Category Archives: firearms

Firearm Appreciation 2.0

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The Los Angeles Times has photos of Saturday’s gun appreciation day. This one’s my favorite. (What is it with wingnuts and spelling? Oh, maybe the double Ms in “comming” and “ammendment” are for “milimeter.” This might be what passes for “clever” on the fringe.)

In comments, Justme mentioned a 20/20 segment on armed “good guy” citizens and mass shootings. I found the segment, “If I only had a gun,” online. It demonstrates why the would-be heroes probably wouldn’t be all that heroic, or effective.

Our recent troll, Katechon, who alternatively argued that all mass shootings take place in gun-free zones and that armed citizens are more effective at stopping “bad guy” shooters than police (odd, if all those shootings were in “gun-free zones”) is, of course, wrong. Mark Follman at Mother Jones claimed that not one mass shooting over the past 30 years was stopped by an armed “ordinary citizen.” The “gun people” came back with a list of shootings in which, they say, an armed citizen stopped the shooter. But in another article, Mark Follman went through the list and found that (1) the “citizen” actually was a law-enforcement or security professional or member of the military, off duty; or (2) the citizen didn’t stop the shooter while he was shooting, but followed and shot him while he was leaving the scene; or (3) the citizen was pumped full of bullets by the shooter, who was later apprehended by law enforcement.

Way to go, armed citizens!

There’s still a lot we don’t know about yesterday’s tragedy in Albuquerque, so I will withhold comment on that. Let’s just hope the Secret Service is doing its job at today’s inauguration festivities.

Happy Gun Appreciation Day!

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Apparently today’s Gun Appreciation Day was a great success! Only five participants accidentally shot themselves!

Emergency personnel had to be called to the scene of the Dixie Gun and Knife Show in Raleigh, North Carolina after a gun accidentally discharged and shot two people at the show’s safety check-in booth just after 1 pm. Both victims were transported to an area hospital, and the Raleigh Fire Department announced that the show would be closed for the rest of the day….

…Two similar incidents occurred at entirely separate gun shows in the Midwest, one in the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio and the other at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. In Ohio, the local ABC affiliate reports that one individual was brought to a hospital by EMS, and in Indiana Channel 8 WISH says that an individual shot himself in the hand while trying to reload his gun in the show parking lot. …

…CNN is reporting that three people were injured at the gun show in Raleigh, not two as originally reported. All were victims of a shotgun that fired while the owner was removing it from a case.

Hey, with law-abiding citizens like these, who needs criminals?

Somethin’ Happening Here

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Today’s “abbreviated pundit roundup” at Daily Kos has a lot of good links to articles about firearms. One of them is “As a gun owner, I agree with Obama’s proposed ban on high-capacity magazines” by Kirk R. Wythers, from the Christian Science Monitor.

The first time my grandfather watched me feed five shells into my gun, he looked at me soberly and said, “Nobody needs more than three shells. If you miss with the first two, you’re probably going to miss with the third.”

I thought of this today after reading Josh Marshall’s long piece on being a member of the non-gun tribe.

It’s customary and very understandable that people often introduce themselves in the gun debate by saying, ‘Let me be clear: I’m a gun owner.’

Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. And I have my own set of rights not to have gun culture run roughshod over me. …

… A big part of gun versus non-gun tribalism or mentality is tied to the difference between city and rural. And a big reason ‘gun control’ in the 70s, 80s and 90s foundered was that in the political arena, the rural areas rebelled against the city culture trying to impose its own ideas about guns on the rural areas. And there’s a reality behind this because on many fronts the logic of pervasive gun ownership makes a lot more sense in sparsely populated rural areas than it does in highly concentrated city areas.

But a huge amount of the current gun debate, the argument for the gun-owning tribe, amounts to the gun culture invading my area, my culture, my part of the country. So we’re upset about massacres so the answer is more guns. Arming everybody. There’s a lot of bogus research (widely discredited) purporting to show that if we were all armed we’d all be safer through a sort of mutually assured destruction, pervasive deterrence. As I said, the research appears to be bogus. But even if it was possible that we could be just as safe with everyone armed as no one armed, I’d still want no one armed. Not at my coffee shop or on the highway or wherever. Because I don’t want to carry a gun. And I don’t want to be around armed people.

Do read both pieces entirely. Josh’s point about rural versus urban is one I made a long time ago, and again here. I grew up in rural Missouri and eventually ended up in the New York metropolitan area, and I full well appreciate why New Yorkers don’t want guns around. And it’s not because they are “elitists” who think they are better than rubes. It’s because guns represent a much greater threat in high population density areas. As I wrote earlier,

After living here awhile, I came to understand why. New Yorkers habitually seek safety in numbers. If you keep to areas where there are lots of other people, you are generally safer than if you are somewhere isolated. New Yorkers prefer subway cars and elevators with at least a couple of other people inside, even if the other people are strangers. They stay in well-lit, high-traffic areas.

In short, they insulate themselves from harm with lots of nearby human flesh. Thick crowds of strangers that an Ohioan would find suffocating are comforting to a New Yorker. The thought that somebody in the flesh shield might whip out a gun and start shooting that flesh is more frightening to New Yorkers than the burglaries that worried my neighbors in Ohio.

If you aren’t used to living here, the density can be hard to imagine. Last summer some guy shot another guy in the vicinity of the Empire State Building, and the NYPD came and shot the shooter. They also shot nine bystanders. And I don’t think that means the NYPD are worse-than-average shots. I know the area; there easily were thousands of people within range of those firearms. “Clean” shots may have been impossible.

But I want to come back to Josh’s description of the two tribes of gun-owners and non-gun-owners, and that guns are part of American tradition. In my experience, the American traditional gun owner was more like Kirk R. Wythers’s grandfather, who didn’t see the point in loading more than three shells at a time. Today’s gun loon is a relatively new sort of critter, driven by a relatively new social/cultural pathology that is causing lesser-educated white men in large parts of the country to see the possession of military weapons as somehow necessary to their self-esteem, and even their very existence. It’s not surprising there is a growing threat from far-right terrorist groups.

How did this start? I dimly remember some talk about stockpiling weapons when John F. Kennedy was elected, because Ozark Mountain folk were afraid of a Catholic president, but that died down pretty quickly. Other than that, the obsession with having to be armed to the teeth in case one has to overthrow the government is just not something one heard in the 1950s and even the 1960s, even in the rural Midwest. This is not traditional. There is something else going on here.

See also “Hannity, Shapiro, and the Politics of Situational Patriotism.”

Gun Culties vs. Everybody Else

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Why we need gun control — a man who sheltered some Sandy Hook elementary students on the day of the mass shootings is being harassed by Sandy Hook truthers.

don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”

On the day of the shooting, Mr. Rosen found six small children and a bus driver on his front lawn. The children said their teacher was dead. He took them in, talked to them, gave them snacks, and called their parents. He gave some interviews after, and the truther mob went after him.

Numerous YouTube videos have been upload that purport to ‘expose’ his ‘lies.’

One man, posting under the name Police State Radio, posted a 15-minute video in which he claimed at least one of the Sandy Hook victims was killed in Rosen’s basement.

‘She was sacrificed in the house, in gene’s house,’ the man says.

This mob is made up of the same people who think they must be allowed to carry concealed firearms anywhere they go and have unfettered access to military weapons. Oh, and in their minds they are “patriots” and “law abiding citizens” who believe they must be armed to defend themselves against “bad guys.”

The NRA likes to frame the gun rights debate in terms of “law-abiding citizens” versus “criminals.” And I’m saying it’s not the professional criminals who scare me. I’ve never in my life been threatened by a gun-toting mobster. But I’ve had a few run-ins with armed hotheads who considered themselves to be “law-abiding citizens” and in fact probably did not have criminal records. But they also lacked heads that were screwed on all the way or as much sense as God gave pop tarts.

There are news stories saying that the President is poised to move forward on a comprehensive gun control package. The package could include some executive orders, which could include such measures as actually prosecuting people who lie on their background checks. Naturally, the usual whackjobs think this is tyranny and want President Obama impeached.

Polls show that support for and opposition to gun control falls along demographic lines; basically, we’re looking at middle-aged and older white men without college degrees versus almost everybody else. Groups most supportive of gun control include younger people of all races, college-educated women, and racial minorities. Josh Marshall prints a letter from a reader —

I view gun control from the prism of the gender wars. It’s a last-gasp attempt by lower-income men to hold onto some shred of self-respect: at least a capacity for autonomous violence, if they are left with nothing else.

And they are being left with nothing else, since the job market is increasingly feminized on all but the highest levels, most remaining male-gendered work (except uniformed public service) is increasingly losing income and status, and patriarchy is no longer a particularly strong legal or cultural norm. This is responsible for many things: almost all bad. I call it the Scots-Irishization of lower-income white men.

If it’s respect they want, they might want to stop acting like a pack of rabid hyenas, or buggier than road kill in August.

Hitler and the Gun Nuts

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You’ve probably noticed that whenever someone talks about gun control, the wingnuts shriek that Hitler confiscated the guns! I’ve long been skeptical of that claim, but I never bothered to check it out. Well, there’s a historian named Bernard Harcourt who fact-checked the Hitler confiscated guns claim, and he says it’s bogus.

As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

You mean, Wayne LaPierre lied? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you … For more, see ON GUN REGISTRATION, THE NRA, ADOLF HITLER, AND NAZI GUN LAWS: EXLPODING THE GUN CULTURE WARS by Bernard Harcourt.

It’s true that Jews and other people identified by the Reich as “problems” were not allowed to own guns. But another historian, Omer Bartov, pooh-poohs the idea that if the Jews had been armed they could have avoided the Holocaust. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?”

By the same token, today’s “patriots” armed with assault weapons quickly could be rendered into a quivering pile of protoplasm by the U.S. military. One would have to be demented to think otherwise.

Bartov, of Brown University, continues,

“Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

The fanciful notion that the Second Amendment arms citizens so they are perpetually prepared to overthrow the government (see example) is a gross distortion of history, of course. There is a credible argument to be made that the Second Amendment was written to make sure that the federal government could not deprive the states of their militias. And the reason the early Republic chose to maintain state militias was that some people of the time were nervous about maintaining a large standing regular army. But the Second Amendment obviously is concerned with arming a militia, and the first purpose of the militia was state and national defense.

The very first time state militias were called into federal service was to put down a tax rebellion in Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington actually put on a military uniform and rode at the head of the troops. If you listen to today’s Gun Nuts, the second amendment was written so that the whiskey rebels could defend themselves against George Washington’s militia. I don’t think so.

The NRA wants to register crazy people instead of guns. Considering this guy, this guy, and these guys —

The U.S. Government effectively dissolved, in either the Civil War or 1933, when it went off the gold standard. And because of that, “you don’t have to pay your taxes, pay off your house, you don’t really owe anybody anything, and by the way if you file the right documents, you can get as much as $20 million from the federal government.”

That’s right, the government actually owes you money. See, when it went off the gold standard, in order to maintain this false sense of legitimacy, the illuminati turned us all into “straw men.” Those capital letters on our birth certificates are our straw man names, and our Social Security numbers are just a way to keep track of us. The government then convinced some suckers in China and other countries to fork over their hard-earned Yuan for a stake in Americans’ future earning potential, anywhere from $600,000 to $20 million, per person. The so-called U.S. Government has been cashing in on you since the day you were born, somehow. And all you have to do to collect is file the right paperwork—and in the meantime, refuse to acknowledge the straw man.

I seriously think that gun nut extremism is some kind of mental pathology. So maybe we should take them up on the crazy people registry thing.

Because We Can’t Control Stupid …

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Veep Joe Biden says he will have recommendations for gun control measures this Tuesday. The Veep said yesterday that he’s seeing a lot of support for a universal background check law. No more gun show loophole. Limiting magazine capacity also appears to be popular.

You might have heard there was another school shooting yesterday, in California. The shooter, a 16-year-old, had a 12-guage shotgun. One student was severely wounded but is still alive as of this morning. Another student and a science teacher were slightly injured. The science teacher was able to talk the boy into putting down his gun.

There is speculation, but no confirmation that I’ve seen, that the school had an armed guard.

We’ll never know, but it’s possible that if the young man had been carrying an AR-15 semi-auto military rifle with a 30-round magazine instead of the 12-guage, there would have been many more casualties. This is assuming the shooter had a standard or even a pump-action shotgun — meaning he would have to do something between rounds to make the gun work — and not one of the newer auto-loading types.

There’s a push to start using the phrase “gun safety” instead of “gun control,” in an effort to win over some of the second amendment absolutists. The theory is that the absolutists are afraid of the word “control” but are likely to feel all warm and fuzzy about “safety.” I suppose it won’t hurt, but remember who you are dealing with. Don’t expect it to work.

In other wingnut news, we see that algebra is a liberal plot. Fox News host Eric Bolling learned that students are being asked to solve distributive property problems in algebra class and assumed this was some kind of socialism. One does wonder if this crew is bright enough to find their own butts.

Even More on Why We Need Gun Control

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This fellow, James Yeager, is CEO of Tactical Response, a Tennessee-based company that specializes in firearms and tactical training. I understand he is responding to the news that the Obama Administration might issue some executive orders regarding firearm sale regulation.

The face of gun rights advocacy. Are we taking notes, America?

via/via

Guns as Sacred Objects

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A gun buyback in Tucson, held on the 2nd anniversary of the Tucson mass shooting, has drawn objections from an NRA lobbyist. Why? Because the 206 guns bought by the Tucson police department are going to be destroyed.

Apparently there’s a law in Arizona that says if a firearm is abandoned and recovered by police, the police are required to re-sell the firearm to a licensed gun dealer. In Arizona, apparently, destroying a firearm is some kind of sacrilege.

I say someone should publish photographs of an assault rifle submerged in urine, and watch the Right freak out.

They’re freaking out already because Veep Joe Biden said something about executive orders and guns, and now visions of Hitler and Stalin are dancing in their paranoid little heads. There’s not a whole lot the executive can do without Congress — the Constitution worshipers don’t seem to read the thing much — but what little he could do could be a help. He could for example, beef up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and modernize the agency’s ability to track firearm sales.

He could not, however, unilaterally close the gun show loophole or reverse the law that prevents the Centers for Disease Control the National Institutes of Health from merely researching gun violence. Apparently, such research is sacrilege.

There’s a lot of talk about somehow tracking gun sales to people with mental health issues. Yep, nothing like a Crazy People Registry to further stigmatize psychiatric illness and stop people from seeking help. Also, how far would such tracking go? Would it be limited to people diagnosed with psychosis or extend to things like mood disorders or hyperactivity? You could be talking about more than half of all Americans, depending on criteria.

Truly, often the only difference between someone diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and someone considered “sane” is that only the former sought help and is getting treatment. For example, if we extend the tracking to people with personality disorders or paranoid delusions, the entire staff of the National Rifle Association would be included. The glitch would be that such people rarely are officially diagnosed until they face some kind of criminal charge and the court can order a psychiatric evaluation.

Seriously, I suspect that if you checked, most of the mass shooters going back many years had no prior diagnosis of mental illness.

I’d be the first one to say that someone diagnosed with psychosis shouldn’t be able to purchase firearms. But I also think that someone who already has an arsenal of assault weapons in his basement ought to be cut off from buying more also. And the severely psychotic often aren’t mentally organized enough to make a ham sandwich or find matching shoes, so correctly filling out a background check form would be quite a hurdle for them. Another argument for closing the gun show loophole.

Anyhoo — I highly recommend this opinion column by Eric Gorovitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Rather than join widespread calls from across the political spectrum for tightly regulating access to military-style assault weapons, the NRA called for the further mobilization of arms. …

… We can see clearly where this new rhetoric leads. If we must arm the schools to keep our kids safe, how can we extend the “cordon” to protect them when they go to the movies, unless we post armed guards in every theater? How will we keep the “monsters and predators” from the neighborhood playground, without an armed guard atop every slide? Once we’ve secured the theaters and parks, can we leave our children unprotected as they walk, innocently exposed to lurking evil, from one newly-protected haven to another? If we want to keep our children safe, and the only way to do that is by saturating their environments with firearms, how can we leave any place without the benefit of such protection? The armed schools proposal provides a terrifying glimpse into the NRA’s vision for America. …

… The gun lobby’s reverence for the Second Amendment has constricted its commitment to other constitutional principles. LaPierre lamented, without elaboration, “our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill,” prompting cries of foul from dedicated mental health advocates concerned with both the constitutional and the rhetorical implications of such a position. Gun lobby supporters launched an online petition calling for the deportation of British CNN commentator Piers Morgan, on the ironic ground that his commentary constitutes an “effort to undermine Bill of Rights.” In the last week, the gun lobby has revealed spectacular intolerance of the freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment, when guns are at issue.

These developments have shown that in the gun lobby’s America armed guards monitor our movements, the government maintains a database of perceived undesirables, and voices of dissent are eliminated. The gun lobby’s vision for the future has emerged from the shadows and declared itself the new home of American fascism.

Or, they can do what Stalin did and get everyone who disagrees with them added to the Crazy People Registry. The threat of being locked up for “treatment” ought to silence the resistance to the NRA once and for all.

Why We Need Gun Control

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I agree with John Cole — this video demonstrates why we need gun control, especially when you realize the interviewee is the sort of person who insists on having unfettered access to all firearms.

I want to comment on one thing, which is that comparing the number of people murdered by firearms every year in Great Britain versus the U.S. is not necessarily useful, given the difference in population. So, FYI, according to Wikipedia, the rate of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people is .25 — note the decimal point — in the UK and 10.2 in the U.S. For homicides with guns, the rate is 3.7 in the U.S. and .04 in the U.K. I doubt blood is running in the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne. Maybe somebody should explain to Alex Jones that “28 Days Later” is fiction.

It’s true that violent crime rates have been dropping for the past several years, but rates of violent crime peaked in the mid-1960s and have been going down ever since. I doubt there is a correlation with guns, one way or another. Some are attributing this decrease in crime to the switch to unleaded gasoline.

Go to Balloon Juice to see the second half of the interview. Then this Alex Jones person issued a follow-up video in which he ranted about being threatened by mafia “cops” who work for Bloomberg. He thinks the mafia cops were going to murder him and then blame crackheads.

Also, perhaps Jones needs to be checked for rabies.

Call Us All Crazy

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So yesterday Wayne LaPierre said, “If it’s crazy to call for armed officers in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy.” Actually, I don’t think the idea is “crazy” as much as it is “stupid.” One, there’s no money to pay for that many trained professionals (using unpaid volunteers would be crazy). And two, the presence of armed security in schools and elsewhere hasn’t stopped mass shootings in the past.

In fact, there was an armed sheriff’s deputy at Columbine High School the day of the shooting. There was an armed citizen in the Clackamas Mall in Oregon during a shooting earlier this month. There was an armed citizen at the Gabby Giffords shooting – and he almost shot the unarmed hero who tackled shooter Jared Loughner. Virtually every university in the county already has its own police force. Virginia Tech had its own SWAT-like team. As James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s former press secretary cum gun control advocate, often notes, he was shot along with the president, despite the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of heavily armed and well-trained Secret Service agents and police.

Regarding the Clackamas Mall shooting, the armed citizen mentioned above was a guy who was legally carrying a concealed firearm, and who saw the shooter. But the armed citizen realized he didn’t have a clean shot and did not fire, but instead took cover in a store. After the armed citizen stood down, the gunman shot and killed himself.

Even so, the gun nutters always include Clackamas Mall on their lists of shooters stopped by an armed citizen, because according to the Right-Wing Legend of Clackamas Mall the sight of someone with a concealed weapon so unnerved the gunman that he shot himself. And then with the next breath they will tell you that mass shootings only happen in “gun-free zones.” Well, somebody’s crazy.

But if you want to talk crazy, what’s crazy is a country in which a corrupt crackpot like LaPierre gets interviewed on national television. What’s crazy is letting gun nuts write gun laws. Wayne LaPierre, on the other hand, is paid very well for what he does. It’s not crazy to appreciate how your bread gets buttered.

A correspondent for The Economist points out that in Sanity World, “strict gun laws” means no guns. He also says,

I would also say, to stick my neck out a bit further, that I find many of the arguments advanced for private gun ownership in America a bit unconvincing, and tinged with a blend of excessive self-confidence and faulty risk perception.

This is a polite way of saying that the guys (and it’s nearly always guys) who sincerely believe they could have stopped some mass shooter if they’d only been there with their guns generally have less sense than a head of lettuce.

Also,

Nowadays, however, there are four states that require no permit at all to carry a gun, and 35 states have permissive “shall issue” or “right-to-carry” laws that effectively take the decision of who should carry a weapon out of law enforcement’s hands. These laws say that if an applicant meets minimal criteria — one is not having been convicted of a felony, and another is not having a severe mental illness — officials have no choice about whether to issue a permit.

Some states go even further by expressly allowing guns where they should not be. Nine states now have “carry laws” that permit guns on campuses; eight permit them in bars; five permit them in places of worship. In Utah, holders of permits can now carry concealed guns in elementary schools.

Among the arguments advanced for these irresponsible statutes is the claim that “shall issue” laws have played a major role in reducing violent crime. But the National Research Council has thoroughly discredited this argument for analytical errors. In fact, the legal scholar John Donohue III and others have found that from 1977 to 2006, “shall issue” laws increased aggravated assaults by “roughly 3 to 5 percent each year.”

Crazy.