A call for legislation often repeated, especially after a
mass shooting, is that there should be new controls placed upon gun ownership. That the call has been made repeatedly is
part of the problem, for that means there has been another mass shooting with
more victims. School shootings get the
calls for gun ownership reviews as well, as those shootings involved
children. In both cases, stronger gun
laws are advanced. What factors are
involved in the calls for gun ownership review and control: who can own what,
as allowed by whom? The corollary is for what reason, or to achieve what?
Looking at the second question first, the reason advanced
for escalating gun control is that there have been shootings with people
murdered and the goal is to stop murders: stop gun homicides. However, the reaction that many make in
response to mass and school shootings is about stopping ‘gun violence.’ The Prevention Institute’s (2019) ‘What we
can do…’ section laments a mass shooting, then uses verbiage of “… the pandemic
of gun violence.” That is an intentional
change in terminology. Gun violence is a
broader category than gun homicide. Gun
violence includes any violence where a gun is involved, while homicide
(murders) are a specific subset within gun violence.
Why this prevarication?
It is because the numbers are needed to be inflated. FBI data show in 2017 there were 15,129 homicides,
which include firearms (total 10,982), knives and cutting instruments (1,591),
blunt objects (467), and other various ways of killing someone (FBI.
2018). Everytown (2019) is a group that
has on their website a section entitled ‘Everytown Law’ which states “Everytown
Law fights for the right of every American to be free from gun violence.” As homicides are not the limit of gun
violence, what is included in gun violence must be reviewed. Gun violence is the issue that politicians
want to address as they want to review gun laws which can include restrictions
to bans on parts, features or the full firearm, and mandatory ‘buyback’ plans (Dobuzinskis,
2019; Epstein, 2019; Stevens, 2019).
Gun violence includes, according to Everytown, deaths and
injuries, done to oneself (self-harm and suicide), unintentional harm and
deaths, shootings by law enforcement, and ‘undetermined’ (2019). This
inflates the number of dead to 36,383 (average deaths a year), while from
homicide according to the FBI was 10,982 in 2017. That more than tripled the number of dead
from broadening the category to ‘gun violence’ instead of ‘gun homicide.’
With gun violence as the standard (homicide, accident,
suicide, and defensive), what we have is a morally relativistic, overbroad term
that has the lone distinction being that a gun was involved, in order to
combine various types of deaths or injuries.
That is like treating women the same regardless of whether they
masturbated or jumped on their bicycles too hard, or were raped, all because a hymen
broke.
In addition, focusing on that one commonality (guns), as the
link to various behaviors, will by design emphasize that commonality. If one was making a khopesh violence study, then
khopeshes would be prominent across the various types of behaviors. With guns as the standard to link different
behaviors, of course guns are going to be heavily represented.
As an estimate of 07/01/2018, there are 327,167,434 people
in the United States of America (U. S. Census Bureau, 2018). From that, 30% own a gun, with 11% not owning
a gun but living with someone who does (Igielnik & Brown, 2017). Using those figures, that gives us 98,150.230
gun owners. The Small Arms Survey (2018)
has those in the United States owning more than 393,000,000 guns, which is
around 45% of world-wide gun-ownership.
By sheer numbers and proximity, guns in general are more available in
the United States than elsewhere.
As a percentage, the Americas (South, Central, and North)
have more homicides with guns than other areas of the planet (UNODC,
2013). However, looking at McEvoy and
Hideg (2018) data, we see that there were around 560,000 homicides in 2016 with
only around 210,000 (around 38%) of those homicides because of guns. Guns do not account for even half of all
homicides, yet politicians want to focus on guns. Furthermore, though the US has a higher rate
of homicide by guns amongst weapon types, it does not have a high rate of
homicides overall. Using the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) data, the Crime Prevention Research
Center (2014) found the US near the middle of overall homicide rates out of 192
countries. Looking at UNODC and Small Arms Survey data, Chalabi (2012) found that
though the US has the highest rate of gun ownership (120 guns for every
100 people), it does not have the highest rate of gun homicides at 2.97
per 100,000, whereas Honduras had the highest at 68.43 per 100,000 (14
guns for every 100 people), and the US’ southern neighbor Mexico had
9.97 per 100,000 with 12.9% gun ownership rate. Even with the inflated, relativistic concept of ‘gun
violence’ in 2016, the US had a lower gun-death rate than Mexico (10.6
to 11.8), and far from places like El Salvador and Venezuela (39.2
& 38.7) per 100,000, with ownership rates of 12% and 18.5% (Santhanam, 2018; Small Arms Survey, 2018).
Regardless of which ‘side of the aisle’ a politician may
sit, many have called for degrees of expanding government control over who can
have what type of weapon, if at all.
This includes members of Congress, presidential nominees, and presidents
themselves, including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Eric Swalwell, Bernie
Sanders, Brian Mast, Barak Obama, Donald Trump, and many others (Bowman, 2019; Dobuzinskis,
2019; Epstein, 2019; Gillin, 2016; Greenwood, 2018; Stevens, 2019). The politicians advance that they, through
the government can help protect the people, with the right programs.
In 1996 a shooter committed a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Australia
that left 35 dead and 18 injured (Tikkanen, 2016). After the homicides by that shooter,
Australia’s government enacted expansive new gun laws and restrictions
including the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), which were said to have
prevented all mass shootings since the one at Port Arthur (Evershed, 2018;
Leaf, 2018). However, looking at data
and trends, the NFA did not have a statistical impact upon homicide or suicide
rates as those had been decreasing in Australia since the 1980s (Siegel,
2018). In addition, stating that
Australia had no mass shootings since Port Arthur is incorrect [just erroneous
to a manipulative lie] as mass shootings in Australia since sweeping gun laws
went into effect include: the Hunt family murders (four killed not including
the shooter’s suicide, by shotgun) in 2014 (Begley, 2015); in the city of
Darwin a man out on parole killed four men and wounded a woman (by shotgun) in
2019 (McGuirk, 2019); seven killed in the Margaret River mass shooting
(multiple guns) in 2018 (McGowan, 2018); the Monash University mass shooting
left two dead and five injured (by multiple handguns) in 2002 (Marshall, 2015). As those cases contradict what politicians
and news outlets [vested interests] are trying to sell, they get overlooked.
Gun ownership and gun homicide are not evenly spread out
across the US. 58% of rural households
have a gun, while only 29% of urban households own a gun (Mitchell, 2018). However, gun homicide is heavily localized to
specific counties, and even within certain areas within those counties as 73%
of US counties had no murders between 1977 and 2000 while 51% of murders in the
US are committed within 2% of US counties (Crime Prevention Research Center,
2017). The World Health Organization
(2015) report with Robert Muggah reported “…that 99% of violence in the USA is
concentrated in 5% of street addresses” (p. 28). Where there are higher rates of gun ownership
in rural areas there are fewer gun homicides, while in urban areas with lower
rates of gun ownership there are higher rates of gun homicide.
Whether in the US with cities that have higher gun control
laws (e.g. Chicago and Washington DC), or another country (Australia), gun
control laws do not stop gun homicide even though all in the area are affected,
people within certain areas still inflict violence against others.
Guns are tools. Tools
can be used as weapons to inflict violence.
As the FBI (2018) report showed, knives and blunt instruments still
accounted for 2,058 homicides. Tools can
also be used defensively. Defensive gun
use (DGU) is hard to accurately measure as there are multiple factors that
contribute to its underreporting, which makes an estimate range from 600,000 to
3,700,000 incidents (Kleck, 2018b). The
Violence Policy Center reviewing David Hemenway and National Crime
Victimization Survey (NCVS) data shows DGU to be 235,700 over a five year
period for a yearly average of 47,140 DGUs (Violence Policy Center, 2015). The Violence Policy Center is an advocacy
group (Violence Policy Center, 2019), as in their ‘Our Approach’ section in ‘About
the VPC’ is a bullet point of “ADVOCACY: We bring an informed and
evidence-based perspective to the campaign for stronger gun violence prevention
laws and policies. We build relationships with policymakers at the local,
state, and federal levels to work for effective solutions that will save lives.”
Reviewing Kleck’s data, at the low end, DGU is around 60
times and at the high end 370 times higher than gun homicide; reviewing the
Violence Policy Center’s data, there is still more than 1.6 times DGU than gun violence, and four times more than gun homicide. However, DGU is not only
stopping homicide attempts, but can include other defensive uses including
other types of assaults, or stopping animal attacks (Kleck, 2018b); in
addition, it is a well-known issue in science that phrasing and terminology can
affect how respondents answer questions, and Kleck (2018a) showed that such
issues affected the low responses and DGU estimates by Hemenway and the NCVS.
‘Assault’ weapon attacks get plenty of coverage whenever
they are used in a mass shooting.
However, what exactly is an assault weapon differs amongst who is trying
to define it, and can change as California passed/modified a law so a
previously exempt feature was made no longer exempt and made the weapon a
banned ‘assault weapon,’ and Ohio had legislation proposed that would not just
affect AR-15s but all semi-automatic weapons (Daniels, 2018). AR-15s “… seem to be the weapon of choice in
some of the deadliest mass shootings…” (Radzievich & Turner, 2019). With that as an understanding, politicians
such as Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Eric Swalwell, Kamala Harris, John
Kasich, among others each call for imposing stronger restrictions to full bans
on AR-15s and similar style firearms (Associated Press, 2019; Daniels, 2018;
Larsen, 2019; Radzievich & Turner, 2019; Samuels, 2019; Watkins, 2019). There are an estimated 15,000,000 to
20,000,000 AR-15 and like guns in the US (Yablon, 2018).
Looking at the numbers, let’s focus on the United States. From 1993 to 2011 the rate of gun homicides
per 100,000 more than halved from 6.6 to 3.2 (Krause, 2012); this decrease in
gun homicides happened while the number of [estimated] guns in the US increased
from 192,000,000 to 393,000,000 from 1996 to 2018 (Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention, 1996; Small Arms Survey, 2018). Additionally, this includes the time when the
Clinton Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004 which made legal again 19 types of
guns, as well as magazines capable of carrying more than 10 rounds (PBS, 2004). An increase in guns does not correspond or
correlate with more gun homicides.
Returning to the numbers for the FBI homicide data of the
10,982 gun homicides (2018). The
breakdown of those total firearm deaths in 2017 are: 7,032 from handguns; 403
from rifles, 264 from shotguns; 187 from other guns; 3,096 from firearms not
stated. This is to say that all the gun
homicides are committed by 0.01% of all gun owners; the number would actually
be even smaller as it is not a 1-to-1 ratio of gun homicide victim to murderer,
especially with the cases of a mass shooting.
Similarly, all the homicides committed by rifles – of which AR-15-style
weapons would be one subset – is also around 0.002% of AR-15-style weapon
owners; the number would be smaller as rifles as murder weapon includes more
than just the AR-15-style which is the low end of the limited pool to be
contrasted (403 out of 15,000,000). Even
with the Las Vegas music festival mass shooting doubling the mass shooting
victim count for 2017, there were still 117 deaths because of mass shootings
(Office for Victims of Crime, 2018).
That made it around 1% of all gun homicides for 2017 were part of mass
shootings.
Mass shootings are a small percentage of gun homicides, and
gun homicides have decreased through the years.
Gun homicides are committed by a minute percentage of gun owners. Having a lower gun homicide rate does not
mean having a lower homicide rate, as we contrast with homicide rates across
the world. Yet, it is through those
headline-grabbing events that politicians and news networks push an agenda of
fear to get attention, for their vested interests.
Looking again at guns as tools, they can be used to murder,
or they can be used to stop murders, to stop crimes, and to keep oneself, loved
ones, and property safe. One of the main
reasons given by 67% of households who have a gun, was that it offered
protection (Igielnik & Brown, 2017).
Defensive gun use with pistols included stopping one who killed one and
paralyzed another in Rockledge, FL (Gallop, 2017), stopping one who killed another
in Arlington, TX (McCausland, 2017), stopping one who shot at multiple,
injuring one in Chicago, IL (Ziezulewicz, 2019), stopping one who murdered
another in Portland, OR (Bernstein, 2014), among many other defensive use of
pistols. AR-15s can also be used defensively
as when a home owner defended his property and himself against three home
invaders, in Broken Arrow, OK (Associated Press, 2017), a teenage boy
protecting himself, his younger sister, and the family home against home
invaders, in TX (Hayward, 2013), Stephen Willeford used his AR-15 to stop the
mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, TX (Brett, 2018). These, among many others are examples of
rifles – including AR-15s – being used defensively. Again, even using the smallest estimate that
Kleck (2018a) advised reflected a vast underrepresentation by the Violence
Policy Center of defensive gun use, the defensive use is more than four times
higher than the gun violence rate, and 13 times higher than the gun homicide rate: sixty times higher and more - up to 370 times - with other
estimates of DGU against gun homicide.
DGU does not have to mean that the initiator of violence is
killed by the one using a gun defensively.
Stephen Willeford engaged the shooter at the Baptist Church shooting;
the shooter had already killed multiple people.
When Willeford shot back after getting his AR-15, he did not kill the
shooter; however, the shooter stopped shooting at others when he was fired
upon, and ran to his vehicle then left (Brett, 2018). Nick Meli did not even shoot at the shooter
at the Clackamas Mall shooting, but with his gun drawn and engaging the
shooter, stopped him from firing upon others (Bella, 2013).
Defensive use stops shooters. DGU is the difference between a shooter acting
as a fox in a chicken coop as an armed perpetrator with trapped victims who
cannot fight back, as contrasted to a lion facing another lion. In 1991, a man drove his truck through the
front entrance of Luby’s Cafeteria, and armed with a couple of pistols began
shooting the people inside the building before killing himself after police
arrived and opened fire. The police
response was too late for many as 22 had been murdered and many more
injured. One unarmed man tried to stop
the shooter during the shooting before the police arrived, but he was mortally
wounded; that man’s wife chose to stay with her husband instead of fleeing, and
she was killed as well (Kennedy & Harrison, 1991; UPI Archives, 1991).
Suzanna Gratia Hupp was a survivor at Luby’s Cafeteria, and
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her experience (Hupp,
2013):
But as I began to
stand up, we heard gunshots… I kept waiting for him to say something like,
“Everyone put your wallets up on the tables!” But the gunshots continued. It
took a good 45 seconds…which is an eternity, to realize that he was just there
to execute people. As he made his way around the front of the truck, I watched
as he leveled his gun on the head of a person crouched beneath him. He pulled
the trigger. Then he calmly walked to the next person, pointed the gun and
pulled the trigger. It was then that I thought, "I’ve got him!" I
reached for my purse on the floor next to me. I had a perfect place to prop my
shooting hand, and I have hit much smaller targets at much greater distances.
Could I have missed? It’s possible. But it sure would have changed the odds. Then
I realized that a few months earlier I had made the stupidest decision of my
life. I had begun to leave my gun in my car because at that time, in the state
of Texas, concealed carry laws did not exist. I was concerned about getting
caught with it… I can't begin to get across to you how incredibly frustrating
it is to sit there, like a fish in a barrel, and wait for it to be your turn,
with no hope of defending yourself.
It was then that my
father took my attention. He began to rise up and said, "I’ve got to do
something! I’ve got to do something or he's going to kill everyone in
here!" I turned to him and tried to hold him down by the shirt collar. But
when he saw what he thought was a chance, he stood up and ran at the guy, who
at that point was about a dozen feet from us. But the gunman had complete
control of the room. He simply turned, and shot my father in the chest. My
father fell in the aisle maybe 7 or 8 feet from me… it made the gunman change
directions slightly, and he went off to my left… I stood up, grabbed my mother by the shirt
collar and said, “Come on, come on! Let's go! We’ve got to get out of here!”… and
realized she had not followed me out… And I had no idea where my mother was.
… I will tell you that
several of the first responders… told us that they had been in a conference at
a hotel one building away when the shooting occurred. In an odd twist of gun
control fate, the manager of the hotel asked them to leave their weapons in
their vehicles so as not to make her customers uncomfortable. So precious
minutes were lost as they retrieved their weapons from their locked trunks and
made their way to the restaurant… They saw a lot of bodies, and a woman, on her
knees in the aisle, cradling a mortally wounded man. They said that a man
walked up to her, she looked up at him, he put a gun to her head, she looked
down at her husband, and he pulled the trigger. That's how they knew who the
gunman was. All they had to do was fire a shot into the ceiling, and this guy
immediately rabbitted to a back bathroom alcove area. He exchanged some gun
fire with them, and then put a bullet in his own head. 23 people were killed
that day, including my parents.
I told the newspapers
the next day that I was mad as hell at my legislators because they had
legislated me out of the right to protect myself and my family. The only thing
the gun laws did that day was prevent good people from protecting themselves.
Since that time, we
have seen dozens of these mass shootings. Isn't it interesting that nearly all
have occurred in places where guns were not allowed.
A lion without teeth or claws is no match for a lion that
has both. Being able to bite or shoot back,
or at least be able to give the impression against a shooter than one can shoot
back can help stop a shooter. Willeford,
Meli, the responders at Luby’s, each did not kill the shooter (the shooter
ended up taking their own lives in each of those cases), but from their actions
either in shooting back or letting it be known that they can shoot back, they
helped stop a shooting and saved lives.
Different guns fill different roles, such as a Derringer’s
size makes it more easily concealable while the rack of a pump shotgun makes a
sound that gets attention, and the look of an AR-15 (as well as its high
functionality) each contribute to defensive usage. Hupp could have shot back with the smaller
weapon in her purse, if it was in her purse instead of her car, to follow ‘the
law.’ While even the presence of an
AR-15 or AR-15-style weapon helps discourage attacks, even during riots (Dunn,
1992; Flitter, 2014).
An old adage goes as “God created men equal. Colonel Colt made them equal” (Eschner,
2017). The point was about those who
could exert less force being able to match those who could exert more force,
along with some marketing. Being able to
match force with a gun if not wholly stopping a shooter, can redirect
them. If one possesses superior
firepower, they may be able to stop by force or scare a shooter by that
superior status. If it becomes necessary to fight or shoot back, you want an
advantage. More powerful, higher
capacity, and other features increase functionality and improve one’s ability
to shoot back.
Fairness is for games.
If you’re looking for a fair fight, you’re doing it wrong.
What the data and the logic shows us, is that regardless of
politicians and news groups trying to sell fear to get people to give them
money or power, there is not an ‘epidemic of gun violence.’ Bad as it may be for those affected by gun
violence, as a society it is not an epidemic, or ‘pandemic.’ Being for people being able to own and
purchase guns is not to be for ‘kids getting killed’ as that is a gross non sequitur
and straw man argument, as no one is advancing a ‘kill children’ platform. Gun violence itself is a relativistic
term. If the goal was about saving
lives, then it would be better for laws to be passed mandating what people can
eat and drink, as diet-related diseases are the leading cause of death,
accounting for one in five deaths globally (Physicians Committee for
Responsible Medicine, 2018; Science Daily, 2019). If the type of death is irrelevant (murder,
suicide, and accident all treated the same), then diet is by far a greater
killer than guns.
The numbers do not add up that gun control saves lives as
when the number of guns had increased and bans on ‘assault weapons’ lapsed, the
gun homicide rate decreased. Guns are
tools, and are used maliciously by an infinitesimal small percentage of gun
owners, and are used defensively far more often than maliciously. This is in addition to the non-malicious or
defensive uses that guns have, such as collection, recreation, hunting, target
shooting and the like. As tools, when
someone (generally a politician) is calling for regulating guns and making you
have to get approval of what they left as allowable, it is a restriction on
individual liberty in action and toward property. Free people do not need permission to engage
in non-coercive behaviors. Politicians
using the coercion of the State to restrict liberty of the people is another
reason why the people should have guns: to defend themselves from internal
threats to their individual rights, whether from other individuals or the
government.
When it comes to calls for gun control, it is based upon the
goal of solving crimes that have decreased without expanded gun control –
included a decrease in gun control – as well as an increase in the gun supply, with
the gun control laws to affect the entire population while most of the gun
homicides are committed in 5% of the of street addresses, committed by 0.01%
of a gun-owning population. That is
impractical to address the issue that it is supposed to address. Restricting free people, holding them as
guilty needing to prove innocence to get approval to have access of what has
been left as allowable – restricting the property rights of those who have
harmed none, is immoral. Even if the
best case scenario of politicians believing what they say that getting rid of
guns, or controlling access of who can have access to guns, it is still the
imposition of pulling the teeth and declawing the individuals in the
populace. Though the politician who
advances the control may not want to further control people, that the people
have been weakened leaves them more susceptible to the imposition of force from
other individuals or an abusive State.
Penn Jillette summed up the second part of the threats when
he spoke of the 2nd Amendment (2005):
“A well-regulated
militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” sure we need an
organized military force to defend your country BUT “the right of the people to
keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
This is the people
in contrast with the militia. It doesn’t say ‘the right of the militia to keep
and bear arms shall not be infringed’ it says “the right of the people.”
Now why the word ‘people?’
Because the people who wrote this just fought a war for two years against a
tyrannical state militia. They knew the time might come when they would have to
do that again so they made the possession of weapons a right that the militia
could never take away.
*numbers are based upon retrieved data, which though may or
may not be the same available year, are close in dates.
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