The Last Gun (35 page)

America's failed approach to gun death and injury has been the exact opposite of what has been proven to save lives in hundreds of other fields. Data and information have been shut down. Driven by ideology, triangulation, and flatly misinformed opinion, attention remains focused on “bad people” and exaggerated “rights,” not on the greed of the gun industry and on the reckless features of its militarized products—guns that hitherto “good people” use dozens of time a day to kill each other and themselves. The result is that, although more than 90 percent of American households own a car,
²⁷
and fewer than a third of
American households contain a gun,
²⁸
the year-by-year trends of deaths nationwide from these two consumer products are on a trajectory to intersect.

These trends will be encouraged for the worse as the gun industry and the NRA—with the compliant support of many state legislatures—continue to weaken gun control laws in order to hype markets for their deadly products. The reason for the gun industry's frantic efforts is the handwriting that they have seen on the wall. Not only is gun ownership declining in America, it is in free fall among younger cohorts. In the 1970s, approximately 45 percent of respondents under thirty years of age reported that their household owned a gun. Recent surveys have shown that number now to be below 20 percent, a decline of more than half.
²⁹
As one author observed:

Barring a wholesale return to rural living or a boom in hunting, it seems unlikely that this trend will reverse. Demographic diversity will also likely contribute to a continued decline in gun ownership. White males own guns at higher rates than members of other groups, while gun ownership among African-Americans is lower, and ownership among Latinos and Asians is lower still. Every projection by demographers shows whites declining as a
proportion of the American population in the next few decades, and Latinos are now the country's largest and fastest-growing minority group. These factors will likely produce a continued, if not accelerated, decline in gun ownership.
³⁰

Figure 12. Firearm and Motor Vehicle Deaths 1999 through 2010

But there is no reason to simply wait for demographics to erase the American gun industry. Hundreds of thousands of lives are literally at stake if we do nothing while the gun industry strikes out more and more dangerously, like a wounded rattlesnake in its final throes. There are a number of specific things that can and ought to be done by all Americans who want to see gun violence drastically diminished—and specific groups like activists in all progressive causes, policy makers, the media, foundations, and public health practitioners:

1. Stop accepting excuses from politicians
. Americans who care about gun violence need first to take back control of this issue from those politicians who refuse to act forcefully. Politicians who are leaders on gun violence prevention are the exception, not the norm—despite the effects guns have on citizens in every state in the nation. The NRA and the gun industry control this issue because the majority of politicians we elect (and reelect) let them control it. The cries of the victims of gun violence are muffled by poll-driven positions and the comfort of accepted political wisdom of those ensconced in their golden triangle.

The degree to which the gun lobby can control the political debate was starkly illustrated in August 2009 at a White House press conference. During that month, a spate of armed protestors began showing up at presidential events. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a man with a gun strapped to his leg stood outside a town hall meeting with a sign reading, “It's time to water the tree of liberty”
³¹
The reference was to a letter in which Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural
manure.”
³²
In Phoenix, Arizona, about a dozen people carrying guns, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle, milled around among protesters outside the convention center, where the president was giving a speech. A spokesman for the Secret Service admitted that incidents of firearms being carried outside presidential events were a “relatively new phenomenon,” but insisted that the president's safety was not being jeopardized.
³³

But, one might fairly have asked, what about the safety of other ordinary citizens who aren't carrying guns and don't want to carry guns? What about their rights, and their preferences? What about the intimidation inherent in the open display of guns at political events by people who are, to put it mildly, clearly angry? What will be the effect of this precedent on future presidents—and other public figures? What about the possibility of people showing up with more advanced firepower—such as freely available 50 caliber antiarmor sniper rifles?

When asked about these events, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spoke only to the parochial interests of gun enthusiasts, saying merely that people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. “There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally,” he said. “Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality.”
³⁴
But as the commentator E.J. Dionne incisively observed at the time, Gibbs's technical response missed the bigger point. “Gibbs made you think of the old line about the liberal who is so open-minded he can't even take his own side in an argument. What needs to be addressed is not the legal question but the message that the gun-toters are sending.”
³⁵

It was a “teachable moment.” But instead of using these events as an opportunity to speak out about “the message that the gun-toters are sending,” Gibbs's meek response only validated their threatening actions, further empowering them. Americans must demand that such appeasement of the gun industry and extremist gun enthusiasts end.

2. Demand an end to the lockdown on gun and gun violence
data, and insist on the creation of comprehensive databases and open information about guns and gun violence
.
Chapter 7
demonstrated how the gun industry and its accomplices in Washington have locked down data and information about guns and gun violence. But data and information are essential to the public health approach, to assessing which policies work to reduce death and injury and which do not. It is fundamental to understanding virtually every firearm-related issue—including the effects of concealed-carry and shoot-first laws, the role of assault weapons, traffic in guns abroad, the effects of guns in the home, and more.

Americans, including activists and especially including policy makers, need to understand that the true reason behind this information lockdown is simply and completely protecting the gun industry from accountability for its depredations. The shameful argument that withholding tracing data protects law enforcement officers and the integrity of investigations is plainly fraudulent.

All of the so-called Tiahrt restrictions on crime-gun data should be ended. But much more needs to be done. The federal government should create a comprehensive reporting system—preferably separate from the weak and compromised ATF—that gathers and integrates in one system data about every aspect of firearms and their use in America. Public health analysts, policymakers, and ordinary citizens should be able to find out as much about the trends in gun violence as that which is freely available today about trends in tire blowouts, baby stroller design, tainted foodstuffs, and virtually every item of consumer usage. The industry will argue that such a database would make it possible to compile the wholly imaginary but nonetheless dreaded “national list of gun owners,” a supposed prelude to “confiscation.” This argument is an extension of paranoia beyond all reason but an excellent fund-raiser for the NRA and others who trade in fear, loathing, and paranoia. If the argument must be taken seriously, it would not be at all difficult to craft a system of data collection and retrieval that would yield the necessary data without including any details of individual ownership.

In the meantime, local activists should aggressively find and pursue sources of data about guns and gun violence in their communities and states, compile it as best they can, and regularly make the information available to the news media in creative reports. These sources include public information such as state Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) data, information from states that participate in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) and other statewide information-gathering systems, medical examiners' records, police and court records, legislative hearings, and local government action. This also includes developing personal contacts with people in the community whose work brings them into contact with incidents of gun violence.

3. Understand that gun violence is not “someone else's” issue.
Gun violence is not an issue just for gun violence prevention activists. Gun violence affects virtually every community—socioeconomic, racial, ethnic—in America, not to mention workplaces, schools, shopping centers, and children's soccer games. Moreover, the gun lobby and gun industry are supported by the agenda of a well-funded, well-organized rightwing coalition. Groups and people who work on the progressive side of issues of domestic violence, school safety, youth violence, and drug abuse, for example, or who work in minority communities should understand that the gun industry, guns, and faux “gun rights” are the ultimate drivers of many of the problems they face. It is their issue too. What is needed is a much grander, better-informed, and better-funded coalition.

Funders—from the largest foundations to the smallest individual donors—and policy makers need to understand that these issues cannot be walled off from each other. For example, guns from the United States empower the criminal organizations in Latin America that produce most of the drugs sold on our streets. Guns empower the organized gangs that sell these drugs at retail in the United States. And guns are often used in the domestic violence that breeds in families and communities shattered by drug abuse.

4. Learn about guns and the gun industry
. Gun control may be one of the few issues in America in which all opinions, no matter how under- or misinformed, are given equal weight. Few things are as disheartening as listening to a longtime advocate or well-intentioned policy maker talk about guns and the gun industry in a way that makes it clear that she or he has not done the homework. Expounding on assault weapons, for example, without understanding the specific design features that distinguish them from sporting rifles (or fully automatic machine guns) and make them so dangerous does more harm than good.

And yet there is nothing all that complicated about how guns work or how the industry operates. It's not rocket science. Those who want to be involved in this issue should educate themselves about the underlying facts before expounding on solutions. The Violence Policy Center (
vpc.org
) and other organizations, as well as leading researchers, have posted dozens of monographs online that explain in detail virtually every issue in gun control. These reports and studies contain voluminous notes about the sources on which they are based. They are nothing less than a free university for advocates.

A corollary to this is “know your enemy.” Join the National Rifle Association and read their magazines if you plan to become an advocate. Just as most Americans have no idea what the gun industry has turned into, few understand what today's NRA represents. The conspiracy theories and venom that reside between the covers of its activist publication,
America's 1st Freedom
, would leave most Americans torn between laughing and crying. I hope they'd get angry and take action.

5. Look upstream for gun violence prevention measures
. Once vehicle safety advocates stopped trying to reform people and started looking at the actual designs of vehicles and roads, enormous strides were made in saving lives and preventing injuries. This is precisely what needs to be done to turn around America's gun violence problem. We need to prevent injury before
it happens. To do that, we need to look upstream at the gun industry, its products, and how they are distributed.

Policy makers need, for example, to look at what impact the designs of specific guns have on their use. What, for example, is the effect on death and injury of the proliferation of higher-caliber handguns in smaller sizes? This cannot be divined from the gun industry's or the NRA's self-serving assertions. If the gun industry insists on calling semiautomatic assault rifles “modern sporting rifles,” let them. But collect detailed data about make, model, and caliber of guns—their sales and their use in crime and other forms of gun violence. A database that includes all the details of incidents of gun violence—similar to databases on contaminated drugs, automobile crashes, and injuries from defective children's furniture—would yield invaluable information, no matter what label the industry chooses to use in its marketing programs. The gun industry's marketing and distribution programs, coupled with the increasingly lax laws about access to guns, are the equivalent of the badly designed, dangerous, and poorly marked roads before the advent of the vehicle safety public health approach. The crazy-quilt system that currently purports to regulate the manufacture, import (and smuggling) into and out of America, and sale or transfer of guns within America is clearly ineffective. It benefits no one but the gun industry.