Right Wing Denial and Too-Frequent Liberal Silliness Prevent Clear Talk — about Reducing Gun Violence within the Confines of the Second Amendment

© 2012 Peter Free

 

24 July 2012

 

 

I had intended to stay quiet about the Aurora shootings, but —

 

The too often vacuous chatter that James Holmes’ vicious deed aroused — from kneejerk liberals and gun crazies, both — might benefit from the injection of a couple of more realistic points.

 

 

The problematic truth is that Americans embrace violence

 

The most basic question is whether some aspects of this might be rationally legitimate.

 

Gun homicides kill about 11,000 people in the United States each year.  Gun suicides kill 19,000.  Most “sensible” nations would consider the combined gun deaths of 30,000 people to constitute a significant public health issue.  But not so America.

 

Culturally, we are a historically violent group.  And apparently proud of it.

 

This truth is reflected not only in our mostly unregulated gun sector (and its current emphasis on allowing almost anybody to carry a concealed firearm) — but in all the wars we start, ostensibly so as to make the world a “safer” place.

 

Before assessing whether these American character traits are rationally based, let’s look at domestic gun death data.

 

 

American gun deaths

 

The following comes from the Mercer University School of Medicine’s summary of U.S. government and United Nations information:

 

In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death:

 

Suicide 19,308;

Homicide 11,015;

Accident 600.

 

This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S.

 

The number of firearms-related injuries in the U.S., both fatal and non-fatal, increased through 1993, declined to 1999, and has remained relatively constant since.

 

However, firearms injuries remain a leading cause of death in the U.S., particularly among youth (CDC, 2001) (Sherry et al, 2012).

 

The rates of firearms deaths in the U.S. vary significantly by race and sex. The U.S. national average was 10.2 deaths per 100,000 population in 2009.

 

The highest rate was 28.4/100,000 for African-American males, more than quadruple the rate of 6.3/100,000 for white males. (CDC, 2009).

 

A study of firearm deaths in high income countries:

 

Australia,

Austria,

Canada,

Czech Republic,

Finland,

France,

Germany,

Hungary,

Iceland,

Italy,

Japan,

Luxembourg,

Netherlands,

New Zealand,

Norway,

Portugal,

Slovakia,

Spain,

Sweden,

United Kingdom (England and Wales),

United Kingdom (Northern Ireland),

United Kingdom (Scotland),

and

the United States

 

was conducted with data from the World Health Organization assembled by the WHO from the official national statistics of each individual country from 2003 (Richardson and Hemenway, 2011).

 

The total population for:

 

the United States for 2003 was 290.8 million

while the combined population for the other 22 countries was 563.5 million.

 

There were 29,771 firearm deaths in the US

and

7,653 firearm deaths in the 22 other countries.

 

Of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003,

80% occurred in the US.

 

In the US:

 

the overall firearm death rate was 10.2 per 100,000,

the overall firearm homicide rate 4.1 per 100,000,

and the overall homicide rate 6.0 per 100,000,

with firearm homicide rates highest persons 15 to 24 years of age.

 

For the US the overall suicide rate was 10.8 per 100,000, and slightly over half of these deaths were firearm suicide (5.8 per 100,000). Firearm suicides rates increased with age.

 

In the other high income countries 2003:

 

the overall firearm death rate was 1.4 per 100,000,

the overall firearm homicide rate 0.2 per 100,000,

and the overall homicide rate 0.9 per 100,000.

 

Firearm homicide rates were highest in the 25 year old to 34 year old age group. The overall suicide rate was 14.9 per 100,000 with a[n] overall firearm suicide rate of 1.0 per 100,000.

 

© 2012 The Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education, Firearms Tutorial: Gun Control Issues, Public Health, and Safety, Mercer University School of Medicine – Savannah (hosted by the University of Utah Eccles Health Sciences Library) (visited 24 July 2012) (paragraphs split and reformatted)

 

 

These facts demonstrate that we (inarguably) have a public health problem

 

If the rest of the developed world has only 13.7 percent of the firearm death rate that the United States has, then America definitively has firearms-related public health problem.

 

Seeing the issue any other way simply rejects globally accepted definitions of public health and medical causation.

 

Denying the connection between firearms and excessive gun death rates, as the National Rifle Association and its gun extremist allies try to do at every twist of the debate, is disingenuous.

 

Worsening the gun death problem, by sprinkling even more firearms into the mix is (absent other motivations) insane.  For example, the NRA now encourages concealed gun-toting by people who are already prone to paranoia.  Most rational societies would consider this prescription for social order, “nuts.”

 

 

Equally visible irrationality at the other pole —

 

Anti-gun liberals occasionally do their cause no good by being so visibly naive in their gun control thinking.

 

One example of this kind of foolishness comes from the Aurora mass homicide.  Gun control advocates criticized the fact that suspect James Holmes could easily get 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet.

 

Absent from their critique was a sensible explanation of how government might restrict the accumulation of 6,000 rounds by someone intent on doing it:

 

Are these critics simply objecting to large purchases of ammunition?  Would buying ammo in lots of 10 rounds each, for 600 days, be preferable?

 

Should there be a limit on the total number of rounds one can have in one’s home or vehicle?  Who will count and enforce the limit, and how?

 

Are we going to subject anyone who wants to buy more than 50 rounds per year to a polygraph test — or metaphorically, truth drug administration — regarding their intended use of it?

 

 

“So, Pete, are people on both sides of the gun control debate idiots?”

 

No.  And that’s the point.

 

The basic divide between the two prongs of the gun control conflict has consistently been obscured by both groups’ unwillingness to pose their most basic political disagreement in clear terms.

 

Gut-toters are willing to sacrifice 30,000 people a year to their right to bear arms.

 

People on the other side customarily think that this volume of gun death overcomes any conceivable reason for indulging our penchant for being able to spray bullets around.

 

From a social perspective, the fundamental issue is whether the arms-bearers’ thinking has any rationally defensible validity at all.

 

In my view, it might.  But most of “us” are reluctant to express it because it is so expressly uncivilized.

 

 

“Pete, what is this uncivilized (but rational) idea that motivates gun-brandishers to discount 30,000 deaths per year?”

 

“Gov’mint and them guys.”

 

The right wing streak that so often characterizes “us” is our fundamental recognition that the world is too frequently a hostile place.  We also share a fundamental mistrust of too large, too distant government.

 

If you ask a gun rights advocate what his deepest motivation is, his truthful answer will ultimately boil down to the fact that he does not want to be helpless against more powerful people, animals, or forces.

 

That’s the entirety of it.  Don’t get suckered by the imbecilic deer hunting argument that so often pops up as camouflage in the gun control debate.  This is not, fundamentally, about sport.

 

We are willing to watch 30,000 Americans die each year, so that we gun-toters do not feel helpless.

 

 

“Pete, is this sense of vulnerability rational?”

 

Probably, given the way our primitive genes/brains are structured.

 

Society always tolerates a “death price” as an accompanying cost of some technologies and social constructs:

 

Take the automobile.

 

Industrial pollution.

 

The unequal distribution of health insurance and health care — with its accompanying necessarily high rate of early death and suffering.

 

The divide between gun control advocates and gun bearers lies in their conflicting views of the world.  The former tend to trust government and their neighbors.  The latter trust neither.

 

Addressing either group as fools is mistaken.  They are simply different psychic branches of the human tree.

 

 

At the very margin — there is (admittedly) one aspect in which the gun lobby is arguably unrealistic, and therefore debatably mistaken

 

This mistake may, some day, allow a chance for reasonable compromise at the fringe of the gun debate.

 

If pressed, gun-toters will argue that they need access to assault weapons to hold off an insane government.  In my view, this is the rationally weakest of our justifications for implementing a completely unrestricted Second Amendment.

 

SWAT-trained, I recognize that civilians (no matter how well-armed) are just not in a position to overcome the training and weapons that our military can deploy in an instant.

 

Having access to an assault weapon is not going to permit me, or my neighbors, to hold off an American military combat squad — should our president ever decide to become King.

 

Were Americans ever to be in the position of taking on an out of control domestic government, we would have to resort to the same tactics that the Taliban currently uses against American forces in Afghanistan:

 

improvised explosive devices,

 

mostly inferior firearms,

 

and

 

philosophically-in-accord networks of friends.

 

What militant American gun advocates overlook is that, should such circumstances evolve, our best avenue for obtaining a military grade weapon would be to shoot its bearer with an ordinary hunting rifle and then take his weapons from him.

 

Under the majority of circumstances (unless one has a close-engagement death wish) one would not need an assault rifle for this initial self-defensive attack.

 

From the point of view of penetrating power, accuracy, range and sometimes portability, hunting rifles are arguably superior to the majority of the world’s assault rifles.  Otherwise, they would no longer exist.  We would all be using comparatively small caliber assault-like rifles to hunt dangerous animals.

 

The gun lobby’s attempt to hold that owning assault rifles and unlimited magazines is part and parcel of rational application of the Second Amendment is, very arguably, anti-social foolishness.

 

 

On the other hand, do we really know that assault weapons and unlimited magazines are the cause of America’s surplus gun deaths?

 

Here, the pro-gun argument is a cost-benefit one.  If assault weapons kill or injure relatively few people, the restrictions necessary to eliminate the harm are not worth their cost in lost freedoms.

 

America’s most fundamental gun-related public health problem very probably comes from handgun ownership.  Not from assault weapons or unlimited round magazines.

 

Focusing only on assault weapons and large magazines may miss appreciably reducing gun deaths.

 

 

“But doesn’t it make sense for gun control advocates to focus on what they might be able to get?”

 

Yes.

 

But here the political hurdle is pro-gun advocates’ fear of the slippery slope.

 

Rabid gun owners think that if they give up their 100-round magazines, “you” will be after their children’s .22-caliber plinkers next.

 

 

The basic gun conflict, like the political one, is between two kinds of brains

 

One trusts government to behave.  The other does not.

 

One mostly trusts its fellow humans.  The other doesn’t.

 

On the right, it is not irrational to confess that 11,000 gun homicides is an acceptable price to implement the Right’s concept of freedom.

 

On the Left, it is not irrational to explain that social modernity requires the painful sacrifice of some individual rights.

 

 

The moral? — If both sides are more honest about their most basic motivations, the gun control battle will be clearer and less intellectually irritating

 

But probably no less solvable.