Gun Guys (52 page)

But not all Americans are necessarily equal. Writing in
American Psychologist in
April 1993, Richard E. Nisbett of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan argued in
Violence and U.S. Culture
that guns aren’t the best predictor of violence; white Southerners are. “There is a marked difference in White homicide rates between regions of the United States, such that homicide is more common in the South and in regions of the country initially settled by Southerners.” And it’s not that the South was poorer than other regions, either. “Although differences in poverty are associated with higher homicide rates, regional differences in homicide are by no means completely explained by poverty, because Southernness remains a predictor of homicide even when poverty differences between regions are taken into account.” Why were Southerners more violent? They “are more likely to endorse violence as an appropriate response to insults, as a means of self-protection, and as a socialization tool in training children,” Nisbett wrote.

The Anti-Defamation League had no use for Aaron Zelman or Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. In “Revolution and Reality: A Transcript and Analysis of Mark Koernke’s ‘Time is Running Out,’ ” published as part of ADL’s
Militia Watchdog
series in 1998, it backhanded JPFO as a “small extremist group.” JPFO, the ADL wrote, a “radical pro-gun group, which ironically consists of mostly
non-Jews, shrilly makes the (unsupportable) claim that the Holocaust was caused by gun control.”

The term “Hogzilla” refers to a giant pig that may or may not have been a hoax. Certain subjects are perfect for research on Wikipedia, and this seems one of them. This is what Wikipedia says:

A story about the question of whether to allow hunters to cull the elk herd in Rocky Mountain National Park or to have rangers do the job ran on
ABCNews.com
as “Officials Consider Ways to Cull Wildlife,” by Jim Avila, August 26, 2006.

The data on children shooting themselves and each other, the rising rate of teenage suicide, and the methods by which teenagers attempted suicide all come from charts generated on the CDC’s WISQARS website and also from
Protect Children, Not Guns 2010
, published by the Children’s Defense Fund.

In their article “Prevalence of Household Firearms and Firearm-Storage Practice in the 50 States and the District of Columbia: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2002,” in
Pediatrics
, vol. 116, no. 3 (2005): e370–e376,
Catherine A. Okoro et al. wrote that two million American homes have loaded guns lying around unlocked. Similarly, a group of CDC researchers found in 1996 that about one in ten Oregon adults lived in a home that always or sometimes contained a loaded and unsecured gun (“Population Estimates of Household Firearm Storage Practices and Firearm Carrying in Oregon,” by David Nelson, Joyce A. Grant-Worley, Kenneth Powell, James Mercy, and Deborah Holtzman of the CDC, published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, vol. 275, no. 22, June 12, 1996).

Even the Department of Homeland Security can’t keep track of its guns.
Washington Post
reporter Spencer S. Hsu wrote on February 18, 2010, in “Report Tracks Lost Firearms at DHS,” that DHS agents had lost 289 handguns, shotguns, and automatic rifles between 2005 and 2008. Some were left on car trunks, others in restaurant or bowling alley restrooms and in clothing-store fitting rooms.

The study of felons and their firearms was published in 1986 as
Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms
, by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi. It makes terrific reading. The half a million annual missing guns comes from a fact sheet issued by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, undated.

The story about the Pennsylvania legislature on
this page
was reported in “Municipalities May Be Forced to Rescind ‘Missing Gun’ Reporting Laws,” by Linda Finarelli in
Montgomery News
, February 24, 2012. The seven states that required gun owners to report stolen guns to police were Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island, according to
Regulating Guns in America: An Evaluation and Comparative Analysis of Federal, State, and Selected Local Gun Laws
(Legal Community Against Violence, February 2008).

That twenty-three states had some form of “stand your ground” law comes from a
ProPublica
article, “The 23 States That Have Sweeping Self-Defense Laws Just Like Florida’s,” by Cara Currier, published on March 22, 2012. Those states were Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia.

A gunfight is an imprecise enterprise. As reported in “A Hail of Bullets, a Heap of Uncertainty,” by Al Baker, in
The New York Times
, December 9, 2007, New York City Police who fired at a person in the line of duty in 2006 hit their target only
28.4 percent of the time. But that was an improvement over 2005, when their hit rate was 17.4 percent. Los Angeles Police officers hit their targets 40 percent of the time, “which, while better than New York’s, still shows that they miss targets more often than they hit them.”

According to the Legal Community Against Violence, which advocates for tougher gun laws, state and local governments from New York to Hawaii, in addition to Chicago and Washington, D.C., were, as of April 2, 2012, facing forty-four “significant” lawsuits challenging gun laws after
Heller
and
McDonald
. Readers are directed to LCAV’s
Post-Heller Litigation Summary
.

Guncite.com
is a website devoted to constitutional rights, particularly the Second Amendment. Its home page states, “Until the Second Amendment is treated as normal constitutional law, this web site will always be under construction …” So as a gun-guy ally, it is to Guncite’s credit that it maintains a page devoted to “Bogus Quotes Attributed to the Founders,” usually bogus quotes that would support the gun-guy position. The bogus quotes on pages 256 and 257 come from Guncite.

That the NRA is not a particularly big lobby comes from “What Sort of Lobby Is the NRA?” by Timothy P. Carney in the January 13, 2011, edition of
The Washington Examiner
. The statement on
this page
that support for gun control had fallen below 50 percent comes from a Gallup report on November 26, 2010, “In U.S., Continuing Record-Low Support for Stricter Gun Control.”

My assertion on
this page
that it was almost impossible to prove that the measures we thought of as “gun control” saved any lives is obviously a contested issue. In addition to the “Firearms Laws” article in the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
, I relied upon
First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws
, published by the CDC in October 2003. The CDC evaluated fifty-one studies on everything from the effectiveness of gun bans to laws requiring gun locks. On banning types of guns or ammunition: “Certain studies indicated decreases in violence associated with bans, and others indicated increases.” On laws restricting who can get a gun: “some studies indicated decreases in violence associated with restrictions, and others indicated increases.” On waiting periods: “some indicated a decrease in violent outcome associated with the delay and others indicated an increase.” On registration, shall-issue concealed-carry, child-access-prevention laws, and zero-tolerance gun policies in schools, the studies were either too few or poorly designed, so no conclusions could be reached.

That researchers kept finding that studies were inadequate for evaluating the
effectiveness of firearms laws may not have been entirely the blame of those who conducted the studies. Michael Luo of
The New York Times
made a compelling case that the NRA unduly influences how research on gun violence is conducted and funded, in “N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say,” January 25, 2011.

And some studies have indeed shown links between guns and violence. Handguns bigger than .32 caliber seemed to be associated with higher homicide rates in Dallas from 1980 to 1992, for example, but whether those weapons were semiautomatic or not seemed to make no difference, according to Christopher Koper of the Crime Control Institute, who published the study “Gun Density Versus Gun Type: Did the Availability of More Lethal Guns Drive Up the Dallas Homicide Rate 1980–1992?” (final revised report submitted to the Firearms and Violence Program, National Institute of Justice, 1997).

The Canadian Parliament’s canceling of the country’s long-gun registry was reported as “Long-Gun Registry Scrapped,” by
CTV.ca
, on October 25, 2011.

When I write on
this page
that crime fell after the Brady Law but it was already falling before, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports make that clear. Two of my favorite gun-crime researchers drilled more deeply into the question, though, in 2000. Jens Ludwig of Georgetown and Philip J. Cook of Duke, whom I’ve never met, are among the very few researchers on the gun/crime nexus who don’t seem to come at the question with preconceived ideas, and are equally willing to gore oxen on both sides. Writing in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
’s August 2, 2000, issue, they examined data from the National Center for Health Statistics and concluded that the Brady Act seemed to be associated with a reduction in suicide among people fifty-five or older, but that it had no effect on homicide rates. That their article appeared in
JAMA
is significant. Many people have attempted to discuss guns as a public health issue, as Arthur Kellerman did in the
New England Journal of Medicine
article described in the notes to chapter two. But Abigail Kohn, in her terrific book
Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures
, makes a strong argument that the public health approach when it comes to guns is suspect. I quote her here at length because the gun-control argument so often relies on the rhetoric of public health.

The public-health approach to gun violence is particularly toxic, she writes, because it both blinds the anti-gun camp and needlessly inflames gun guys.

The Warren Cassidy quote on
this page
appeared in
Under Fire
, by Richard Lacayo, in
Time
, June 24, 2001.

More about the deadliness of the assault rifle: In 2010, the Brady Center published a list: “Examples of Assault Weapon Violence Reported Since Ban Expired in 2004.” The list included 410 incidents, some of which—like the September 15, 2007, birthday party in New Orleans, where twenty-eight bullets were fired from an AK-47, killing one man and wounding three children—were horrifying. But a closer examination of the list showed that several of the incidents were accidents; several more were suicides; and twenty-five involved the popular Chinese military rifle called the SKS, which held only ten rounds, had no pistol grip, barrel shroud, or collapsible stock, and was an “assault rifle” under the law only because it had a bayonet—not a widely used murder weapon. Of the 410 incidents, only thirty-nine involved more than ten bullets being fired. Ten was the maximum size of a gun’s magazine under the Clinton-era assault-rifle ban. Even if one adds in the seven others that mentioned “spraying” bullets, in only forty-six of the incidents that “involved” assault rifles was the fact that the weapon involved was an assault rifle relevant. The rest of the shootings could have been done with any gun. Forty-six incidents in five years and three months is, undeniably, forty-six tragedies. But nobody at Brady seemed to be asking whether it was worth cleaving the country down the middle yet again to prevent them.