As you’ve probably heard if you’re in the U.S., both the National Rifle Association and some Congressional Republicans (as well as many Democrats) are now calling for either a ban on or tighter regulations of “
bump stocks“—those substitute parts of guns that can convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic ones. The sale of automatic weapons (in which holding down the trigger produces continuous fire) is illegal in America save for those made before 1986, and those old weapons are extraordinarily expensive. However, the sale of “bump” devices, which can turn a semiautomatic into an automatic (these devices move the stock back and forth rapidly against the trigger finger, causing very rapid fire) are legal, and can be ordered online for less than $100.
Given that automatic weapon sales are illegal, I see no justification whatever for allowing the legal sale of devices that can convert a gun into a weapon that would be illegal to buy. Further, how can you even justify the private ownership of automatic weapons or semiautomatic weapons like assault rifles, whose only purpose is to kill as many people as possible in a short time? It seems a no-brainer that bump stocks should be outlawed now.
As I said, some in Congress are considering that, and even the demonic National Rifle Association (NRA) is saying Congress should “review” the regulations about these devices to see if they comply with federal law. Here’s the NRA’s statement issued after the Las Vegas shootings:
But this is all window dressing. Bump stocks are clearly things that should be banned, and the NRA’s calling for a “review” is not the same thing as calling for a ban. Once again, the NRA shows its unwillingness to seriously engage with gun control, and on an issue that has an obvious answer. Ban the damn bumpstocks!
More important, banning bump stocks—which of course are now selling like hotcakes to Americans who fear they won’t be able to buy them soon—is only the tiniest step in gun control. Far more needs to be done. In my view, all private ownership of guns should be banned except for those who can demonstrate a real need for them: perhaps hunters, farmers, hikers, or those who have been threatened. I’ve long thought that the words of the Second Amendment clearly indicate what its authors meant when they said this:
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.
Is that not clear enough? The right of the people to “keep and bear Arms” is there for the purpose of allowing a “well regulated Militia”. Does Joe Sixpack with his Glock own his arms to participate in a well regulated Militia? While the courts, most particularly the Supreme Court, have interpreted this to mean that people should be able to own their own guns willy-nilly, I’m not at all sure that the Founders who wrote that Amendment would approve of how it’s been used. As for myself, I’d favor a total repeal of the Second Amendment and its replacement with other laws.
I believe Michael Shermer, who wrote the article below in yesterday’s New York Times (click on screenshot to see it), would agree.
Shermer’s op-ed makes two ponts. First, despite the loud claims of gun lovers, gun ownership doesn’t make people safer. While there are a few studies that contradict that conclusion, the bulk of the data say that private ownership of guns causes the death of innocent people at a much higher rate than it does the death of criminals at the hands of private gun owners (my emphasis):
Stories about the use of guns in self-defense — a good guy with a gun dispensing with a bad guy with a gun — are legion among gun enthusiasts and conservative talk radio hosts. But a 1998 study in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, to take one of many examples, found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” That means a gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.
A 2003 study published in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine, which examined gun ownership levels among thousands of murder and suicide victims and nonvictims, found that gun-owning households were 41 percent more likely to experience a homicide and 244 percent more like to experience a suicide. The Second Amendment protects your right to own a gun, but having one in your home involves a risk-benefit calculation you should seriously consider.
Before you go quoting the counter data, read a piece in this month’s Scientific American by Melinda Moyer, “More guns do not stop more crime, evidence shows“. Looking at all the studies, Moyer concludes that the bulk of the good ones show that restricting guns does indeed reduce deaths and crime. A quote:
A decade after laws relax, violent crime rates are 13 to 15 percent higher than they were before. And in 2004 the National Research Council, which provides independent advice on scientific issues, turned its attention to firearm research, including Lott’s findings [JAC: this is from a 1997 study by Lott and Mustard claiming to show that crime fell after it became easier to get gun permits]. It asked 15 scholars to reanalyze Lott’s data because “there was such a conflict in the field about the findings,” recalls panel chair and criminologist Charles Wellford, now a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. Lott’s models, they found, could be tweaked in tiny ways to produce big changes in results. “The analyses that we did, and that others have done, show that these estimates are very fragile,” Wellford explains. “The committee, with one exception, concluded that you could not accept his conclusion that more guns meant less crime.” Wintemute summarized it this way: “There are a few studies that suggest that liberalizing access to concealed firearms has, on balance, beneficial effects. There are a far larger number of studies that suggest that it has, on balance, detrimental effects.” [JAC: the article describes Garen Wintemute as “a physician and noted gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis.”]
One problem with getting data is that the NRA has successfully lobbied to prevent the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from even investigating the question of guns and injuries, even though it is a public safety issue. This is one example of how the NRA is evil, for it prevents collecting empirical data—probably because it knows how those data will come out. As the Sci Am piece reports:
in the late 1990s [Mark] Rosenberg was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which then funded and studied gun violence. He said he was fired from the agency in 1999 for pushing ahead with this research despite political opposition, although his boss at the time, whom I contacted, disagreed that Rosenberg’s actions on gun research caused his dismissal.
I asked Rosenberg what happened after the Kellermann studies came out. “The NRA started a multipronged attack on us,” he recounted. “They called the CDC a cesspool of junk science.” Indeed, soon after Kellermann’s early studies were published, the NRA ran an article in its official journal, the American Rifleman, encouraging readers to protest the CDC’s use of tax dollars to “conduct anti-gun pseudo-scientific studies disguised as research.” The association also asked the National Institute of Health’s Office of Scientific Integrity to investigate Kellermann and his colleagues, but it declined. Todd Adkins, current director of research and information at the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told me via e-mail that the association was reacting because CDC scientists had started a campaign to persuade Americans that firearms are a menace to public health and ignored data that did not support this idea.
As the dispute continued, Representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas introduced a rider into the CDC’s 1996 spending bill mandating that none of its funding be used to advocate or promote gun control. Congress also cut out $2.6 million of the CDC’s budget, the exact amount that had been allocated for firearm research the previous year. (Later, that funding was restored but was earmarked for traumatic brain injury.) Harvard’s Hemenway says that the move “was a shot across the bow: ‘We’re watching you.’” He adds that “the CDC recognized that they better be really, really, really, really careful about guns if they wanted to have an Injury Center.”
Dickey’s addition to the CDC’s funding bill has been renewed every year since. In fact, in 2011 the language was extended to cover all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, including the NIH.
Note that that extension was under the Obama administration, which did little to stop gun proliferation (granted, they were dealing with a Republican Congress). Still:
The CDC’s hands are still tied. After the 2012 school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., President Barack Obama signed an executive order requesting that the CDC spend $10 million on gun violence research. But Congress did not appropriate the funds. In fact, according to Linda DeGutis, who directed the CDC’s Injury Center from 2010 to 2014, agency employees weren’t even allowed to discuss Newtown. “We couldn’t talk to the media except on background. We couldn’t be quoted on anything,” she recalls. “There were CDC staff members who wouldn’t even mention the word ‘gun.’” (Current staffers declined to be interviewed for this article.)
This is reprehensible. What can possibly justify Congress (whose members have accrued millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the NRA) from preventing the CDC studying gun violence? Well, we know what chain of evil lurks here: the NRA doesn’t want that research to happen, because it could possibly—and we don’t know this—justify tighter restrictions on owning guns. And the Congress, many of whose Republican members get lots of campaign money from the NRA, don’t want to anger that organization. The result: research that could prevent deaths doesn’t get done. Congress would prefer people to die, so the members can keep their jobs, rather than appropriate a pittance to see if we could prevent those deaths.
Finally, Shermer notes the “militia” issue, which has made gun nuts do some fast talking to circumvent it. But how can you circumvent this?:
Gun-rights advocates also make the grandiose claim that gun ownership is a deterrent against tyrannical governments. Indeed, the wording of the Second Amendment makes this point explicitly: “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.” That may have made sense in the 1770s, when breech-loading flintlock muskets were the primary weapons tyrants used to conquer other peoples and subdue their own citizens who could, in turn, equalize the power equation by arming themselves with equivalent firepower. But that is no longer true.
If you think stock piling firearms from the local Guns and Guitars store, where the Las Vegas shooter purchased some of his many weapons, and dressing up in camouflage and body armor is going to protect you from an American military capable of delivering tanks and armored vehicles full Navy SEALs to your door, you’re delusional. The tragic incidents at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, and Waco, Tex., in the 1990s, in which citizens armed to the teeth collided with government agencies and lost badly, is a case study for what would happen were the citizenry to rise up in violence against the state today.
And in any case, if you’re having trouble with the government, a lawyer is a much more potent weapon than a gun.
So bumpstocks get banned. That will have some effect on reducing deaths, if the ban happens, but it’s not going to stop the mass shootings, the gun suicides, the accidental shootings of children and family members, and so on, that constitute the bulk of unnecessary gun deaths.
Thanks, NRA!
