous about having to defend themselves in court. Yes, lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, but gun manufacturers aren’t exactly vulnerable little guys. The American legal system has mechanisms in place for tossing out baseless lawsuits, and surely some brought against gun makers and sellers will be summarily tossed.
  • We don’t know a whole lot about how the gun industry deals with the violence, death and destruction its products bring about because the whole industry operates under a Congress-approved veil of secrecy. We do know that victims have been unjustly stymied, denied even the chance to have their voices heard in court. No good happens in the shadows, and no industry does the right thing if it’s permitted to operate partly outside of the law. Getting rid of the PLCAA won’t end gun violence. But it would let victims be heard, and it would bring a little transparency to the shadowy, coddled gun industry.
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