A Sick Country Filled With Guns

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Jeremy Scahill

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/07/a-sick-country-filled-with-guns/


October 7 2017, 3:29 p.m.
We live in a sick country. A country where it’s legal for someone to purchase 30 assault weapons and unlimited ammunition, weapons that really only have one purpose: to hunt and kill other human beings. A country where a cabal of high-powered lobbyists, bought-off politicians, and gun manufacturers profits off of massacres, where the meaning of the Second Amendment has been twisted so intensely that it no longer matters why it was written or what it was actually intended for.

The leaders of the National Rifle Association, who would be viewed as terrorist enablers and promoters in a sane society, they don’t like the first part of the Second Amendment — so much so that they don’t include it in their very public memorializing of their Holy Bible of gun addition.

The version of the Second Amendment displayed at the NRA’s headquarters doesn’t include the first half of the Second Amendment. The NRA only wants you to focus on the second half, which says, “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The first part of the Second Amendment, which the NRA finds too inconvenient to include, states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …”

Was the Las Vegas shooter a member of a well-regulated militia? No. Were any of the murderers who shot up schools or religious assemblies or workplaces members of a well-regulated militia? No. And regulated — that’s an interesting word, because no thoughtful person can really argue that guns in the United States are actually regulated in any meaningful way. In this country, you can buy dozens of assault weapons. You can store enough guns and ammunition in your garage to wage a small war. Why? Because the Second Amendment has been laundered through lobbyists, and some Supreme Court justices, to mean something it does not mean.

The coalition that fans the flames of fear and promotes the idea that guns keep us safe — that the solution to gun violence is more guns — makes a shitload of money off of all this death and misery. And they will make more money off of the Las Vegas massacre.

You can murder 20 innocent children between the ages of 6 and 7 at Sandy Hook Elementary School and these villains are unmoved in their belief in the golden calf of assault rifles. “If only the teachers had been armed, those kids might be alive today. Now let’s check out our stock prices.”

Each time we’re faced with a new mass murder with guns, in this case 58 killed and more than 500 wounded, we end up in the same place: “Let’s pray. Let’s tweak this or that law. Let’s talk about using acoustic sensors to detect gunshots. Let’s put armed private security in schools. Let’s use the terrorist watchlist to deny gun purchases. Let’s have more surveillance, more religious and racial profiling.” Which is absurd, given that most mass shooters are white.

None of what most politicians and TV pundits offer up in the aftermath of these killings is going to do anything to solve the real issue: We are a nation filled to the brim with guns, including assault weapons that are actually meant for assaulting people. Not for hunting. Not for sport, unless your sport is murder.

Watch what happens in Congress in the coming days. Empty platitudes. Bullshit proposals: “We must do something about this.” And, of course, a lot of prayer. But none of that is going to change to the fact that we live in a sick society that believes guns bring us security. A nation that has been taught by powerful, twisted people that guns aren’t part of the problem. That everything except guns — and how easy they are to get — is the problem. Mental illness is the problem. Muslims are the problem. Gangbangers in Chicago are the problem. Not having a gun is the problem. And when these mass shootings happen, most of the time, the shooter is a white man. We want to know who he was, why did it, what his motive was, as we should. But compare that to how black victims of police killings are treated in the media: “Well, did they do drugs? What were they wearing? Did they have a criminal record? Did they listen to hip hop? Where are the fathers?”

After he was killed by George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin was characterized as a thug, his hooded sweatshirt somehow evidence that he was scary or menacing. That’s how black victims are portrayed. After police shot Tamir Rice, the head of Miami’s police union called the 12-year-old a thug, saying that if you act like a thug, you’ll get treated like one.

Contrast that with some of the stories we’ve seen about the Las Vegas shooter — not victim — shooter! One headline (since changed) in the Washington Post said he “enjoyed gambling, country music, lived quiet life before massacre.” Black victim is a thug; white shooter is a character from a country western song who just happens to murder 58 people. It’s sick. And this is a pattern.

What if mass shootings carried out by white men were covered the same way that stories involving shooters of other races are covered on a daily basis in this country? White-on-white crime. Let’s investigate country music and its violent lyrics. Let’s find some white people brave enough to speak out on this pandemic of white men carrying out mass shootings at an alarming rate. And let’s make them speak for their entire race.

We all know why the narratives are different. And another thing: We’re hearing once again that this is the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history. It’s just not true. There are several examples of white gunmen killing huge numbers of black people. The 1917 East St. Louis massacre resulted in an estimated 100 black people being shot and lynched; in 1873, between 60 and 150 black people were massacred in Colfax, Louisiana. We don’t even know the exact numbers of Native Americans killed in mass shootings since the founding of the United States: Hundreds were killed in places like Sand Creek, Clear Lake, and Wounded Knee.

Donald Trump, who boasts that he’ll be the best friend the NRA could possibly have in the White House, suddenly found God when he first addressed the Las Vegas shooting. Let’s be real: Trump’s deepest connection to the Bible is watching Charlton Heston as Moses. But religious Trump, who speaks from the Scriptures, was praised for his perfect tone across the media. Specifically, on CNN: “Just what we needed to hear.”

A big part of our problem on guns is how it’s discussed in the media. Presidents who get prayerful are praised instead of held accountable for the role they play in sustaining this nation’s gun addiction, in promoting the gun industry that profits off of murder. When the shooter is an Arab or a Muslim, they are often immediately branded as a suspected terrorist. After Las Vegas, the president and other politicians called this shooter “deranged” or “insane” or another word that’s lost all meaning — “evil.”

When it’s a Muslim shooter, it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about what the U.S. response should be: watchlisting, banning people from entering the country, surveillance of mosques. But when white people do the killing, don’t talk about guns. That’s politicizing the tragedy, disrespecting the victims. Whether it’s someone inspired by ISIS murdering his coworkers or a white man shooting up a school or a white man gunning down Sikhs because he thought they were Muslims, they all do it with guns.

We don’t need prayers. We don’t need fake unity over the tragedy. We need to look at the common factor in all of these heinous acts of mass murder: guns. Anything else is just putting a Band-Aid on a gaping, infected, and lethal wound on our society.
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
AMERICAS

What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

Guns vs. Mass Shooters What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings?


November 7, 2017
The Interpreter
By MAX FISHER and JOSH KELLER

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.

But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

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Outside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Tex., after a mass shooting on Sunday.CALLIE RICHMOND FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES


A Look at the Numbers
The top-line numbers suggest a correlation that, on further investigation, grows only clearer.

Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American, according to a 2015 study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama.

Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people — a distinction Mr. Lankford urged to avoid outliers. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.


Graphic | Guns and Mass Shooters, per Capita

Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.



Factors That Don’t Correlate
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.

A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.

Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.

Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.



A Violent Country
America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence.

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An investigator among thousands of personal items left behind after a gunman opened fire in Las Vegas last month.JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS


Comparisons in Other Societies
Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.



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But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

As with any crime, the underlying risk is impossible to fully erase. Any individual can snap or become entranced by a violent ideology. What is different is the likelihood that this will lead to mass murder.

In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.

By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.


Beyond the Statistics
In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.

This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different.

The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.

Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States.

Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.

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A vigil after the Las Vegas attack.HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Difference Is Culture

The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns.

The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than they are anywhere else.

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

RELATED COVERAGE

The Interpreter: Control and Fear: What Mass Killings and Domestic Violence Have in CommonJUN 15, 2016



Air Force Error Allowed Texas Gunman to Buy WeaponsNOV 6, 2017
What Happened at the Texas
Church ShootingNOV 5, 2017


Outlier: Comparing Gun Deaths by Country: The U.S. Is in a Different World


© 2017 The New York Times Company


https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html



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MCP

International
International Member
Mass Shooters Love AR-15 Assault Rifles. Now Trump Wants to Sell These Weapons to the World.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/07/texas-shooting-gun-sales-assault-rifle-trump/

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On Sunday, when 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley entered the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, he carried a version of what the National Rifle Association has proudly called “America’s rifle.” Kelley used his Ruger AR-556, a variant on the enormously popular AR-15, to kill more than two dozen churchgoers.


AR-15 variants are perennial favorites for those who perpetrate America’s notorious mass shootings. An AR-15-style rifle similar to the one used by Kelley was the weapon of choice for Adam Lanza, who killed 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. James Holmes, who shot almost 100 people in a Colorado movie theater the same year, used one, too. And Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who massacred attendees of an office party in San Bernardino, California, less than two years ago, also did so with AR-15 variants.


Now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s administration, “America’s rifle” is poised to go global.


In September, senior U.S. officials confirmed that the administration plans to diminish State Department oversight of non-military international firearms sales. Instead, it will give the Department of Commerce jurisdiction over this activity, with the explicit goal of easing regulation and boosting international arms sales.


“This will allow us to get in the (small arms sales) game for the first time ever,” an administration official told Reuters, which broke the story.


The plan promises to be a boon for American gun manufacturers. Shares of Sturm, Ruger & Co., which produces the rifle used in Sunday’s mass shooting, surged by nearly 15 percent following the September news. Exports currently account for only about 5 percent of the company’s sales.


The AR-15 gained its reputation among gun enthusiasts because it is a portable, lightweight, accurate, and customizable semiautomatic weapon — the civilian version of the M-16, the military’s longtime standard-issue rifle. The AR-15 typically carries a 30-round magazine, though 75- to 100-round magazines are available for sale in the U.S. In the aftermath of Sunday’s shooting in Sutherland Springs, dozens of emptied 30-round clips were found littered throughout the First Baptist Church sanctuary.


The rifle became commercially available in the U.S. when Congress allowed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban — which singled out the AR-15 specifically — to expire in 2004. In less than 15 years, millions of AR-15 variants have been sold to the American public. Kelley purchased his model in a San Antonio sporting goods store in 2016.

The Trump administration’s plan to foster these kinds of sales the world over could increase annual firearm sales by 15 to 20 percent, according to Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of industry group the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

A government effort to open international markets to American gunmakers could be interpreted as a show of gratitude by the Trump White House. “You could really turn the spigot on if you do it the right way,” a senior administration official said of the plan.

The firearm lobby spent lavishly to elect Trump. Sturm Ruger donated $4 million to the NRA last year, and the NRA, in turn, spent more than $30 million to support Trump’s campaign.

Trump’s election, however, seems to have inadvertently suppressed domestic gun sales, reversing year-over-year growth under former President Barack Obama. Sturm Ruger was hit particularly hard; its profits shrank by half earlier this year. “I think there was a big hangover coming out of the election cycle that had to be worked off,” Ruger CEO Christopher Killoy said on an analysts call earlier this year.

The Trump administration’s plan to boost international gun sales does not require congressional approval, and officials told Reuters that it could be implemented during the first six months of 2018. A State Department official reached by The Intercept would not respond to queries about the proposed policy, except to express the administration’s commitment to easing regulation. “This administration is committed to reducing regulatory burden and encouraging U.S. exports. We are reviewing all possible steps that could help us achieve those goals while protecting America’s national security,” the official said. “All arms transfers are made in accordance with U.S. law and are reviewed under the conventional arms transfer policy, which includes consideration of end use and human rights.”

Three Democratic senators cautioned Secretary of State Rex Tillerson against the proposed change in a September letter, noting that small arms are the “primary means of injury and destruction in civil and military conflicts throughout the world.”

The government’s effort to simplify export controls on small arms began under Obama in 2009, but the plan lost momentum as deadly mass shootings on U.S. soil captured headlines throughout the past decade. It’s unclear yet if the Trump administration has any such scruples.


Top photo: An AR-15 rifle is displayed on top of a booth on the exhibit floor during the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Louisville, Ky., on May 20, 2016.

 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
4 basic questions about the AR-15


The Washington Post
By Julie Vitkovskaya
and Patrick Martin
February 18, 2018


An AR-15 once again made an appearance at a mass shooting, this time at a Parkland, Fla., high school on Wednesday. The suspect in the shooting, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, purchased the semiautomatic rifle about a year ago, according to a law enforcement official.

These AR-style rifles have appeared in some of the deadliest shootings in the last few years, including a concert in Las Vegas, a nightclub in Orlando, a church in Texas and an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Here’s what you need to know about its history and use.

What does “AR” in “AR-15″ stand for, and what are its origins?

“AR” doesn’t stand for assault rifle. It stands for the Armalite rifle, named after the company that developed the weapon. It was first used during the Vietnam War as an alternative to the M-14 rifle, which was heavy, difficult to control and outmatched by the AK-47. In the late 1950s, the gun manufacturer Colt purchased the rights to the rifle but had difficulty selling it to the U.S. military.

Then-chief of the Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay took a liking to the weapon after a Colt salesman offered him a chance to shoot watermelons with the gun at a Fourth of July celebration. LeMay ordered 80,000 of them but was rejected by multiple government agencies as well as Congress, which didn’t want to spend money on a new weapon when the M-14 was already in production. LeMay continued to press for its use and even appealed to President John F. Kennedy (who rebuffed him).

In the 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara halted the production of the M-14, and the rifle finally made its debut on the battlefield in Vietnam as the M-16 assault rifle.

What are defining characteristics of the rifle?

The military’s M-16 was originally fully automatic, meaning it fired several rounds with each pull of the trigger. Its civilian counterpart, the AR-15, is semiautomatic — the user needs to pull the trigger to fire each shot.

The AR was designed for speedy reloading in combat situations, and it can fire dozens of rounds in seconds. The butt of the rifle, or the stock, has a large internal spring that absorbs the shock of each firing. The low recoil makes it easier to shoot and is more accurate than earlier military weapons. It can also be easily customized by adding scopes, lasers and more.


Who can purchase an AR-15?

It depends on the state you live in. In Florida, an AR-15 can be bought by anyone older than 18with a clean record. There is no waiting period. (Handgun purchases typically require a three-day waiting period for anyone older than 21.) It is legal to own fully automatic weapons, but they are heavily regulated. Some states prohibit ownership of semiautomatic rifles with certain characteristics, such as the AR-15.


What are the laws surrounding assault weapons?


Gun advocates maintain that semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15 should not be classified “assault weapons” because they are not fully automatic and because the guns have recreational uses, such as hunting and target shooting.

Yet gun-control advocates say that distinction is arbitrary and that the weapons are just as dangerous because they are designed to kill a large number of people quickly. They often point out that the AR-15 has a high muzzle velocity, which combined with the small .223 round produces a violently ricochet through an animal body if it hits bone.

Bolt-action rifles with cartridges loaded in 30.06, a common deer-hunting caliber, fire a round that travels slower with more blunt force, though the muzzle velocity varies for lighter and heavier rounds.

In 1994, an assault-weapons ban signed by President Bill Clinton outlawed the AR-15. But the law had a lot of loopholes, and gun manufacturers circumvented it by modifying the weapons. The ban expired in 2004, and sales of the gun increased during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. The National Rifle Association labeled it “America’s most popular rifle.”

Lawmakers were not interested in picking up the effort to ban assault rifles until 2012, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to ban assault weapons following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The effort eventually failed.

Now, gun-violence experts want to see the 1994 ban restored, and lawmakers are calling for new legislation. A new bill introduced by Feinstein and supported by 22 other Democratic senators would ban selling and manufacturing 205 “military-style assault weapons.” The bill also calls for a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Alex Horton contributed to this report.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...tions-about-the-ar-15/?utm_term=.af1821a36cda


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MCP

International
International Member
Florida-school-shooting-1518815802-article-header.jpg



Another Mass Shooting. Another Case in Which Signs of White Violence Didn’t Raise Alarms.

It was true for Dylann Roof in Charleston. It was true about for any number of violent white men in Charlottesville. And it was true for Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, Florida.

Like these other young men who turned violent, lots of people who interacted with Cruz saw the day coming when he would do something drastic, maybe even one day shoot up a school.

He had long since been expelled from his high school. One student who had served with him in the Junior ROTC called him “a psycho.” Another student said he was a weapons enthusiast who tried to sell weapons at school. Yet another student said he had been banned from bringing a backpack to school as a student after bullet casings were found in it.

Lots of people who interacted with Cruz saw the day coming when he would do something drastic, maybe even one day shoot up a school.
Classmates reported that he stalked someone in the school. Another student said he was physically abusive to his ex-girlfriend. His social media profiles were full of guns, ammo, bigotry, and threats. A teacher said he was a known threat. Neighbors knew something was up; Cruz talked constantly about killing animals.

Local law enforcement say they have not verified alleged ties to a white supremacist group, but it seems Cruz displayed a white supremacist ideology: A classmate said he talked about how white people were better than black and Latino people.

Last year, he had been reported to the FBI for making violent threats online, and it happened again this year. Someone warned the FBI about Cruz on January 5, 2018, according to the bureau, but the feds never investigated it. Local police reportedly came to his house 39 times over a period of seven years, although it’s not yet clear if the incidents all involved Cruz.

Yet none of this prevented Cruz from building what he openly admitted was an “arsenal” of weapons that he repeatedly said online that he hoped to use – even at a school.

Imagine if Nikolas Cruz was a young Muslim. Imagine he had, however fleetingly, been tied to a group of radical Muslims operating elsewhere in Florida — whether it was true or not, that just the suggestion had been made.

I can tell you this much: If Cruz was a young Muslim, this would’ve never been allowed to go this far. Do you really think the FBI would have failed to investigate a young Muslim with this history?



Nikolas Cruz, 19, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where he allegedly killed 17 people, is seen on a closed circuit television screen during a bond hearing in front of Broward Judge Kim Mollica at the Broward County Courthouse on February 15, 2018 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Photo: Susan Stocker/Getty Images


No matter how extreme, no matter how numerous the warning signs, no matter how horrendous the cost, a person who openly talks about white supremacy and violence simply doesn’t raise alarms with America’s security apparatus. A person who openly talks about white supremacy and violence simply doesn’t raise alarms with America’s security apparatus.
While the president of the United States is asking for billions of dollars to build a security wall along the Mexican border, violent white supremacists within our borders are murdering and maiming people. Donald Trump wants to ban people from a handful of Muslim countries from coming into America because they might be terrorists, but Americans are terrorizing other Americans without needing to get visas at all.

An apparent white supremacist can go through life making threats, talking about weapons, harassing people, warning that he would be a school shooter, have people call the FBI on him, and yet never get serious scrutiny from just about anyone. There were just no consequences.

On Thursday, Instagram confirmed that the profile photo of Nikolas Cruz with his red, Trump-inspired “Make America Great Again” hat was indeed real. He also wears the cap in a video shooting what appears to be a BB gun in his backyard, months before the shooting. Trump, for his part, has also gone through life spewing white supremacist rhetoric, sexually harassing and assaulting women, all with little or no consequences. Quite the opposite: Trump was elected to be the most powerful office in the world. It’s no wonder Cruz admired him.

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/florida-shooting-nikolas-cruz/
 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
FactCheck.org®
ARTICLESFEATURED POSTS

The Gun Debate
Facts on background checks, concealed-carry laws, U.S. gun homicide rate, stolen guns

By Eugene Kiely,
D'Angelo Gore,
Lori Robertson
and Robert Farley

Posted on March 5, 2018 | Updated on March 6, 2018



President Donald Trump and some members of Congress metFeb. 28 at the White House for a freewheeling discussion on how to reduce gun violence at schools. The meeting came two weeks after the mass shooting in Florida in which 17 people were killed, including 14 high school students.

Here we look at the facts regarding some of the issues that were raised during that meeting:


Do universal background checks reduce firearm deaths?

Sen. Christopher Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, urged Trump to support federal legislation that would expand background checks of prospective gun buyers.

Currently, federal law requires background checks on those who buy guns from federally licensed firearm dealers. Murphy and the Democrats want to expand background checks to cover private sales by unlicensed individuals, including some of the sales that take place at gun shows and over the internet.

Murphy cited states that require universal background checks as evidence that such a federal law would reduce gun deaths.

Murphy: In states that have universal background checks, there are 35 percent less gun murders than in states that don’t have them.

That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that universal background check laws have caused lower mortality rates. A causal relationship between such state laws and firearm deaths hasn’t been established by researchers.

In fact, Murphy is citing an average firearm mortality rate for states with universal background checks. But the states’ individual rates vary. Some of them have higher firearm mortality rates than states that don’t have universal background checks.

There are eight states and the District of Columbia that have laws in effect that require “universal background checks at the point of sale for all sales and transfers of all classes of firearms, whether they are purchased from a licensed dealer or an unlicensed seller,” according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The average firearm mortality rate in those nine jurisdictions was 9 per 100,000 residents in 2016, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 35 percent less than the states that don’t require universal background checks, as Murphy said.

Below are the rates for the eight states and the District of Columbia that required universal background checks in 2016.

Firearm-mortality-rates1.png


Colorado, the District of Columbia and Oregon had rates higher than the national average, which was 11.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2016, according to the CDC.

They also had higher rates than Maine (8.3 deaths per 100,000), New Hampshire (9.3), and Vermont (11.1) — three states that have no state laws on background checks and received an “F” grade for the strength of their overall gun laws from the Giffords Law Center.

David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, told us there haven’t been enough studies to say for sure that universal background checks reduce firearm deaths. But the studies that have been done suggest an association between such universal background checks and reduced firearm deaths, he said.

He referred us to a 2017 paper he coauthored that reviewed the available peer-reviewed research on gun control laws from 1970 to 2016. “We found evidence that stronger firearm laws are associated with reductions in firearm homicide rates,” the paper said. “The strongest evidence is for laws that strengthen background checks and that require a permit to purchase a firearm.”

The RAND Corp. on March 2 released several reports as part of its Gun Policy in America initiative, which looked at several thousand studies and identified 62 that met its criteria — “studies that offered some evidence, some estimate of the causal effect of [gun] policy” on several outcomes, Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told FactCheck.org.

The review of the scientific literature found “moderate” evidence (two studies in agreement) that background checks by licensed dealers may decrease firearm homicide rates, but whether private-seller background checks affect those rates was “uncertain.”


Do concealed-carry laws decrease violent crime?

Whether state concealed-carry laws — the right to carry a concealed firearm in public — cause an increase or decrease in gun violence remains unsettled.

At the bipartisan meeting, Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana spoke about a House-passed measure that would allow people who have the right to carry a concealed handgun in one state to be able to carry a gun in other states that have concealed-carry laws. (All states have some form of concealed-carry permissions, though they vary in the requirements or restrictions.) “Look at the data,” Scalise said. “I know a lot of people want to dismiss concealed-carry permits. They do actually increase safety.”

Scalise’s office pointed us to statistics on the growth in concealed-carry permits, and the decades-long downturn in the national violent crime rate since it peaked in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t show any cause-and-effect. When we looked into this issue in 2012, we found there was academic disagreement on what impact concealed-carry laws had. Six years later, that’s still the case. And the body of research is largely inconclusive.

The RAND Corp. project also looked at studies on causal effects of concealed-carry laws. There was inconclusive evidence that such laws had an effect, in either direction, on mass shootings or suicides, and only “limited” evidence that such laws may increase unintentional injuries or violent crime overall. The “limited” evidence is just that — defined by RAND as one study meeting its criteria and not contradicted by studies “with equivalent or stronger methods.” In fact, RAND found inconclusive evidence on the impact on specific violent crimes: “Shall-issue concealed-carry laws have uncertain effects on total homicides, firearm homicides, robberies, assaults, and rapes,” it said, largely because studies found uncertain or inconsistent results.

“It’s hard to do research in this area,” Morral told us, citing three reasons that it’s difficult to prove causation of gun laws – “no funding, weak data and you can’t do experiments.”

We’ve explained before that while crime or homicides may go down after certain policies are implemented, it’s difficult to show that the policy caused the decline. Researchers can’t do real-life experiments with firearms. But setting that aside, Morral said, “The U.S. government does not invest heavily in collecting the kind of data you might want.”

And funding for gun research lags that for other causes of mortality. Morral referred to a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found: “Between 2004 and 2015, gun violence research was substantially underfunded and understudied relative to other leading causes of death, based on mortality rates for each cause.”

The RAND project concluded: “With a few exceptions, there is a surprisingly limited base of rigorous scientific evidence concerning the effects of many commonly discussed gun policies.”


How does the U.S. gun homicide rate compare with other developed countries?

At the meeting, Murphy also said: “America has a gun violence rate that is 20 times that of every other industrialized country in the world.” His wording was imprecise.

A spokesman for the senator said he was referring to a study on violent death rates published in the American Journal of Medicine in March 2016. It found the “U.S. gun homicide rate” in 2010 was 25 times higher than the rate for more than 20 other “populous, high-income countries” combined, not individually.

The authors of that paper, Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, used mortality data from the World Health Organization to compare the U.S. with 22 other high-income countries, with at least 1 million inhabitants, that also belonged to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development in 2010. That was the most recent year with “complete data for the greatest number of countries,” the paper says.

They concluded: “In 2010, the US homicide rate was 7.0 times higher than the other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher.”

That comparison was based on the aggregated gun homicide rate for only the non-U.S. nations examined, not “every other industrialized country,” Grinshteyn told us in an email. And it doesn’t mean the U.S. rate was 25 times higher than the rate for each of the studied countries, as Murphy’s statement may have suggested to some.

For example, the U.S. gun homicide rate of 3.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 2010 was about seven times higher than the rates in Canada and Portugal, about nine times higher than the rate in Ireland, and about 12 times higher than the rates in Belgium and Italy.

On the other hand, Grinshteyn said, the data show America’s rate was 82 times higher than the rate in the United Kingdom, 88.3 times higher than the rate in Norway, 513.8 times higher than the rate in Japan, and 594.7 times higher than in South Korea, which had the lowest gun homicide rate of all the countries included.

The combined gun homicide rate for all 22 nations was 0.1434 deaths per 100,000 population, Grinshteyn said, and the U.S. rate was 25 times higher.

That said, Murphy still has a point about the large gap between the U.S. and other similarly developed nations.

“The United States has an enormous firearm problem compared with other high-income countries,” Grinshteyn and Hemenway wrote in their analysis. “In the United States, the firearm homicide rate is 25 times higher, the firearm suicide rate is 8 times higher, and the unintentional gun death rate is more than 6 times higher. Of all firearm deaths in all firearm deaths in all these countries, more than 80% occur in the United States.”




Are most firearm homicides committed with stolen guns?

During the White House meeting, Republican Rep. John Rutherford of Florida said “stolen guns kill more people than guns that are bought legally.” There is no research to prove that.

Rutherford’s office pointed us to a Washington Post story about a study on guns recovered by Pittsburgh police. But an author of that study says Rutherford got it wrong.

“There is no data in our study that would support that statement,” the study’s lead author, Anthony Fabio of the University of Pittsburgh, told us in a phone interview.

The 2016 study — “Gaps continue in firearm surveillance: Evidence from a large U.S. City Bureau of Police” — found that in 2008 most perpetrators, 79 percent, were carrying guns that did not belong to them. But that doesn’t mean they were all stolen or even illegally obtained, and it doesn’t mean that they were used to kill people.

The researchers concluded about 33 percent of the guns were reported stolen when police contacted the gun owners (more than 40 percent of those stolen guns had not been reported stolen prior to that). Another 22 percent were not stolen. In a large proportion of cases — 44 percent — it was unknown or could not be determined if the gun was stolen.

The study was not limited to guns used to commit homicides. The authors did not know what crimes the recovered guns were used for. In other words, the study does not back up Rutherford’s statement about the prevalence of stolen guns being used in murders.

It is certainly true that a large percentage of guns that are used to kill someone were acquired illegally, said Philip Cook, a public policy professor at Duke University. If nothing else, he said, research he did in 2005 shows that more than 40 percent of those convicted of homicide had at least one prior felony conviction that would prohibit them from owning a gun.

“But most such illegal transactions do not involve stolen guns, as far as we know,” Cook told us.

Cook, who is currently doing research on gun theft, told us via email that he was unaware of any evidence that would support Rutherford’s statement that “stolen guns kill more people than guns that are bought legally.”

A 1986 study of nearly 2,000 convicted felons in 10 state prisons by researchers James Wright and Peter Rossi found that nearly a third of those reported they had directly stolen their most recent handguns. About 44 percent of their guns were obtained from friends or family, and 26 percent from “gray or black market sources,” the report states. Wright said the study concluded that “70 percent of the most recent handguns possessed by this sample were definitely or probably stolen.” But the study’s authors could not confirm that this percentage definitely represented stolen guns.

“So the more general point, that improper storage of guns by legal users puts an awful lot of firearms into criminal hands, is no doubt correct,” Wright told us via email.

Federal data back that up.

The Trace reported that 237,000 guns were reported stolen in the U.S. in 2016, up 68 percent from 2005, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Those records show nearly 2 million weapons were reported stolen over the last decade. One caveat: In 2005, fewer states had laws requiring gun owners to report missing firearms, and The Trace noted that “[w]hen asked if the increase could be partially attributed to a growing number of law enforcement agencies reporting stolen guns, an NCIC spokesperson said only that ‘participation varies.'”

The actual number of stolen firearms is likely much higher, the report states, since many gun thefts go unreported.

Federal law requires licensed dealers to report stolen or lost guns, but not individual gun owners. Only 11 states and the District of Columbia require gun owners to report stolen firearms, according to the Giffords Law Center.



So Rutherford has hit upon a growing problem in the U.S. with stolen guns, even though there is no hard evidence that more stolen guns are used in homicides than guns that are purchased legally.

Fabio, the lead author of the study on recovered guns in Pittsburgh, said one of the biggest takeaways from his study is that there is a dearth of good data and research about firearms. That echoes the findings of the RAND project on gun violence.

Since the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been wary of studying gun issues after NRA lobbyists convinced Congress to cut into its funding after a series of studies in the mid-1990s were viewed by the NRA as advocating gun control. Referred to as the Dickey amendment, a warning has accompanied appropriations bills, saying that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

As a result, Fabio said, “There’s not a lot of money for research with the word ‘firearm’ in it.”



Did the law banning certain types of semiautomatic weapons from 1994 to 2004 reduce gun violence and deaths?

At the meeting, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, gave Trump a letter and said: “This is when the 10-year assault weapon ban was in — how incidents and deaths dropped. When it ended, you see it going up.”

Feinstein’s office told us she was referring to a Washington Post article about “Rampage Nation,” a 2016 book by Louis Klarevas. The author collected data on mass shootings — those involving six or more firearm deaths — for a 50-year period in an effort to assess the impact of the 1994 ban — which prohibited the sale of an estimated 118 models of semiautomatic weapons from 1994 to 2004.

Klarevas identified 12 mass shootings that resulted in 89 deaths when the ban was in effect, down from 19 incidents and 155 deaths in the previous 10-year period, from 1984 to 1994, the Post article says.

Federally funded research, however, did not credit the 1994 ban with reducing gun violence.

As we have written before, the Department of Justice funded a series of three studies on the effectiveness of the law that concluded with a 2004 study led by Christopher S. Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

That final report said the ban was successful in reducing crimes committed with assault weapons, or AWs. However, that decline was likely offset “by steady or rising use of non-banned semiautomatics with [large-capacity magazines], which are used in crime much more frequently than AWs,” the report said.

“Therefore, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the report concluded.

What happened after the federal ban expired?

As Feinstein referenced, Klarevas reported an increase in mass murders. In the 10-year period after the ban expired, the number of mass shootings increased by 183 percent (from 12 to 34) and the number of deaths increased by 239 percent (from 89 to 302), according to Klarevas.

In a paper published last year in the Journal of Urban Health, Koper and his colleagues said the “limited” data available on the type of guns used in mass shootings “suggests” an increase in the use of “assault weapons and other high-capacity semiautomatics.”

The researchers said that “detailed weapon information could not be found in public sources for many” of the mass murders, which they defined as four or more firearm deaths, not including the shooter, in a single incident.

Koper et al, Oct. 2, 2017: Estimates for firearm mass murders are very imprecise due to lack of data on the guns and magazines used in these cases, but available information suggests that AWs and other high-capacity semiautomatics are involved in as many as 57% of such incidents.

That study also found an increased use of high-capacity semiautomatics in crime in general.

Using local crime data from three cities and FBI data on law enforcement murders nationwide, Koper and his colleagues found that such high-powered guns “have grown from 33[%] to 112% as a share of crime guns since the expiration of the federal ban — a trend that has coincided with recent growth in shootings nationwide.”

At the high end, the percentage of semiautomatics used in crimes in Richmond, Virginia, increased from 10.4 percent in 2003 and 2004 to 22 percent in 2008 and 2009, an increase of 111.5 percent, the report said. The 33 percent figure represents the increase in the number of law enforcement officers killed by high-capacity semiautomatics, up from 30.4 percent in 2003 through 2007 to 40.6 percent in 2009 through 2013.

Would restoring the ban, as proposed by Feinstein, reduce mass shootings and gun violence in general? That’s unclear.

David Hemenway, the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told us last year that an assault weapons ban may reduce mass shootings, but it would be unlikely to reduce gun deaths overall.

For a 2017 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Hemenway and his colleagues reviewed the available research on the association between firearm laws and preventing firearm homicides. Specifically, they reviewed four studies — including the 2004 federally funded study led by Koper — regarding bans on military-style weapons.

That paper said the reduction in firearm homicide rates identified by Koper et al during the federal gun ban period “was not statistically significant.” The three other studies “examined laws banning assault weapons in the context of other firearm-related laws; none found a decrease in firearm homicides,” the paper said.

“Specific laws directed at … the banning of military-style assault weapons were not associated with changes in firearm homicide rates,” the researchers concluded.

After the paper was published, Hemenway told us last year, “I doubt that banning AR-15 type weapons has much effect on overall gun deaths since these type of guns are not often used in suicides, homicide or for accidents. Reducing the accessibility of AR-15 type weapons might reduce mass shooting incidents and fatalities.”

The RAND project looked at studies on state assault-weapons bans and found“inconclusive” evidence that they affected mass shootings or homicides overall.

Update, March 6: We obtained updated data from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, showing that there were 246,968 guns reported stolen in 2017. We have added a new graphic to reflect that. We also updated the title on the firearm mortality rate chart to clarify that the figures are for 2016.


https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/the-gun-debate/


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