Breaking news- mass shootings and gun insanity as far as the eye can see.

July 18, 2015July 18, 2015 commongunsense"accidental shootings", access to guns, ASK campaign, Aurora Theater shooting, bad apple gun dealers, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, Charleston church shooting, Chattanooga shooting, corporate gun lobby, defensive gun uses, Everytown for Gun Safety, gun free zones, gun ownership in America, mass shootings, military and guns, public health and safety, public support for background checks, safe gun storage, shooting of police officers, The Trace, Walmart gun dealers

On Thursday of this week, the breaking news was all about mass shootings. One could not look at any news media without the interrupted programming reporting about the shooting of Marines at a Naval recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And today, the news is that another victim has died of the injuries sustained in Thursday’s mass shooting. Also on that day, the jury of the Aurora theater shooting trial returned a guilty verdict. Common sense happened. In addition, there was news about the upcoming trial of the Charleston church mass shooter. America was consumed by mass shooting.

What we didn’t hear about that day was that 80 other Americans died from gunshot injuries and hundreds more sustained injuries. What the news media did’t talk about was a spree shooting in Maine that killed 2 and injured 5. How did this guy get his gun, by the way?

Will there be a day when we won’t be talking about another mass shooting? When will we do something about all of this? Congress took a break from their work while families were grieving and people were being shot. This statement from the Brady Campaign is perfect:

The two stories dominating news headlines across the country both center on the issue of gun violence – an epidemic that kills 89 people in America every day, and injures hundreds more. Congress’ response to a grieving nation: another three-day weekend.

“Today marks one month from the Charleston church shooting, while just yesterday four Marines were killed while serving their country on US soil and the Aurora movie theater shooter was convicted for murdering twelve people. Gun violence leads the news today in every congressional district in America, and this doesn’t count local shooting incidents that fail to make national news,” said Brady Campaign President Dan Gross. “The issue of gun violence is very much on the public’s mind and the last thing Congress should be doing is taking another break. Our elected leaders should make it a priority to take immediate action to keep guns out of the wrong hands and that starts by taking a vote on H.R. 1217.”

Isn’t it time for them to get to work on solving one of our country’s most pressing public health and safety problems? When 32,000 Americans die in one year from gun injuries, isn’t it time to break out common sense, put our collective heads together and start working on solutions? For there are solutions and we are ignoring them.

I write often about, at the least, requiring background checks for all gun sales. 92% of Americans, and yes, even gun owners, favor this solution. Why is this not the solution? Why would we even think about allowing anyone who purchases a deadly weapon to not go through a background check? It’s insane.

A group of faith leaders has written about another solution and is imploring President Obama to use it in this New York Times piece:

For more than a year, we and fellow religious leaders across the nation have worked to persuade President Obama to use what we believe is the most powerful tool government has in this area: its purchasing power. The federal government is the nation’s top gun buyer. It purchases more than a quarter of the guns and ammunition sold legally in the United States. State and local law enforcement agencies also purchase a large share. Major gun manufacturers depend on these taxpayer-funded purchases. For the government to keep buying guns from these companies — purchases meant to ensure public safety — without making demands for change is to squander its leverage.

Some of the leading brands of handguns purchased by the government — Glock, Smith & Wesson, Sig Sauer, Beretta, Colt, Sturm, Ruger & Company — are also leading brands used in crimes. Among the brands of handguns recovered by the Chicago Police Department at crime scenes between January 2012 and October 2013, all six of these companies ranked in the top 11. When police officers carrying Glocks are recovering Glocks at crime scenes on a regular basis, shouldn’t this prompt questions about whether the police department could use its influence to reduce the number of guns that end up in the hands of criminals? When Smith & Wessons turn up frequently in the hands of criminals, shouldn’t questions be asked when Smith & Wesson seeks a contract with the federal government?

There are specific suggestions made by these faith leaders that could lead to safer practices of selling guns to make sure guns don’t fall into the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. Why would we not require these gun dealers to more accountable for what they are doing? They are selling deadly weapons designed to kill people.

Along the line of common sense solutions suggested in the above linked piece is another article that highlights the gun sale policies of Walmart, the nation’s largest seller of guns:

Current federal guidelines offer dealers a degree of discretion in the small percentage of cases where background checks don’t clear within two hours and are placed under review, after which many retailers will opt to proceed with the sale even if an approval or denial hasn’t been issued when the three-day mark passes. Walmart’s own background check policies have surpassed federal requirements since 2002, when the company decided that it would no longer sell guns to customers without a completed approval from NICS. The company refuses to sell a gun without a concrete all-clear from the federal system.

“The fact is, a gun dealer is not required to sell a gun to anybody,” Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, tells The Trace. In default proceed sales, he argues, it’s safer not to. In a 2000 FBI study, the agency found that a person whose background check takes over 24 hours to complete is also 20 times more likely to be a prohibited purchaser. “Walmart realized that it’s just not good practice as a responsible corporate citizen to supply guns to those people,” says Lowy.

Walmart, the nation’s largest gun retailer, sells rifles, shotguns, and ammunition in some 1,700 outlets. (It doesn’t offer handguns, except in the state of Alaska.) In 2008, the company adopted even more rigorous standards by implementing a 10-point code of conduct as part of a partnership with the gun safety group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. In addition to refusing default proceed sales, Walmart agreed to videotape all firearm transactions, require background checks for all employees handling or selling guns, and create a system to trace guns sold by the company that are later linked to crimes, among other measures. (Mayors Against Illegal Guns is an earlier iteration of Everytown for Gun Safety, a seed donor of The Trace.)

Other gun dealers need to follow these simple good practices when selling guns. Lives depend on it.

Making sure kids and teens don’t access guns can also save lives. The ASK campaign is all about asking if there are loaded, unsecured guns in the homes where your kids play and hang out. Making sure if you are gun owners yourself, you do the same, is crucial.

The solution is not more guns, by the way. There is absolutely no evidence that works. In fact the opposite is likely true. For example, this Georgia navy recruiter accidentally shot himself in the leg with his personal weapon carried into a recruiting center. But now, of course, Republican Presidential candidates and gun rights activists are suggesting that if only those Chattanooga victims would have had guns, they could have protected themselves.

Pandering.

How would that have worked? The shooter shot from a distance spraying the buildings with bullets and it happened by surprise as these events always do. Perhaps military members working in these facilities should be armed but armed and trained. But even then, it may not stop the next armed attacker from spraying bullets from a distance. Like in any situation where a gunman shows up, chaos ensues and more guns do not ensure more safety and fewer deaths.

Even armed officers and law enforcement are shot and killed or injured in “guns allowed” zones. One of the first victims in Chattanooga was an armed police officer who was injured and couldn’t stop the shooter. I have written often about the shootings of armed officers in Tacoma, Washington, Pittsburgh, New York and other places.

Arming more people is not the answer. The answer is to have fewer armed citizens. There are far too many guns circulating in America. There are far too many people who shouldn’t be abel to have guns who can access them far too easily. The evidence is mounting that in America we make it easy for shooters like the Aurora shooter, the Columbine shooters, the Charleston shooter, the Chattanooga shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter and all of the others to gain access to deadly weapons.

A new study that draws the same conclusion as others, finds that guns for self defense are used very infrequently and that, indeed, do not actually make much difference and could make things worse for the gun owners. From the article in The Trace:

Despite these advantages, even the NCVS is almost certainly overestimating defensive gun use. The fact is that defensive gun use is an inherently rare phenomenon: Any survey, no matter how well designed, will produce a final estimate that is much higher than its true incidence because of false positives. Not only is this a well-established statistical phenomenon, it’s also supported by new data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) — the most comprehensive and systematic effort to catalog every publicly available defensive gun use report — which finds that there were fewer than 1,600 verified DGUs in 2014.

In response to GVA data, pro-gun advocates have been forced to argue that the reason researchers can barely find .064 percent of the 2.5 million DGUs a year claimed by Kleck and Gertz is because virtually nobody reports their defensive gun use to the police. This argument is problematic. For starters, it would seem to imply that the vast majority of people using guns in self-defense are irresponsible citizens who use their firearm to ward off an attempted crime, and then, perhaps uncertain about the legality of their action, are leery of interacting with the police. It would also imply that while these citizens ostensibly stopped a crime serious enough to justify brandishing a firearm, they aren’t at all concerned about informing the police about a criminal who remains on the street.

The only thing we can know for sure is what we have empirical data on: Namely, that there is a reliable floor for defensive gun use estimates at around 1,600 a year. In addition, according to the most recent data on defensive gun use, we have reliable evidence showing that owning a firearm does not give individuals any significant advantage in a criminal confrontation, and they are no less likely to lose property or be injured by using a gun in self defense.

Facts matter. We need to re-think our insane gun culture and the claims made by the corporate gun lobby. For saving lives is the most important thing we can do and if the facts point to stronger gun laws and discussing the role of guns and gun violence in our communities that don’t fit with the claims made otherwise, it’s time to change the conversation.

As if to punctuate the evidence about our daily news and breaking news reports about shootings, Everytown for Gun Safety has a new report about the trends in mass shootings and other shootings. It is not a pretty picture. You can read the facts for yourself but surely the report reveals that more guns and more easy access to guns had made our country far less safe. Let’s look at just one fact, though, considering the shootings of the past few weeks:

Here’s some further evidence to support this point. Last year, Media Matters noted that response rates to mass shootings are generally within minutes of the first shot fired. During the September 2013 Navy Yard shooting which claimed 13 lives, for example, local police arrived within two to three minutes and members of the Yard’s armed security force had already fired at the shooter but failed to stop him. In 2012, Mother Jones found absolutely no evidence that even a single mass shooter had considered whether someone in the area could legally be carrying a firearm. Instead, shooters choose locations based on their personal connection to the site — and don’t seem to care much about whether someone might be firing back at them. Perhaps that’s because many mass shooters are suicidal; Everytown says that in 42% of incidents, the shooter killed themselves.

Facts matter. We can’t let this trend continue.

Today is my birthday. I have much to be thankful for. So today I will celebrate with the usual cards, birthday cake, time with friends, calls from family and time at our beloved cabin on a lake.

Too many people will not be celebrating birthdays. Too many families will not be able to celebrate the birthdays of their loved ones, killed by gun violence. It’s all around us.

We are better than this.

UPDATE:

This article about an Oregon felon arrested with guns and ammunition is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with our American gun culture:

Broke told police that he had the gun “out of concern for his safety because of all the guns on the street,” court documents state.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Gun odds and ends

July 15, 2015July 16, 2015 commongunsense"accidental shootings", American gun culture, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, Charleston church shooting, Chattanooga shooting, common sense gun laws, conceal carry permit holders, Congress members and guns, corporate gun lobby, Dan Gross, good guys with guns, gun rights extremists, guns and the military, Jade Helm, Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, stolen guns, Texas gun laws, threats with guns4 Comments

There are so many articles and incidents every day that I really don’t know where to begin most of the time when deciding on a topic for a post. So today I am going to just write about odds and ends. Because the American gun issue is so complicated and full of controversies and oddities, it seems appropriate to write about the oddities and then also about the ends that can help change the oddities in our gun laws and our unique gun culture.

Let’s start with police shootings in other countries, most especially Norway as written in this article:

Police in Norway fired their guns only twice last year – and no one was hurt – new statistics which reveal the country’s low level of gun use have shown.

Norwegian officers drew their weapons just 42 times in 2014, the lowest number of times in the last 12 years. Only two people were killed in police shootings in the same period.

The majority of Norway’s police, like forces in Britain, Ireland and Iceland, patrol unarmed and carry guns only under special circumstances.

In the US, where officers are armed at all times, 547 people have been killed by police during the first six months of 2015 alone, 503 of them by gunshot.

Why isn’t this proof that more guns have not made us safer? It is, of course but the gun lobby can’t deal with this truth. No other country has the insane culture of that of the U.S., thank goodness. And more, about officers themselves being shot:

US police are faced with greater day-to-day violence than most developed countries. In 2013, 30 officers were fatally shot while on duty.

The last time a British officer was killed by gunshot was in 2012 when two female police constables were shot in Manchester.

Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahy said in a statement at the time, “Sadly we know from the experience in America and other countries that having armed officers certainly does not mean, sadly, that police officers do not end up getting shot.”

So there’s that oddity. But the post hasn’t ended. Now I want to talk about “good guys” with guns in my neck of the woods. The following article is a caution to anyone who wants to mow their lawn too early in the morning:

A 57-year-old Ely man was charged July 6 in State District Court in Virginia after admitting to police that he pointed a shotgun at another man mowing a lawn.

James Brobin was arrested July 2 in Ely after a victim and another witness said Brobin raised a shotgun at the man mowing grass on the corner of Central Avenue and East Harvey Street in Ely. (…)

Jason Carlson told Ely police that Brobin came within approximately 20 yards of Carlson and raised the gun for approximately 20 seconds. Carlson and his brother began cutting grass at a residence at approximately 7 a.m.

After he lowered the gun, said the complaint, Brobin “made a slashing motion across his neck with his right hand.” He then walked back across the street and into his home at 13 West Harvey St., said the complaint.

Be careful out there and don’t mow your lawn at 7:00 a.m. We can safely say that this was another “good guy” with a gun until suddenly he wasn’t. I have written about other incidents involving lawnmowers. In this one, also in Minnesota, a woman got hurt over a lawn mower incident:

A Minnesota man ambushed his 17-year-old neighbor, shooting her three times, hours after she asked him to not ride his lawn mower through her yard, prosecutors say.

Chad Pickering, 40, told investigators the teen was “a bitch” who “threatened him” Monday afternoon, before he “went over to (her house) and knelt down by a pine tree … and ‘I waited, and I waited and I waited,’” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Apparently lawn mowing can cause enough anger to armed “good guys” with guns that they actually believe they can shoot someone over that anger.

Under the category of “you just can’t make this stuff up” here, now, is a machine gun lawn mower.Let’s take a look:

No words.

It’s hard not to make a comment about this ~~oddity~~ insanity taking place in the state of Texas concerning a military operation. You’ve just got to love the photo of these paranoid armed Texans ready to take on the government. By the way, are these “good guys” with guns? From the article:

Eric Johnston is a retired firefighter and police officer from Arizona currently residing in the Texas Hills region. Johnston decries paranoia, saying “We are not far-wing, ‘Oh God, arm ourselves, get in camouflage, block the streets. We’re doing more of a neighborhood watch kind of thing. We are going to find a central location and set up an area and just cruise the streets, drive up and down the highway through Bastrop…most of us are legal concealed-carry folks, but we’re not going to be running up and down the street with automatic rifles.” This mentality ascends all the way to the governor’s office – as Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor Jade Helm 15 back in April.

Can we think about the “mentality” of even the Governor of Texas?

And speaking of the odd mentality of some people, can we talk about why some people pack guns in their camping gear? This couple found out what a bad idea that was:

The woman, 38, was camping with her boyfriend in Box Elder Canyon of the Stansbury Mountains west of Grantsville when the boyfriend tried to instruct her in firearms use, said Tooele County sheriff’s Lt. Ron Johnson. The woman first tried shooting a BB gun and then moved to a .22-caliber rifle, Johnson said.

“He handed it to her, and she placed it between her legs,” Johnson said. “When she went to stand, she grabbed it around the trigger guard. It discharged into her chin and exited through the bridge of her nose.”

Oops. Clearly we are not safer when there are more guns around. There are way too many irresponsible people handling guns out there. I would say the other campers are lucky that bullet didn’t end anywhere else. If this man was teaching his girlfriend gun safety one has to wonder how responsible he is himself as a gun owner. And we all know that alcohol and guns just don’t mix. Unfortunately this is not an oddity. It’s a normal, almost every day occurrence in our country.

And can we talk about where some of our crime guns come from? An Arizona gun show provided 26 guns to a group of teens who broke into the show venue during the night and stole the guns:

Investigators said about a dozen teens were able to cut through a chain at the east gate of the Central Florida Fairgrounds and make their way into the Orlando Gun Show expo building, smashing through a window with a brick. They walked out with 26 guns.

Oops. Only in America do we have the odd ~~problem~~ practice of thousands of guns being exhibited at large gun shows. Stolen guns end up as crime guns. Obviously this is another one of those things we need to work on to improve gun safety and improve the overall safety of our communities. To that end, I suggest we put our heads together to figure out how to keep guns from being stolen from gun shows, gun shops, homes, cars,etc. When we are awash with guns, this is a serious problem.

Aside from these inanities about people with guns, “accidental” shootings, lawn mowers, Jade Helm, stolen guns and others, let’s look at a real tragedy that could have possibly been averted if we had stronger gun laws. The Charleston shooter should not have been able to get his gun legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer. But here is how he could have been stopped from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence:

72-Hour “Default Proceed”: When a firearms dealer conducts a background check on a prospective gun buyer, most results come back instantly: approved or prohibited. But about nine percent of cases require further investigation by federal agents before rendering a decision. However, if the investigator doesn’t return a result within 72 hours due to inconclusive research, inconsistent records, or simple inefficiency, the dealer is legally allowed to proceed with the sale. This is what happened with the Charleston shooter, and it’s appallingly common. In 2012 alone the 72-hour default proceed allowed 3,722 prohibited purchasers to buy guns. Expanding the investigation period to give agents more time to fully investigate gun buyers iswidely supported by Americans—including two-thirds of gun owners, and it will unquestionably save lives.

State Reporting Improvements: Many states fail to report essential information like criminal history, mental health status, domestic violence records, and, especially important in the Charleston case, illicitdrug abuse records to the agencies that perform background checks. Increasing NICS funding and changing federal law to require states to report relevant records to the NICS system will close this dangerous gap in the background checks system.

Universal Background Checks: The best way to save lives from gun violence is require background checks on all private sales, including online and at gun shows. South Carolina has abysmal gun laws (we gave them an F on our 2014 Gun Law State Scorecard), and had the Charleston shooter failed his background check at the gun shop (as he should have), he still would have easily been able to purchase a gun through a private sale, where no background check is required. Eighteen states currently have some form of private sale background checks, but until we pass this smart gun law everywhere, we cannot act surprised when dangerous criminals get their hands on deadly weapons so easily.

Dan Gross of the the Brady Campaign has made a similar statement regarding the Charleston shooter’s access to a gun he should not have had in the first place:

“Dylann Roof’s arrest on a drug charge, combined with his admission of prior drug use, should have prevented him from buying a gun, and it’s a tragedy that is not what happened. This news underscores the urgency of the message that Charleston families and the Brady Campaign took to Capitol Hill this week: Congress must vote now on H.R. 1217.

Yes. We can actually do something about the oddities and the insanity of our gun culture.

This editorial in the Washington Post gets right to the point with their title-The argument against common sense gun control crumbles:

Mr. Comey’s revelation should, first, inspire a lot of soul-searching among federal law enforcement. They aren’t responsible for Mr. Roof’s virulent racism, but they failed in the narrow area of responsibility that the nation entrusted to them. Congress has stifled the study of gun violence and theenforcement of gun laws in the past. But this appears to be a the fault of a poorly operating database.

Mr. Comey’s admission should also drive home what should be an obvious point: A tightened, functional background-check system and other simple measures would erect real and practical barriers to people attempting to buy guns for nefarious purposes. If the system had worked correctly in this case, Mr. Roof would have been turned away at the gun store counter. If Congress had tightened up the system’s rules years ago, he would have had a harder time looking elsewhere, such as at gun shows. If federal and state lawmakers weren’t so in thrall to the pro-gun fringe, friends, family members and other potential sources would have faced clear and high penalties for giving Mr. Roof a weapon without taking him to a gun store to get checked out first.

It’s entirely appropriate to talk about imposing basic gun laws in the wake of any mass shooting. All of them underline the fact that guns are shockingly efficient killing machines that no responsible government would ignore. Even if better gun laws wouldn’t prevent every rampage or end street crime, they would certainly cut down on gun deaths from all sorts of causes by making it tougher to obtain and use firearms illegally. (…) But in the case of Mr. Roof, gun activists now can’t easily fall back on the argument that better gun laws couldn’t have helped. Maybe Mr. Roof would have been so determined to start a race war that he would have eventually found a gun. Maybe not. What’s clear is that it didn’t have to be so simple for him. The country should have tried harder to stop him — and should be trying harder to stop the other Dylann Roofs still out there. That means law enforcement can’t be asleep at the switch. And it means that Congress should finally pass more common-sense gun limits that would make it harder to skirt the system.

9 Black men and women are dead. Our background check system has a serious flaw. People who shouldn’t get guns get them anyway. Congress does nothing. People continue to die. And we have a broken system of gun laws fostered by the corporate gun lobby and our own elected leaders. This is not only insane but totally unacceptable and should be at odds with our American values. We just have to be better than this.

UPDATE:

Sadly, I did not think I would have to add one more mass shooting to my list of “odds and ends”. But 5 more Americans are dead, including the shooter, in a shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Here is the statement, in its’ entirety, from the Brady Campaign about the shooting:

“We are shocked and saddened by today’s acts of domestic terrorism at a Navy Reserve center and a military recruitment center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As information continues to unfold, our thoughts are with the victims who are reportedly members of the military and law enforcement, as well as their families and the Chattanooga community.”

“We do not yet know how the shooter obtained his firearm. As the details continue to unfold in Tennessee, it is already clear that this is another reminder of the work that needs to be done to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. We owe it to the men and women at our military installations, in our communities, and to the 89 people killed every day by guns to take action now.”

This has to end.

Law suits and the gun lobby

July 14, 2015 commongunsense"accidental shootings", access to guns, American gun culture, ammunition sales, Aurora Theater shooting, bad apple gun dealers, Brady background checks, Brady Center, Brady Law, Charleston church shooting, Congress members and guns, kids and guns, lawsuits and guns, Media Matters, safe gun storage, Sandy Phillips2 Comments

In 2005 Congress passed a law opposed by many, including the gun violence prevention organizations around the country. It was difficult for the general public and Congress to really grasp. But when the “guys with the guns make the rules” that is often the case. This law is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms law, aka the Immunity Law ( Gun Industry Immunity). Here is what this law does:

In the years before passage of the act, victims of firearms violence in the United States had successfully sued manufacturers and dealers for negligence on the grounds that they should have foreseen that their products would be diverted to criminal use.^[2] The purpose of the act is to prevent firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been committed with their products. However, both manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible in much the same manner that any U.S. based manufacturer of consumer products (i.e. automobiles, appliances, power tools, etc.) are held responsible.

Here is more about the law:

While opponents of the measure said it singles out the gun industry for special protection, Mr. LaPierre said the protection is necessary because, unlike auto manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies, American firearms makers “don’t have deep pockets,” and the industry would be at risk simply from the cost of fighting the lawsuits.

But opponents called the bill shameful — “bought and paid for by the N.R.A.,” in the words of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, whose constituents include victims of the 2002 sniper shootings in Washington and its suburbs, called the measure “a cruel hoax” on victims of gun violence.

“I went to a lot of memorial services during that period of time,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “I’ve met with family members. To tell them that their cases were frivolous is, I think, to add insult to injury.”

Eight of the sniper victims or their relatives won a $2.5 million legal settlement from the manufacturer of the gun used in the shootings and the dealer in Washington State who sold it. Mr. LaPierre said that suit would have been permitted under the law passed Thursday. But the lawyer who brought it, Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, disagreed.

Mr. Henigan said that while the dealer had violated federal law, the bill would have prevented the suit nonetheless because the violations did not pertain directly to the weapon used in the sniper shootings. He said he intended to challenge the bill on constitutional grounds, arguing that it deprives states of their right to legislate and deprives victims of their right to sue.

As our country is experiencing more, not fewer, gun deaths and injuries and as the mass shootings keep piling up, this Media Matters article wonders why we aren’t paying more attention to this gun lobby law. From the article:

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act favors an industry that, at best, turns a blind eye to business practices that place profit over victims. As Forbes admits, the result is that “gun manufacturers have won double-barreled protection from Congress against the type of lawsuits that bedevil the makers of everything from toys to tractor-trailers.” Although legal experts like Andrew Cohen, posting in The Atlantic, are starting to highlight this unnecessary and unprecedented immunity for the gun industry, further attention would better inform current calls to hold gun companies accountable in court. As leaders of Congress state that “every idea should be on the table” in attempting to prevent another tragedy like the Newtown massacre, major news outlets should investigate why the gun industry remains shielded by law from the consequences of its irresponsible business practices in a way that other industries are not.

For example, the same type of gun used in the Newtown shooting was used by the 2002 Washington, D.C., snipers to shoot more than a dozen people. But if it had been in effect at the time, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act would have blocked the lawsuit filed by the victims against the gun maker and dealer, and prevented the settlement they received. On this point, the questions of Denise Johnson, the widow of one of the snipers’ victims, are still relevant:

I’m confident that the criminal justice system will work to punish the people who killed my husband. But the civil justice system must also be allowed to work. Those who share responsibility for my husband’s death must also be held accountable.

[…]

I and families of other sniper victims have sued these gun sellers. I hope that by holding them accountable, we can cause others to behave more responsibly, and that future tragedies such as mine will be prevented. I understood when I filed the case that I was not guaranteed victory, but that’s OK. All I wanted was my day in court. But if [the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act] is enacted, the courthouse door will be slammed in my face.

No other industry enjoys the protections that the gun industry is seeking. Gun sellers and manufacturers shouldn’t be above the law. If any other product injured my husband and irresponsible sellers played a part, I would be able to bring a case in court. But because Conrad was shot with a gun, my lawsuit would not be allowed. Those who sell guns that are sought by criminals need to be more careful than sellers of other products, not less careful.

I call on Congress to protect my rights and the rights of other victims of gun violence. There’s nothing frivolous about how bad gun dealers behave. And there’s nothing frivolous about my case.

The gun industry does not need to be more protected than any other industry. If victims file law suits, the courts can sort it out like they do for other industries who are sometimes sued by victims who are harmed by a product. The tobacco industry was found to be liable for deleterious health effects caused by their products. The same with the auto industry. Why does Congress treat the gun industry differently? The corporate gun lobby may complain that they don’t have deep pockets but that is really not the case. The gun industry seems to be thriving thanks in part to the protections it has received from our own elected leaders who are afraid to stand up for the victims. And also thanks to the fear and paranoia sold to some in America that fuels the sale of firearms. And in a sick twist, many of these firearm sales increase after high profile mass shootings.

At some level, our elected leaders must know and understand this information. Do they also know how much gun deaths and injuries cost Americans? Our leaders need to know it all in order to make informed decisions. There has been controversy in the past week or so about one such leader who happens to be running for President- Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders voted in favor of the 2005 law that protects the gun industry and has been having problems because of it. He also voted against the Brady Bill.

The 2005 law has come to the forefront in a recent lawsuit filed by the parents of one of the Aurora theater shooting victims against an ammunition company. From the article:

A federal judge ordered the parents of a Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting victim to pay court costs and attorney fees as a result of a lawsuit filed last year, and the defendants in the case say the family owes around a quarter of a million dollars. (…)

The lawsuit was part a larger effort by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence to expose unscrupulous gun dealers that ignore obvious warning signs and sell to customers with malicious intentions.

The plaintiffs, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter, 24-year-old Jessica Ghawi, was killed in the shooting, filed suit in September, but a senior district judge dismissed the claims last month.

The judge cited the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in the ruling, a law passed in 2005 to shield gun makers and retailers from liability for injuries caused by a third party with their products.

On-line purchases like this are way too easy and come with no background checks:

“We’re different than other cultures,” said Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, which advocates for firearms owners’ rights. “We do allow Americans to possess the accoutrements that our military generally has.”

Gun rights activists like Brown celebrate that freedom, but even some involved in the trade are troubled by how easily Holmes stocked up for his alleged rampage.

Chad Weinman runs TacticalGear.com, which caters to police officers looking to augment their equipment, members of the military who don’t want to wait on permission from the bureaucracy for new combat gear, and hobbyists like survivalists and paintballers. The site receives “thousands” of orders daily, sometimes from entire platoons that are about to deploy to war zones.

On July 2, Holmes placed a $306 order with the site for a combat vest, magazine holders and a knife, paying extra for expedited two-day shipping to his Aurora apartment. The order, Weinman said, didn’t stand out.

“There’s a whole range of consumers who have an appetite for these products, and 99.9 percent of them are law-abiding citizens,” Weinman said. But he said that “it makes me sick” that Holmes bought material from him. He added that he doesn’t sell guns or ammunition and that he was “shocked” at the amount of bullets that Holmes allegedly bought online.

Authorities say all of Holmes’ purchases were legal – and there is no official system to track whether people are stockpiling vast amounts of firepower.

This statement ( above) should concern us: “”There’s a whole range of consumers who have an appetite for these products, and 99.9 percent of them are law-abiding citizens,””. Law abiding or not, why is there an appetite for these products in the first place? Doesn’t that tell us something about our insane American gun culture? Who needs these kinds of products? And if you are law abiding and want them, a background check or further scrutiny should not be a bother to you. But…rights.

Sandy and Lonnie Phillips lost her daughter, Jessica, that night in a movie theater. Her right to live was taken from her in just seconds by a man who could buy hundreds of rounds of ammunition on-line because- rights:

That’s right. Not only does U.S. federal law protect gun makers and sellers from being held responsible for selling arms to nutcases, terrorists and murderers, but the state of Colorado requires plaintiffs to pay them court costs for having the nerve to sue them! (…) The other problem, which Sachs does not specifically mention is that our nation’s lax gun laws — along with laws protecting gun makers and sellers — allow no recourse to victims of the weapons industries and the NRA gun lobby.

Americans can buy anything they want on-line no matter who they are. Guns and ammunition should be treated differently than other products because they are the only product designed to kill people. Why can’t we get this right? High profile shootings often highlight our weak gun laws. The recent Charleston shooting has exposed a flaw in the FBI’s national instant check system:

That is something that should outrage all Americans, black or white, gun owner or non-owner. Polls show voters overwhelming support a background check system that prevents serious criminals and the dangerously mentally ill from owning firearms. Yet the NICS isn’t getting the job done — failing about 228,000 times per year based on the latest FBI numbers. And that’s not even counting the sales from private sellers to private buyers (including those conducted in conjunction with gun shows) that, while restricted in Maryland, are unrestricted in 33 states by last count. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, background checks only cover about 60 percent of gun sales. (…)

As troubling as the Confederate flag may be as a symbol of racism and oppression, a gun in the hands of a criminal or a dangerous psychotic poses a far more imminent danger. Fixing the background check — and closing the private sale loophole on a national basis — is no assault on Second Amendment rights. Rather, it would be a case of making existing law, one that’s been on the books for 22 years, function in the way that Congress intended. And qualified gun owners would have nothing to fear as they’d face no additional burden beyond a meaningful criminal background check while gaining the comfort that terrible armed rampages like the one that took place in South Carolina might be made less frequent.

Sometimes overlooked in discussions of this nation’s falling violent crime rate (and it’s fallen every year since 1994 on a per capita basis) is the role of Brady background checks that have denied guns to 2.4 million prospective buyers who were either convicted of felonies, were fugitives from the law or were determined to be dangerously mentally ill. Surely fixing the system will yield even better results, making it just a bit more difficult to walk into a church and kill six women and three men gathered for a Bible study. As important as taking down the Confederate flag may be on a symbolic level as a repudiation of the kind of white supremacy that Mr. Roof embraced, fixing the leaky background check system would save lives of all kinds and likely in large numbers.

Background checks on all gun sales can save lives.

We need to Finish the Job and require background checks on all gun sales. It’s the bullets and ammunition that actually kill.

Back to the gun lobby and lawsuits. Some lawsuits have worked in spite of the 2005 law. This Kansas lawsuit puts gun sellers on notice that they need to make sure those who are buying their guns can pass a background check. From the article:

The owners of Baxter Gun and Pawn say they didn’t know Graham was a felon, and that they were convinced the grandmother was buying the gun as a gift for young Zeus. She filled out the form and passed the mandatory federal background check, as Graham waited.

“He paid cash for the gun, he carried out the gun, and he purchased the ammo,” Shirley says.

And just hours later, he used it to kill the boy, and himself.

“I lost my son,” Shirley says. “At the time, my only child. At the age of eight.”

She filed a negligence suit against the gun shop, and the Kanas Supreme Court eventually ruled that gun dealers must exercise the “highest standard of reasonable care” to keep weapons away from felons. That’s higher standard than had been in place.

She recently settled with the gun shop owners for $132,000.

“This case is hugely important,” says Jonathan Lowy with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

He argues that gun control advocates face a veritable brick wall in Washington, where he says powerful gun rights lobbying groups consistently block gun control legislation. Civil litigation, he says, offers a chance to move the needle on restricting sales.

And more from the article: ” “Gun dealers can be held accountable when they irresponsibly supply a dangerous person. That is a powerful message,” he says.”

And what follows is a comment from a gun dealer about how this is not the norm and most gun dealers are responsible. It is only about 5% of gun dealers who are responsible for 90% of the crime guns. But that 5% comes with innocent victims losing their lives. There should be no tolerance for “bad apple” gun dealers. Clearly stopping these dealers from careless and dangerous business practices can save lives. It won’t bring the ones who were shot back and it won’t stop their families and friends from grieving for them, but if it will stop another family or more than one family from experiencing the devastation of gun violence, it is important and worth doing.

Lawsuits matter.

Reasonable people can agree that we need to keep people from being shot in any way we can. That being the case, our laws need to be stronger, not weaker. And our conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in our communities needs to involve a discussion about everything we can do to stop the senseless violence that is devastating our communities. Common sense tells us we must have that conversation.

The thing is, we shouldn’t have to beg for our leaders to pass laws that can save lives. We shouldn’t have to sue bad apple gun dealers to get them to do the right thing. We shouldn’t have to remind gun owners to keep their guns locked away, unloaded, from kids and teens so they can’t “accidentally” shoot someone or themselves. (According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 994 “accidental shootings since January of this year; 371 children killed/injured in the same time period; 1269 teens (12-17) killed or injured since January.) Something has to change.

We are better than this.

Other countries have managed to get it right. We can too if we have the will and if our leaders do what they know is right in the face of a well funded and fierce corporate gun lobby.

Changing the tone of the conversation about gun violence prevention

June 29, 2015June 29, 2015 commongunsenseBrady background checks, Charleston church shooting, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, corporate gun lobby, gun owners favor sensible gun laws, Josh Horwitz, NRA, President Obama and guns, Senator Chris Murphy, sensible gun laws

Isn’t this a sad image? The fact that someone made this political cartoon says all we need to know about the tone of the gun culture in America. For Congress has failed to act to save lives repeatedly. The corporate gun lobby has Congress firmly in it’s grasp. What is it about strengthening gun laws? Why is the gun lobby so resistant? It’s about fear. It’s about paranoia. It’s about profits for the gun industry. It’s about holding on to a culture that has changed since our own fathers and grandfathers joined the NRA. The gun lobby opposes measures that can save lives. Even though these measures won’t affect their rights to own guns for hunting, self defense and recreation, they stand against them.

It makes even less sense after a string of mass shootings in our country ending with the shooting of 9 innocent black Americans at a Charleston church. This won’t be the last of these and the gun lobby continues to foment the fear, hatred and paranoia that can influence the (mostly) young white males who have committed these heinous shootings. What’s happening is not President Obama’s fault. He has not taken people’s rights or guns away. Blaming everything but the proliferation of guns- the easy access to guns- the lax gun laws that allow easy access- the cavalier attitude towards guns and gun safety- the lack of responsibility exhibited by some gun owners- the lack of our elected leaders to deal with public health and safety measures against gun violence-the lack of an American discussion about the role of guns and gun violence…… is what is leading to the carnage.

By all rights we ought to all be fed up with this insanity. President Obama clearly is and has said so in many eulogies delivered since he took office.

President Obama delivered an amazing eulogy at the funeral of Rev./Senator Clementa Pinckney on Friday. It was, itself, full of grace and poignancy. By now you have seen it. Among the beautiful and powerful remarks made at the eulogy on Friday were these about gun violence prevention:

“We’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation,” Mr Obama said at the funeral.

“The vast majority of Americans, the majority of gun owners, want to do something about this.” (…)

“Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again,” he said.

Right from his many references to grace and then the singing of Amazing Grace at the eulogy, the words ring true:

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me….
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.

We do need to stop being blinded by the outdated ideas of the corporate gun lobby. They just don’t fit with what is going on in real life every day. What we need is sanity. What we have now is insane. And even gun owners can agree that the gun carnage just can’t continue without our doing something about it.

An article written about gun laws and the gun culture in Japan is instructive about what citizens in other countries think about the insanity here. You can read about the strict regulations of guns and their owners in this article which highlights why laws matter. Japanese citizens who want to own and shoot guns must take classes, register their guns, prove that their guns are stored safely in their homes and go through stringent checks by law enforcement for their mental and physical ability to be safe with a gun. At the end of the article, the man interviewed for the piece said this:

“You should have a reason for having a gun, and if you don’t have a reason, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a gun,” he said while he prepared his rifle for his next round of practice.

Indeed, further along the range, Yanagida seemed a bit puzzled when asked about using his guns in self-defense: “I never thought about using my guns to protect myself.”

If only that was the case in our own country. How many people would still be alive today? How many parents would have their children to love or their parents or siblings? How many communities would not be talking about the violence that took the lives of their citizens?

Australia passed significant new laws after the massacre of 1996 that killed 35 people. The American gun lobby loves to pass off what happened in Australia as something it wasn’t and isn’t. Here’s an article to counter the deceptions of the gun lobby and why we, too, should pass stronger laws to stop the carnage.

And unrelated to the Charleston shooting there are some great quotes from people in articles about some of the many every day shootings and insane gun incidents that speak to our need for common sense and common ground about gun violence prevention. This one comes from a Police Chief in Mississippi after the Walmart incident in which a man bought a rifle, loaded it and carried it around in the store. I wrote about it before because at the time of the incident, the man was not arrested. It seemed that law enforcement had to grant him deference because he was a white guy with gun rights after all. But upon further review, the man and his friend were arrested for disturbing the public peace. Check out what the Sheriff said about the incident:

“The possession, carrying and use of firearms require not only training and skill, but intelligence and responsibility. When persons act with deficiency in intelligence and responsibility, it can be both dangerous and unlawful.” Chief Leonard Papania stated.

Intelligence and responsibility are both needed but way too often are deficient. We can all agree to that and we should be able to put our heads together to fix it.

And the wisdom of a young mother who was shot in the leg by a gang member who thought that just because he had a gun he could shoot it at a passing car with a rival gang member inside. He missed. That happens. And the bullet hit a young mother walking her young child across the street. The 15 month old was hospitalized and now may have life long difficulties. Here is what the mother said:

“There’s a better way to solve your problems than shooting guns. … A lot of power is in a gun. You can’t always control it,” Spielman said.

Too true. When guns are available, they will and do get used to solve problems. And they are powerful and can’t always be controlled. What about this don’t we get in our country? Guns are dangerous weapons designed to kill others. It should be difficult to get one and difficult to use one. We make it far too easy and people who can’t be responsible with a deadly weapon are able to get one anyway. That is the problem with our gun culture. It’s not sane.

As I write often here, we can and must change the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in our country. We can change the tone and set the tone of the conversation by passing stronger laws and having a common sense and civil conversation. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut knows that Congress can set that tone and change the conversation:

“The question for political leaders is whether we can live with ourselves if we continue our thundering silence in the face of these seemingly endless tragedies. Whatever you think the answer is – changing firearms laws, fixing our mental health system, increasing resources for law enforcement – the time to act was long before today. The excuse that legislative action is not a guarantee that tragedy won’t strike again is just a mask for cowardice or cold-heartedness. I shudder to think what it says about us as a nation if we don’t even try to make a good faith attempt to end this carnage.”

Senator Murphy gets to the heart of the matter. We aren’t even trying to stop the carnage. What does that say about us?

And of course, as I write constantly here, the majority of gun owners not only do not belong to the NRA or another gun lobby organization, they actually don’t like the NRA and are in favor of common sense gun measures and changing the conversation about gun violence and gun safety reform. Read this great article written in the Washington Post by just one of these reasonable gun owners:

I agree with the NRA on one point: Tightening controls on gun ownership will not eliminate gun violence. And it may not do much to address the psychopathology of young men who commit mass murder. Timothy McVeigh and the Tsarnaev brothers committed their crimes with bombs, while Adam Lanza, with no criminal record, inexplicably stole his mother’s guns, murdered her, and headed off to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

But by filtering out at least some people who are poor candidates for responsible ownership, gun control will reduce the steady bloodletting of everyday life in our cities, a pervasive environment of danger that police departments around the country have decried, calling for greater handgun controls.

Rather than being our American birthright, gun ownership should be a privilege earned after thorough examination and training, like driving a car. But in 21st-century America, arms-bearing is an inalienable right, thanks to 27 anachronistic words of a constitution ratified in an 18th-century world of slow-loading muskets. (…) The Charleston massacre probably won’t result in gun reform, but its survivors have challenged the NRA’s bleak, seething worldview by suggesting that kindness can be the dominant mood of our public life. By offering perhaps premature forgiveness to the young man who killed their loved ones with a legally purchased Glock semiautomatic, they have shown us the possibility of living a more open, less timid existence. They imagine a world of joy, community and shelter, not fear, hatred and violence.

We can imagine a world less fearful and more safe from devastating gun violence but it will only come to fruition when our elected leaders realize they can stop being afraid of the corporate gun lobby. It is a minority of gun owners and a minority of Americans. It is the job of our elected leaders to do what’s right and best for the majority of their constituents. They have not done this with gun policy. It’s time for that to change.

There should be no excuses for what happened in Charleston or no blaming the victims. That is tawdry, unseemly and offensive to all. But the gun lobby and its’ minions have a way of blaming the victims as an excuse for why we shouldn’t do anything about the easy access to guns and the promotion of guns in every nook and cranny or our country, including churches. Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence wrote this piece today about why blaming the victims is insane:

The nine innocent Americans murdered in Charleston were exercising their fundamental freedom to worship in a manner of their own choosing. Because they chose to pray without weapons does not mean they were “waiting for it.” It means that they were trying to live their lives as the Constitution envisions — in “domestic tranquility.”

The reality is that blaming the victim is deplorable, no matter the circumstances, and is a strategy to avoid dealing with tough problems. But as we have seen with the epidemic of sexual assault, domestic violence and gun violence, avoidance just ensures that the violence continues. One way to honor those killed in Charleston is to make sure that we as a country refuse to tolerate a “they asked for it” mentality for one more second.

Nobody asks for gun violence. Nobody wants to be shot. Everybody is against that idea and everybody should have a desire to do something about it. The gun lobby and gun extremists can look on from a distance and make these insane excuses and claims. But gun violence is affecting more and more of us every day and the circle of grief is getting wider as I wrote in my last post. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change the conversation and the tone of the conversation away from rights to responsibilities and to tolerance, love and keeping our fellow Americans safe from devastating gun violence.

Look what has happened in the past week or so. America is having a different conversation about the Confederate flag, about racism, about forgiveness, about health care, about marriage equality and yes, about gun violence prevention. Laws do matter as we have seen with the need for the South Carolina legislature to act to take down the Confederate flag at their capitol. The Affordable Care Act is the law of our country and the Supreme Court upheld this in their ruling this past week. Marriage Equality is now the law of the land. Though the conversations about racism and the flag are extremely important, so is the conversation about stronger gun laws. Stronger gun laws can also become the law of the land.

UPDATE:

I want to include this great post from a blogger writing for Huffington Post. From the article by Steve Nelson:

If the rest of us concede the unimpeded right for you to have an arsenal at the ready, will you stop open carry legislation? Will you reverse the idiotic laws that allow guns on college campuses? Will you stop parading your rifles around parking lots and playgrounds full of small children? Will you agree that reasonable regulations that keep weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill or career felons might be good for all of us?

Yes, I know that Dylann Roof’s gun purchase was legal. Perhaps no regulation would have prevented him from attaining a weapon. But is it possible that this disturbed young man felt entitled to take things into his own hands because of our gun culture? Was his irrational fear and hatred of black folks fueled by others who arm themselves against largely imaginary threats? Can any reasonable person deny that such tragedies are more likely when the surrounding culture screams, “Arm yourself! Stand your ground! Danger is all around!”?

Just what would it take to convince you to bring the United States into the civilized world?

ASK about guns on Father’s Day

June 21, 2015 commongunsense"accidental shootings", "law abiding" gun owners, American gun culture, ASK campaign, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, Charleston shooting, guns and elected leaders, guns and presidential candidates, guns and racism, kids and guns, Mother Emanuel church, President Obama and guns3 Comments

Today is national ASK day- a day to call attention to the fact that too many children have easy access to loaded guns. Children are curious and will touch guns even if adults have told them not to. It’s the adults who are responsible to secure their guns safely from children and teens. Kids should not be made responsible for this as toddlers. Yes, toddlers do find guns and shoot others or themselves with guns they find in their homes. If you want your own child or grandchildren to be safe from gun violence, asking about unsecured guns is your job. More on this at the end of this post.

Just as it is an adult’s responsibility to understand that an adult child or friend who has serious problems should not have a gun. And it is the country’s responsibility to make sure seriously troubled individuals, felons, adjudicated mentally ill people, those with restraining orders for domestic abuse, drug abusers, terrorists and others who could be dangerous with guns should not have them. It should be difficult to obtain a gun since they are weapons designed to kill people. Guns are unique in this way and need to be treated differently from other products on the market. There is no right to do whatever you want to do with a gun or to have one if you shouldn’t.

In the midst of national ASK day, long planned by the Brady Campaign, we are dealing with the after effects of one of our nation’s most heinous shootings. It’s hard to say that because they are all heinous and they all leave families bereft and the nation reeling. But this one feels worse. The victims were targeted specifically for their skin color by a white man who hated them for their skin color.

The nation is grieving for the 9 victims of the Charleston “Mother Emanuel” church shooting. The nation is asking why. The dust won’t settle for quite some time. There will be funerals. There will be attempts at healing. There will be community gatherings. There will be discussions- or there should be discussions about the role of guns and gun violence and about racism and the ugliness that caused the shooter to kill 9 people with no remorse. There will be a very public and emotional trial which will re-victimize the survivors. It’s an ugly picture of America. The gun rights folks are trying to change the subject blaming it on anti-depressants ( even though there is no evidence that the shooter was on them), religion, and even the victims themselves have been blamed by at least one NRA member. Shameful. Offensive. Insensitive. Ugly.

The truth of the matter is that the shooter was a racist with white supremacist views. He set out to kill black people and he chose the Mother Emanuel church on purpose for its’ historical significance to the black community. He was a school drop-out with no job. He appeared to be a troubled young man. He actually talked about this kind of violence with his room mate and a girlfriend and his room mate took his gun from him at one point because of his talk about violence. But his girlfriend got the friend to give it back. She just has to be re-thinking that decision and agonizing over it. This is why gun violence restraining orders are a good idea. They can prevent shootings like this.

There is talk about whether or not the shooter could have passed a background check. Apparently he bought the gun from a gun dealer but then we heard his father gave him the gun. Did he have a pending felony charge making him a prohibited purchaser? We don’t have all the facts yet. It will take a while to sort out. We do know though that in South Carolina it wouldn’t matter if he had been charged with a felony because he could easily buy a gun from a private seller on-line ( Armslist.com) or at a gun show with no background check. That’s why requiring background checks on all gun sales can make a difference.

And elected leaders are either running towards the discussion about the need to change gun laws or running way away from it. As just one ridiculous example, former Governor Rick Perry, Republican presidential candidate, suggested that the Charleston shooting was an “accident”. Come on. This should be a hot topic in the upcoming election. If it’s not, there’s something wrong with us. I guess we already know that. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, as always, did a great job of talking about our fetish with guns and the results of it in a recent show. Watch Stewart below:

Can we move on after this horrific shooting? We will. But for goodness sake, let us not move on and ignore the elephant in the country. What about gun violence? What are we going to do about it? Will we let the corporate gun lobby hold us hostage again like they did after the Sandy Hook shooting? Will our leaders at long last decide they don’t need to be afraid of the gun lobby’s threats and money? For that would be a great day in America. The rest of the world would cheer for us since now they can only wonder why we allow these kinds of shootings over and over and over again:

“We don’t understand America’s need for guns,” said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. “It is very puzzling for non-Americans.”

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

“The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We’ve tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction,” said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country’s largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

“People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice,” he said. “But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual.”

America is awash with guns as President Obama stated in remarks about the Charleston shooting. Take a look at these graphs in a Vox.com article showing the proliferation of guns in a country that can’t seem to get together to stop the shootings:

Despite signs of decline in gun ownership, the US still has a huge number of private guns. In 2012, Americans owned an estimated 270 million guns, almost 42 percent of the total number of civilian-owned guns on the entire planet:

In developed countries, there is a strong correlation between the number of guns and incidences of gun violence. In 2012, the US, which has the most guns per capita, also had the most firearm-related homicides of developed countries. Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, had the least:

When there are so many guns, there will be so many shootings. Period.

And while we move on, there are things we can do aside from passing stronger gun laws like ever popular universal background check requirement.

We can get parents and grandparents to ASK if there are unsecured guns in the homes where their kids/grandkids play and hang out. Why? Because that is a way to reduce gun deaths and injuries. There are plenty of stories to tell about parents who didn’t ask and now are living with the memory of their deceased children. Take this family, for example. Their daughter was shot by a friend when the children found a gun in the friend’s home. It doesn’t have go be this way. We actually can prevent gun deaths and injuries. Guns need to be stored securely away from kids and teens to avoid “accidental” gun deaths and suicides.

Check out the website of the ASK campaign for more information about how to ask along with materials and some videos about the awkward conversation that parents must ask to protect their children from an avoidable and senseless death. It’s just common sense, of course. Check it out:

The conversation might be awkward but not nearly as awkward as the conversation will be if your child or a friend’s child finds a loaded gun and fires it accidentally- killing or hurting someone else.

It’s Father’s Day. Fathers and mothers should be asking this question. No father wants to have to talk about his daughter like the Brooklyn father in the article above. He won’t be getting a father’s day hug or gift from his daughter this father’s day.

Some families in Charleston will be missing their fathers on this day. And some fathers won’t have their sons or daughters to wish them a happy father’s day on this day. These families will never be the same. The community and the church will never be the same. The violent and unexpected nature of gun deaths never goes away for the families who experience it. I know that from personal experience. It feels like the family has been violated.

The reaction of the families of the shooting victims is an example of grace and forgiveness in the face of tragedy. These are real people with real emotions who loved their family members and who will miss them and grieve for them. The shooter took someone away from them. Do shooters ever think about that when they fire their guns? Shooters rarely think about those who will be left behind with the holes left in their hearts and their lives that survivors will live around as they try to come to grips with their losses.

We are broken. We are Charleston. We are Mother Emanuel. We stand with the victims and survivors. We need to change our country.

Let’s do some common sense things this father’s day. Stand with the families of the Charleston shooting victims and support their healing. Demand that our leaders get to work and pass stronger gun laws and stop being afraid of the corporate gun lobby. Demand a change to the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in America- the only country that experiences such carnage. Think about being a responsible gun owner if you are one and store your guns safely. If you are a parent, think twice about giving your troubled young adult child a gun. The Charleston shooter’s father will be having a terrible father’s day today.

And ASK about unsecured guns in places where your child plays. We can save lives if we all get together and talk about the epidemic of gun violence and solve this problem together for the sake of our children and our families.

Happy Father’s Day.

“Good guy with a gun” myth

May 29, 2015 commongunsenseArmslist, bad apple gun dealers, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, conceal carry permit holders, corporate gun lobby, Facebook gun ads, Finish The Job, gun newspaper ads, private gun sales, public in favor of background checks, state gun laws, Wayne LaPierre10 Comments

It’s a myth propagated by the corporate gun lobby mostly in the figure of Wayne LaPierre of the NRA that a “good guy with a gun” can stop a “bad guy with a gun”. This presupposes that the only folks with guns who mean evil intent are the “bad guys”. Let’s look at this mythical thinking in the first linked article above:

That argument was put to the test last weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, when two “bad guys” with guns, Jerad Miller and his wife, Amanda, shot and killed two police officers. To be clear, the Milers were, in the eyes of the NRA, “good guys” until that exact moment when they used those guns to do “bad” things.

After the cold-blooded shooting, the Millers headed to a Wallmart for a final confrontation with police. Inside, there was a good guy — Joseph Wilcox, a 31-year old Las Vegas resident with a concealed carry permit and a gun in hand. Rather than running away, he took out his weapon and approached Jerad Miller from behind. It was a heroic and selfless act and one for which Wilcox deserves nothing but praise.

But it was an act that cost Wilcox his life.

Unbeknownst to him, there was more than one shooter, and when Wilcox approached Jerad Miller, he was shot in the back and killed by Amanda Miller.

While the NRA claims that a more armed population can prevent these types of mass killings, we know this is not true — and a tragic death like Wilcox’s is a far more likely outcome.

How does the gun lobby respond to this recent shooting in a Grand Forks, North Dakota Walmart store? From the article:

The gunman in Tuesday’s shooting had two passengers in the car when he pulled up to the Wal-Mart in south Grand Forks, Grand Forks Police Department spokesman said Wednesday.

Police Lt. Derik Zimmel said the two people stayed in the car while Marcell Travon Willis, 21, entered the Wal-Mart around 1 a.m. Within seconds, Willis allegedly shot two Wal-Mart employees, including 70-year-old Gregory Weiland, who died as a result.

Lisa Braun, 47, was injured from a gunshot wound. She was still in “satisfactory condition” as of 8:15 a.m. Wednesday, according to an Altru Health System news release.

Willis then shot at a third, unidentified Wal-Mart employee and missed before turning the gun on himself and ending his own life.

The shooter was stationed at the nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base:

Sean Willis of Nashville, Tennessee, said only that his son had been in the military for about three years and was originally from Springfield, Tennessee.

Sgt. David Dobrydney, a base spokesman, said he couldn’t yet release any information about Willis due to Air Force regulations.

So far we don’t know why the shooter did this and then took his own life with the gun. Most likely we will learn more in the coming investigation. But I think it’s safe to say that the shooter was a “law abiding” gun owner and therefore one of those “good guys” with a gun that the gun lobby is talking about.

Mr. LaPierre?

The words uttered by Mr. LaPierre dropped like a thud on the American public. The inane response to a terrible national tragic shooting just seemed to puny and ridiculous and just plain incredulous. But this must be what the corporate gun lobby and its’ minions actually believe. They are wrong but they continue believing in myths. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence took on this myth in an article about a poster boy for the “good guy” with a gun myth. They write about a case of an Alabama “good guy” with a gun who shot another in a presumed robbery but got away with the shooting. From the article:

Who Will Protect Us from the “Good Guys”?
Folks like Wayne LaPierre and Cam Edwards and “More Guns, Less Crime” Author John Lott might think our country is better off when criminals under indictment for rape are allowed to own guns and carry them in public. Rational Americans might disagree, and ask, “If these are your ‘good guys,’ who are your ‘bad guys’?” Perhaps then-NRA President Karl T. Frederick had this quandary in mind when he told Congress in 1934, “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

It also begs the question of how many other NRA “Armed Citizens” have criminal records and histories of violence, a topic which Media Matters recently explored. As Timothy Johnson of Media Matters pointed out, the NRA’s glorification of individuals like Marlo Ellis “demonstrates how the show must scrape the bottom of the barrel to find actual cases of self-defense with a gun for its audience.”

The thing is, when all of those “good guys” with guns are walking around in public with their guns as they now are everywhere, how do we know what will happen? How will we know when one of them snaps or is suicidal and takes the lives of innocent people? How can we tell these “good guys” from the “bad guys”? And when we allow people with no permits or training to now carry guns as we have done in several states, we will open up our communities to more of these kind of shootings. It is inevitable.

And why wouldn’t the “bad guys”- and by that term I assume the gun lobby means criminals and domestic abusers and others who are otherwise prohibited from owning and carrying guns- also then carry their illegally or, actually, legally purchased guns in public? And what I mean by legally purchased is the policy of allowing private sellers to sell guns at gun shows, through Internet sites ( Armslist.com) on Facebook, in daily newspapers and/or flea markets and other venues. It’s legal because we have not passed laws to require those gun sales by private sellers to undergo background checks.

Which brings me to my point. We have no idea if someone obtained their gun with a background check or not. And in states that don’t require background checks before granting carry licenses, we surely can’t guarantee that the person with the gun is law abiding. Without background checks on all gun sales, the person carrying with a license that doesn’t require a background check and a gun purchased without a background check could be the next Jared Loughner or the next Radcliffe Haughton.

The public has common sense when it comes to background checks. 92% of Americans (and including gun owners) believe all gun sales should come with a background check. Of course. Why in the world did anyone believe it was a good idea in the first place to not require background checks for all gun sales? It slipped through the cracks of the Brady Law when it passed in 1993 in part because then there were only occasional private sellers. Now is different. Private sellers often have exhibits of guns similar to those being sold down the aisle by licensed dealers where background checks are required. And a whole new market has opened up on the internet at places like Armslist.com, even on Facebook and in ads in local newspapers for just a few. Yesterday there were 3 guns for sale by private sellers in my home town newspaper. How about yours? I assume they will be sold with no background check. In my state of Minnesota today there are multiple listings of guns for sale by private sellers- presumably with no background check. In fact, this website called gunlistings.com makes it very easy to find gun ads in papers all over the country. Interestingly enough, there is advice for the buyer and the seller here:

For ensured safety when buying or selling your guns you should meet at a FFL dealer and conduct the transaction through the gun dealer. (transfer fees vary by dealer)

It is up to the buyer and seller to determine if transfering the gun through an FFL is required by law.
If you choose to conduct a transaction privately always meet in a public place!

Always consult federal, state, and local laws before conducting firearms transactions.

At least that advice was given. We have no idea if it’s taken. And we can see how easy it is to find guns for sale from private sellers.

Consider the reason we need a national law. Some states require background checks on all or most gun sales and some don’t. Naturally those who don’t want to go through a background check know where to go to get their guns. And when they are allowed to buy as many as they want, it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand what happens with those guns.

We need to finish the job started in 1993 and require all gun sales to go through Brady background checks. The Brady Campaign’s Finish The Job campaign asks you to sign a petition to send to Congress to pass the background check law they refused to pass after the horrific Sandy Hook school shooting. If we don’t pass this law, we are not doing our job to protect our communities from devastating gun violence. We also know that even this will not stop all shootings or all “bad guys” from getting guns. There are straw purchases, stolen guns, bad apple gun dealers and lots of trafficking. But it is one way to make us safer. Saving lives is what this is all about and if we can save lives, why wouldn’t we? And the bigger question is why the corporate gun lobby is so opposed to keeping guns out of the hands of the “bad guys” instead of a laser focus on arming who they believe to be the “good guys”.

It’s time for a change of conversation and a change to our gun las. We need action and we need those who support background checks to speak out and bring others with them. Lives depend on it. We are better than this as a country.

Of “Mad Men”, lapdogs, car dealers, gun giveaways and biker gang shoot-outs

May 19, 2015May 26, 2015 commongunsense"Mad Men", American gun culture, ASK campaign, biker gang shoot-out, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, conceal carry permit holders, corporate gun lobby, Dan Gross, gun give-aways, lapdogs for gun industry, mass shootings, Texas gun laws, Texas Open Carry

Texas bikers — Thanks to Parents Against Gun Violence

There is always so much to write about that it’s difficult to find the starting point. But I think I’ll start with the biker gang shoot-out in Waco, Texas on Sunday because the irony is so delicious. Let’s first take a look at who showed up at this massacre that took the lives of 9, left at least 18 injured and led to the arrest of 172 or so. You really can’t make this stuff up. From the article:

Open Carry advocates and bikers packed the State Capitol grounds in January in hopes of pushing for more lax gun laws. Among those bikers was Mike Lynch, who was also one of the culprits in the Waco bloodbath. (…)

Mike is one of the 172 bikers who were arrested after the carnage in Waco, leaving 9 dead and at least 18 injured.

In January, at least 2,000 bikers made their way to the State Capitol for a day of lobbying. Gun rights was at the top of their list of priorities, Fox 8 reported.

“They’re going to try to take our guns because some looney toon killed a bunch of people,” one biker said in January.

I can’t fit anymore irony in one sentence than that.

Lynch wrote on Facebook, “What a great day!” above a post referencing their attendance at the Texas Capitol.

So when we let the gun lobby and its’ minions write our gun laws, this is what we get- a lot of dead people in a massacre that most law enforcement said they have never seen in all of their years of working in the field. And it’s true that the gun lobby, whose interests are not that of even most gun owners, write the laws.

I love this statement about what happened in Waco from the Brady Campaign:

“Everything is big in Texas,” said Jonathan Hutson, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “Including big biker shootouts and even bigger loopholes that allow criminals and other dangerous people to buy guns without a Brady background check at gun shows and online”

Ah- the irony again. Now here was a group of mad men, for the perpetrators were mostly men. And mad they were- over some slight that allegedly happened in a restaurant bathroom and perhaps someone drove over someone’s foot in the parking lot? That’s enough to make you mad all right. But did people have to die over these petty arguments? The answer is, of course, NO. But when a gun, and in this case other weapons as well, are available, it’s easy to kill someone in an instant in an argument.

What I am saying is that guns are the most commonly used weapon in homicides. And this case was a prime example. Other weapons were used but the 9 who died apparently, from the information I have found, all died of gunshot injuries:

….“When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists,” Thompson wrote, “your chances of emerging unmaimed depend on the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools.” The addition of guns proved predictably deadly. But whose bullets killed whom and why?

As if on cue, the right wing is blaming law enforcement for the deaths. At this point we don’t know who killed whom. But it seems clear from several articles that the biker gangs had made some statements threatening to shoot police officers.

And as if to make the public, who mostly support common sense when it comes to gun laws– yes- even in Texas- madder, the Texas legislature is thinking about expanding gun rights to allow just about anyone to open carry their pistols and other guns and with a provision that prevents law enforcement from asking them for their permit to carry. Seems like a good idea, right? This is the gun culture we have, thanks to spineless politicians who care more about their campaign treasure chests and saluting to the corporate gun lobby than about common sense and actually doing something about the public safety they were elected to protect. This is the definition of mad men– meant broadly to include all legislators.

They are lapdogs to the gun lobby. Shame on all of them. Check out this Brady Campaign video for the satire and the truth about our politicians:

Sigh.

Closer to home, a local car dealer decided it would be a good idea to give pistols away in a promotion to get customers to buy cars. Great idea, right? What message does this send to the public? Why do we think giving away a deadly weapon should be a part of a business promotion? Some of my Facebook friends alerted me to the one page prominent ad in the local newspaper. This prompted quite a big discussion on Facebook and through e-mail about what we could do to express our concerns about such an ad.

Yesterday more than a few phone calls were made by concerned citizens to both the local newspaper and the local car dealer. We learned that the Pawn Shop that had apparently donated the guns for the promotion, is a licensed firearms dealer and will perform background checks on any person who walks away from the gun dealer with a gun. The problem is that there was no disclaimer to that effect in the ad as there should have been. We also learned that the both the newspaper personnel and the car dealer representatives to whom we spoke were quite adamant that a background check should be required. If that is the case and the importance of a Brady background check was expressed, one wonders why there is so much resistance to requiring all gun sales to have one? Calling attention to the fact that many gun sales go without background checks will help to change the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in our communities.

By coincidence, I took my car to my dealer for an oil change and some other maintenance yesterday where I spoke to one of the managers who I know. He said that this ad was the topic of their morning meeting. They were quite concerned about the lack of information about whether a background check would be required. Their other concern was for the bad message this sends to the public leaving them embarrassed for car dealers who have to sink to giving guns away to get business.

What is happening here is that the veritable “chickens are coming home to roost.” When we sit back and allow the insane and well funded single interest gun lobby groups to make our laws without thought to the consequences, we encourage such a cavalier attitude towards guns that when something happens like the Waco shooting, people are taken aback and proclaim surprise. When a car dealer gives gun away in a prominently placed ad in a local paper, some people just think it’s part of our culture and no big deal. Others, however, take notice and they don’t like it. The problem for this gun dealer here was that the ad was so large and the image of the two pistols so obvious that it called attention to itself. That is what they wanted but I don’t think the result is what they expected.

This is NOT the gun culture the general public wants. But it is the gun culture we have. It is also not the culture we have to accept. Things are changing.

Dan Gross, President of the Brady Campaign wrote this great piece yesterday about how changes to social mores occur over time and how we have learned to do a better job of protecting our children and our communities from hard, sometimes the hard way. From the article:

And then it struck me, what could be more inspiring than Mad Men? Not only as a great way to end a speech, but as a powerful demonstration of how much the world can change and how quickly that change can happen.

In less than a generation how many of the things we see on that show have gone from perfectly acceptable — even glamorous or sexy — to socially unconscionable? How many dangerous, reckless or harmful things that we used to do without second thought, are things we would not even consider doing now? (…)

The fact is, if we can just keep guns only out of the hands of people that every sane American believes should not have them in the first place, and inspire safe, responsible behavior around the dangers and risks of guns in the home, we can create extraordinary change.

But first, we have to stop talking about guns as a partisan political debate and start talking about gun deaths as the public health and safety issue that they are.

Don Draper famously said, “If you don’t like what’s being talked about, change the conversation.” That is precisely what we must do to address the problem of gun deaths and injuries in our nation. Just like all the other issues that have changed so dramatically in the generation since Mad Men, we have to start talking about solutions based on our common goals and values, like health, safety and freedom from fear.

Dan Gross is right. Gun violence is a public health and safety epidemic. Making that worse by passing looser gun laws rather than stronger laws has deadly results. Promoting gun giveaways for advertising promotions is just not a good idea given the increase in gun deaths and the obvious public health problem resulting from our cavalier and insane gun culture. We don’t have to accept the way things are. We can step up to make change and it can happen in small ways as well as large. The “Mad Men” culture isn’t the culture we have today, though some would say that the advertising culture prevalently featured in the popular series still exists in some ways. But luckily we know better about some things and people no longer openly smoke and drink in the work place or let kids play with plastic bags over their heads.

If local car dealers realize that they shouldn’t give guns away as a way to get people to buy cars, then change will happen. If Texas legislators are scrutinized for their own role in listening to the wrong people while making gun laws, then change will happen.

It is so obvious that something is terribly broken with our American gun culture. But why do we let it continue without making the changes we deserve? Ask your legislators to be responsible decision makers when it comes to public safety. Ask them to stop being lapdogs to an industry that sells deadly weapons without concern for public safety. Ask other parents if there are unsecured guns in homes where your children play. Ask businesses to think twice about allowing loaded guns in places where families gather. Ask questions when you aren’t sure a policy is going to actually keep children and families safe from devastating gun violence. Make phone calls, send e-mails, realize that laws matter and there are consequences to bad laws.

We can’t shrug our shoulders and just walk away thinking that nothing will change anyway so why bother. We can make a difference if we put our heads together for common sense.

Let’s get to work. It’s past time to challenge things that have become socially acceptable but are actually harmful and dangerous. Let’s do it before more harm is done. Lives are at stake and we are better than this.

Happy Anniversary Million Mom March

May 14, 2015May 13, 2015 commongunsenseASK campaign, bad apple gun dealers, Brady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, Donna Dees Thomases, Million Mom March

Today is the 15th anniversary of the Million Mom March. I have been writing about it and posting to Facebook pages about it. I want to share this video in the words of Donna Dees Thomases, founder of the Million Mom March, about why she decided to organize a march to end gun violence:

Donna was right. We weren’t doing enough to prevent the daily shooting incidents. When small children are attacked by a crazed gunman in a pre-school, something was ( and is) wrong with our American gun culture. Not long after the shooting incident at Granada Hills Jewish Community Center where young children were injured, the Columbine shooting happened. And then the shooting of 5 year old Kayla Rolland. They just kept coming and it was more than enough to get 750,000 plus Americans involved in one of the nation’s largest rallies on the Washington Mall.

We marched and we organized and we had hope. And then we learned that trying to break through the entrenched corporate gun culture was an uphill battle. We have had occasional victories, the latest of which is the passage of a new background check law in the state of Oregon.

We will continue working on passing stronger gun laws and countering the craziness of the corporate gun lobby. Why? Because lives depend on our staying the course and being there to get out the message that too many have died from gun violence and that we can save lives if we put our collective heads together to change the national conversation and tell the truth about the devastation of gun violence in our communities.

In another article about the anniversary, Donna and other advocates talk more about the movement and about plans for the future.

When I started this 15 years ago, 10 kids a day died from gunshot injuries. The number today is closer to 8. That is an improvement. But it’s not acceptable. What other public health epidemic gets treated like gun violence? It’s all about the fierce opposition of the corporate gun lobby and it’s bought and paid for politicians. That has not changed in the 15 years since the Million Mom March.

But never mind. We will continue working on safe storage, on getting parents to ASK if there is a gun where their children play and hang out, on laws to stop bad apple gun dealers from providing guns to dangerous people and to make sure all gun sales go through a Brady background check.

For this is the country most people want. It’s not what we have or deserve.

We are better than this.

Thanks to Donna Dees -Thomases and the many Million Mom March and Brady chapters all over the country for their devotion to this important cause. Thanks go to all of those politicians who have had the courage to speak up for common sense. Thanks to the physicians, lawyers, clergy, community activists, like minded groups, friends, families of victims and survivors for their willingness to support what we do. And thanks to those who have followed in our footsteps to make our country safer.

The gun nuts and nutty rhetoric and logic

May 12, 2015May 18, 2015 commongunsenseBrady background checks, Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence, conceal carry permit holders, conspiracy theories and guns, constitutional carry, constitutional Sheriffs, corporate gun lobby, George Zimmerman, gun nuts, guns and lawmakers, lapdog politicians, Million Mom March, Oregon gun laws, Stand Your Ground laws11 Comments

Oregon just passed a new law requiring background checks on all gun sales. This makes 7 states plus the District of Columbia having now required that all gun sales have background checks. It’s more than interesting to watch the gun nuts go all nutty about the idea that everyone now needs to go through a background check when purchasing a gun. These folks take it all personally as if the law was meant to punish them. Think about it. How could a law that requires Brady background checks,which most of these folks already undergo when purchasing their guns at federally licensed firearms dealers, punish them? What about the tired old mantra that we need to enforce the laws already on the books?- an excuse to stop progress towards safer communities. It’s backwards thinking promoted by the corporate gun lobby. Don’t believe them. This law will only stop people who shouldn’t be able to purchase guns from purchasing them anyway.

Gun nuts have been getting away with these talking points for many years. Apparently they don’t like laws that get in the way of unfettered access to guns. They want their guns with no hassle, no laws in the way.

The thing is, this nutty way of thinking allows felons, adjudicated mentally ill people, domestic abusers, and others who shouldn’t have guns to get them easily. The Million Mom March and Brady Chapters have been advocating for expanding Brady background checks for the last 15 years. Even after the horrific shooting of 20 first graders at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, the gun lobby stood in the way of common sense. Our Senators couldn’t even muster support for something that made so much sense and was a compromise piece of legislation, after spending time with the parents of the nation’s most horrific shooting. Shame on them all.

Other groups have joined the fray since May 14, 2000 increasing the number of people advocating openly and loudly for Brady background checks and other measures to keep our children and our communities safe from devastating gun violence. Most of these got involved after the shooting in Newtown because they, like the rest of us, were horrified that something like this could happen in our country. They are getting a dose of the gun lobby’s nuttiness that the rest of us have experienced for many years. They are also experiencing the fierce opposition to even the smallest measures to make us safer.

Together we are having an impact however. We welcome the new folks who have joined us in the fray. We already know that the general public and even gun owners and NRA members are with us. For at least 15 years, polling has been consistent about that. We also already know that some of our politicians have been cowed by the corporate gun lobby whose minions speak of gun confiscation and taking away rights if we just but pass small but reasonable measures to keep the majority safe.

What we need now is for the gun nuttery to be openly recognized. We can look to this recent article in the Washington Post about a “constitutional” Wisconsin Sheriff and his extreme nutty views about guns and gun violence for what the minority is thinking. His views are crazy and unsubstantiated but somehow he continues to be re-elected. Let’s take a look:

Less than 24 hours after Officers Benjamin J. Deen, 34, and Liquori Tate, 24, of the Hattiesburg Police Department were gunned down during a traffic stop, Milwakuee County Sheriff David A. Clarke linked the deaths to events in Ferguson, Mo., and said in a series of tweets that the president is to blame.

[Four suspects in custody after shooting deaths of two Mississippi police officers]

“Obama started this war on police intentionally,” Clarke wrote. “Right in line with his community agitating.”

Clarke, a conservative folk hero who has predicted that a second American revolution will be fought over gun rights, is a regular Fox News guest with55,000 followers on Twitter. In 2013, he ran radio ads telling people to fight back against violent criminals instead of relying on 911, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

America’s 1st Freedom, an NRA publication, has called the outspoken Clarke “NRA’s Favorite Sheriff.” Earlier this year, he was presented with the Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Right then. The NRA leaders love this guy. He is a perfect foil for their extreme views about the world. And he is encouraging people to protect themselves from all of those violent criminals out there waiting to get them rather than to rely on his very own services as a Sheriff. You really can’t make this stuff up. From this article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. set off alarm bells Friday with a radio spot some view as a call for citizens to arm themselves.

In the radio ad, Clarke tells residents personal safety isn’t a spectator sport anymore, and that “I need you in the game.”

“With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option,” Clarke intones.

“You could beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back.”

Clarke urges listeners to take a firearm safety course and handle a firearm “so you can defend yourself until we get there.”

“You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. We’re partners now. Can I count on you?”

The thing is, what Clarke says is simply not true. Continue reading the article. This is the fear and paranoia that the corporate gun lobby needs in order to stay in business. It’s what we in the world of gun violence prevention movement have been fighting against. The fact that our politicians have been duped into believing this nutty rhetoric should be alarming and a lesson for why we need to keep working to advocate for what we know is right.

The gun lobby has actually become more nutty in the 15 years since I have been involved. They have gained ground by weakening gun laws all over the country claiming that any law to strengthen our safety is a violation of their rights. Their other specious claim is that any stronger gun law punishes their own. That, of course, is not true and ridiculous but they manage to get away with it because of our own lawmakers’ lack of backbone when it comees to challenging this “logic”. Here are just a few of the inane efforts to deceive gun owners, the public and lawmakers:

George Zimmerman made the news again. This time, he was on the other end of a gun nut who shot at him in a claimed road rage incident in Florida. The shooter has been in other disputes with Zimmerman and claimed “self defense.” Ha! You just can’t make this stuff up. It’s just plain nuts that Zimmerman was not held legally accountable for the death of an innocent Black teen-ager and even nuttier that he is out and about causing more trouble.

How many more incidents should be tolerated for the man who has already killed another human being? This is the 4th one since he killed Trayvon Martin. Some people should not have guns and yes, they should lose their gun rights. This is a guy who is the poster child for what can go wrong in our twisted and dangerous gun culture. We don’t need Stand Your Ground laws so people like Zimmerman can walk away from a murder. We don’t need guns everywhere carried by anyone.

Maine’s Governor, along with 5 others, signed on to an amicus brief to attempt to repeal California’s strong conceal/carry law- claiming punishment for gun owners. Nuts.

The NRA’s own Wayne LaPierre is lying again- using a false conspiracy theory claiming that President Obama is out to ban all ammunition sales. He’s wrong but never mind. Nuts.

The Tennessee Governor signed a law also similar to one signed in Indiana to interfere with federal gun regulations because, you know, states shouldn’t follow federal law. How this benefits gun owners and law abiding citizens is not spelled out. It will actually benefit the felons and others who should not have guns. My theory is that this is on purpose so when felons have more guns, the gun lobby can hysterically cry that more citizens need their guns for self protection against the felons with guns. It’s nuts. What could possibly go wrong?

And in a cynical attempt to roll back “knife rights” the NRA is involved in legislative measures to allow possession of more dangerous knives for “law abiding” citizens. Nuts. From the article:

“I don’t see knives posing that big of a danger to the public,” Representative Harold Dutton Jr., who sponsored the bill, said in an interview. “Now that we’re going to let everybody have a gun, I think we ought to set knives free.”

This twisted “logic” is actually more nutty than we think. The gun nuts like to argue that knives take more lives than guns. They are wrong of course and it can be easily proven. The claim is that knives kill more people than long guns. That would be true. But total gun homicides in this FBI report from 2011 were 8523 compared to total knife homicides of 1694.

Here’s my theory. If we allow more dangerous knives we will certainly have a rise in deaths from knives. Then the gun lobby can say that knives are just as lethal as guns so what’s the problem?

The thing is, these measures increase the likelihood of deaths and injuries to innocent people all over our country. It’s just plain nuts.

We are better than this. But arguing with nuts is just nuts. It isn’t worth the argument. The problem is that our legislators refuse to use logic and get cowed by the nuts. They are bullied into taking positions counter to public health and safety. And what we will surely see is an increase in deaths and injuries. In states with strong gun laws and fewer guns, there are fewer gun deaths. The same is true in most other civilized, developed democratized countries not at war. We have the proof. We just need our elected leaders to speak the truth and not be afraid of the nuts.

Isn’t it past time to speak the truth and get on with ways to save lives? Why are the gun nuts winning the argument with our elected leaders? They shouldn’t be. If you believe, like most Americans do, that too many of our leaders are lapdogs for the gun lobby, please let them know how you feel. Also please join a group working on preventing gun violence. As we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Million Mom March, I see a strong and committed group of Americans who are not going away. We are stronger than ever and we will call out the nutty gun logic so we can base policy on facts.

UPDATE:

I found this article that was written along the same theme that I wrote about in this post. That would be that the gun lobby’s fueling of fear and paranoia is a vicious circle. When the fear causes more guns and more guns cause fear, we have a serious problem. We are not talking about just any consumer product. We are talking about deadly weapons designed to kill people. From the article:

The gun rights movement warns of a society riddled with pervasive threats—increasingly, they come from police officers, or their absence, or their recklessness. And the NRA gets its way: there are more guns on our streets than ever. This in turn makes the job of policing that much harder—and the possibility of police violence more frequent. Perhaps police might retreat from criminal encounters, which increasingly risk turning out badly—where someone dies, or they are charged with a crime. Either way, the gun rights movement will bellow that we need still more guns and more armed citizens. Despairing in the face of criminal and police violence, African Americans appear to be joining this view.

We are mired in a classic negative feedback loop. The gun rights movement is good at making its predictions come true. It bemoans a society delivered unto violence, coming from every corner, and will make sure of that.

This is more than nutty. It’s dangerous and unacceptable. I know we can do better.

UPDATE:

I am going to update this post both as another example of the nuttiness and stupidity of the gun nuts and in response to a comment made that I shouldn’t call all hard core gun guys nutty. This is the new mantra from the NRA who do say they represent about 4 million members, more or less- Hillary Clinton is now going to take away the guns that Barack Obama didn’t manage to get his cold dead hands on. From the article:

The NRA then baselessly links this non-existent firearm registry scheme to gun confiscation, declaring, “Gun registration has been considered the holy grail — the queen on the chessboard and the key to the kingdom — by every gun-ban group, every genocidal regime and every would-be tyrant around the world since King George sent his redcoats to seize the colonists’ arms at Lexington and Concord. That’s not hyperbole. It’s history.”

The article concludes, “Hillary Clinton’s apparent ultimate aim is as direct and undeviating as an argon laser: ‘Universal’ background checks … which depend on universal gun registration … which inevitably, invariably, leads to gun confiscation.”

So we will now be hearing this for the upcoming election cycle because the NRA’s leaders have to find a way to gin up the fear and paranoia to make sure to protect gun sales and the industry. It’s just plain nuts. The worst of it is that so many people believe it. I suppose they didn’t notice that President Obama did not actually manage to get their guns. Never mind the facts and common sense.

Million Mom March, moms and guns

May 10, 2015May 10, 2015 commongunsenseASK campaign, Brady background checks, corporate gun lobby, domestic shootings, kids and guns, Million Mom March, Mother's Day, public support for background checks, safe gun storage, women and guns, women in political office

Did you get your mother a gun for Mother’s Day? If not you can enter a gun give-away contest at the NRA website to make sure someone special to you has a gun for self defense on this special day. Perhaps someone is lurking outside of the restaurant where you will take your mother for brunch. Or maybe at church? Or at the park where you go for a picnic? Or maybe a mother in your life needs her gun while shopping? Remember this young mother who lost her life senselessly when her 2 year old sone found a loaded gun in her purse and “accidentally” discharged the gun? She died.

Would your mother really prefer a gun to flowers on Mother’s Day?

This is a wrong headed idea but the corporate gun lobby has no common sense when it comes to profits over safety. Women are more at risk for their lives in homes where there are guns than in homes without guns. Domestic disputes too often turn deadly when a gun is available. As a result, too many children are without their mothers on this day and too many mothers are also without their children as a result of deadly and avoidable gun violence. From the linked article:

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, has argued that firearms are a great equalizer between the sexes. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee last year, he declared, “The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun.” But the empirical reality of firearm ownership reflects anything but equality, particularly when it comes to intimate partner violence. Such fights become much more frequent and lethal when firearms are involved, and the violence is nearly unidirectional, inflicted by males upon females. This relationship holds true not only across the United States, but around the world.

Don’t buy your mother a gun today.

The gun lobby needs to promote gun ownership among women, and even children, because fewer homes report owning guns and gun ownership is mostly among older white males living in rural America. But I digress.

Mother’s Day has become a profit maker for greeting card companies, florists, retailers and others. But the annual commemoration is not about that:

The earliest iterations of Mother’s Day in the U.S. were organized for several reasons, but celebrating mothers wasn’t among them. U.S. women’s groups in the late 1800s came together in West Virginia to tackle everything from infant mortality to disease and milk contamination. In 1870, a composer by the name of Julia Ward Howe issued a “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” urging women to become politically active and to promote peace following the U.S. Civil War, according toNational Geographic.

And that is what mothers have been doing ever since- promoting peace, promoting safety for children, promoting public health and safety. Women are politically active but their voices are too often drowned out by a power structure that has not included women in leadership roles where they can make a difference. That is changing but not enough. Women in politics will be key to getting policy changes in the best interest of women, children and families.

15 years ago on Mother’s Day of 2000, which fell on May 14th that year, 750,000 mothers and others marched for sanity and common sense concerning gun violence. I was one of those who attended the Million Mom March and came away a changed person. I found my voice. Eight years after my sister was shot and killed in a domestic shooting, I found a way to talk about it and a way to tell my story. I also found that I was not alone. Unforgettable at the March were the many people carrying posters or wearing tee shirts or hats with photos of a loved one lost to a bullet.

Over the years, as I got involved with the issue of gun violence prevention, I became acquainted with many victims and survivors nation-wide who are my friends to this day. We are in a club that we didn’t want to join. Some of them are moms who have lost children so Mother’s Day is difficult and a sad reminder that our nation is awash in guns and gun violence. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Moms are a force. Don’t mess with a mom who has lost someone to a violent and sudden death. 15 years after the first march against gun violence mothers are still marching. Yesterday hundreds marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, including many gun violence prevention groups, to show support for common sense. There were marchers from the Million Mom March and Brady Campaign chapters, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Moms Demand Action and others in a show of unity to demand that our elected leaders stand up for the victims and survivors instead of the gun lobby.

My sister experienced the tragic loss of a young toddler in a drowning death at the lake behind their home. She never really got over the loss of her only daughter, who was a year older than my own. My daughter had a special relationship with my sister because of this loss. And yes, I also know that drownings are the cause of more deaths than shootings in very young children. But with the increase in the number of young children “accidentally” shooting themselves or others, that may change. As more data hopefully becomes available, we will know more about what causes death in young children. Mothers should not lose their children no matter to what cause. My mother, of course, lost her oldest daughter to a domestic shooting.

Today, I know that a gun did not make my sister safer from a domestic shooting. My sister never got to see her oldest son get married or to hold her grandchildren. She wasn’t in attendance at the weddings of my own children but was remembered lovingly at these occasions. I do what I do because of her and because of the many women who have lost their lives to a bullet.

The thing is, my sister is your sister. Just because this hasn’t happened in your family doesn’t mean it won’t. That is why it is so important to be involved in the movement to change the conversation about guns and the role they play in so much devastation to families all over America. Gun deaths and injuries happen in every neighborhood, to any age group, to any economic category, to any gender, to any and all races and usually in unexpected ways. Every one of us can be affected.

So what do we mothers who continue to march want?

We want people to know that if they choose to own guns, they should also choose to understand that those guns are a risk to themselves and others in the home.

We want mothers ( and others) to practice responsible gun ownership. Guns should be locked securely unloaded and separate from ammunition.

We want mothers ( and fathers) to ASK if there are guns in the homes where their children play and hang out.

We want mothers ( and others) to continue to advocate for background checks for all gun sales. In states where that has happened, women (and others) are safer from shootings.

We want domestic abusers to have fewer guns, not more guns. Some states , including my own state of Minnesota, have passed laws to make sure the guns of domestic abusers are required to be removed from them before they are used to kill a domestic partner.

We want mothers and women to run for political office and raise the issue of gun safety reform and then get the job done to make our communities safer.

We want mothers ( and others) to get involved and stay involved to change the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence. We can make safer communities for our families if we continue to march and continue to advocate for common sense.

We want mothers ( and others) to be loud and clear with elected leaders that the majority of Americans want stronger gun laws, not looser laws.

Happy Mother’s Day. Keep marching.

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Blogging for gun safety reform and changing the conversation about the role of guns and gun violence in our communities. Common sense gun laws and gun safety reform and gun rights are not mutually exclusive.

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