Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Shooting Your Guns – Good for Business – Not


We intuitively know, and statistics confirm, that other than a major bomb or other comparable explosive (including bio-terrorism and poison gas) – pretty hard to get or assemble – the most efficient way for a non-military person to kill the greatest number of people (including themselves) is a gun. Running a truck through a crowd is nasty, but eventually the truck stops. Stabbing masses is just too damned hard. But a gun, particularly a high-capacity automatic perched high above looking down at a massive and panicking crowd, well, that is the model of super-deadly efficiency. “Run, hide, fight” – the mantra of how to deal with an active shooter in your midst – became completely meaningless in Las Vegas on the evening of October 1st. The only thing that would have prevented that debacle would have been to deny the shooter the ability to get the necessary weapons in the first place. The ONLY thing.
Noting that Vegas gunman, retired accountant Stephen Paddock, had 23 guns in his hotel room, 19 back at his house, and more than enough ammunition continue his rampage for hours, you’d think somehow those weapons would have crossed the line and been completely illegal. But with minor adjustment, his legally-purchased semi-automatic weapons easily achieved near-fully-automatic capability, and there were no barriers of any kind against his purchase of the guns and ammo he possessed. All those guns in his room? There was a gun show scheduled during his visit, so… Not abnormal. Welcome to America!

The October 2nd Vox.com provides a rather elegant set of graphs, charts and statistics on U.S. gun-deaths, but here are their most salient, rather fully-supported conclusions (see the article if you want the supporting statistical data):
·         America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany

·         America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world

·         There have been more than 1,500 [U.S.] mass shootings since Sandy Hook [in 2012]

·         On average, there is more than one mass shooting for each day in America

·         States with more guns have more gun deaths

·         It’s not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths

·         States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths

·         Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple decades

·         In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

Being able to discern when a “good guy with a gun” – through temper, temperament or progressive mental illness – becomes a “bad guy with a gun” is amazingly difficult. And who decides who’s good and who’s bad? The NRA (the National Rifle Association)? I’m glad that the GOP sponsors of a congressional bill to make silencers legal, because the shooters were getting hearing problems (but it’s OK if cops are slowed down in finding a criminal shooter because they don’t hear the shots), finally realized that now was not the time to spread that bullet-driven toxicity deeper into American society. They wisely tabled the bill.
Nevada, a state that voted for Hillary Clinton, is as red as it gets when it comes down to guns. When the FBI told state lawmakers they were not sufficiently staffed to service Nevada background checks on gun sales, the state just dumped the requirement. Open carry? Sure. Restrictions on semi-automatic assault rifles or oversized magazines. Hell no!!! U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan mumbled something about reinstating ban on folks with mental health problems, but most of the GOP seemed to accept conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s observation that mass shootings from crazies were simply “the price of freedom.”
Forgetting about the dollars lost from millions of once-potential tourists that no long consider the United States a safe country to visit, unless you are a medical professional, the NRA lobbyist or a gun manufacturer, gun violence is downright expensive. So if you don’t care about victims, their families or pain, maybe we can get to you with a hard dollar analysis.
Let’s start here: Health Affairs Magazine is a very prestigious policy periodical with an editorial board of doctorate-holders and medical doctors from Harvard, MIT, Georgetown, University of Texas, Princeton, Duke, Emory and Tufts, to name just a few. In its October 2017 issue, it presents a number of findings in an article entitled, Emergency Department Visits For Firearm-Related Injuries In The United States, 2006–14.
Just looking at emergency departments (“ED”) in American hospitals, “Of the patients who presented alive to the ED, 37.2 percent were admitted to inpatient care, while 8.3 percent died during their ED visit or inpatient admission. The mean per person ED and inpatient charges were $5,254 and $95,887, respectively, resulting in an annual financial burden of approximately $2.8 billion in ED and inpatient charges.” You can guess that a whole lot of those folks didn’t have full medical insurance, so many either fell between the cracks or got public coverage under Medicaid or equivalent. Your tax dollars at work. But there are 78 thousand people treated in U.S. hospitals every year for firearm injuries.
$2.8 billion? Piddling. Chump change to gun enthusiasts. But the study also looked across the all levels of economic cost to this country from gun violence: “The new report in Health Affairs calculates the price tag for firearm injuries: $2.8 billion a year in American hospital charges and $46 billion a year in lost work and medical care. $46 billion?! That’s not chump change to anyone.
Yet, basically, most Americans don’t really care… until gun violence happens to them. I mean if we can watch 20 children die at Sandy Hook and do nothing, exactly what does it take? For folks who mysteriously believe that the Second Amendment is a blanket right to own guns (it never was), they get downright indignant when anyone suggests even the most basic common sense rules to limit guns in a society that is literally hemorrhaging at the seams from gun homicides. Self-defense? Who are you kidding? Only one in about thirty deaths-by-gun falls within the definition of legally “justifiable.” And please don’t bring your rural “I’m a hunter” values into the heart of a big city!
Post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, Franz Gani, one of the authors of the above report, told interviewers from  AOL.com/article/finance (October 4th): “There’s a large clinical and financial burden here, and we really need to do something about it”… Scientific, research-driven public policy might prevent shooting massacres like this week’s at a Las Vegas country music festival, he said.
“Government-funded research has led to lifesaving interventions to prevent other injuries. It inspired laws mandating automobile seat belts and air bags, for example. But Congress has essentially choked off federal funding for scientific studies of firearms-injury prevention since 1996.” What he doesn’t say is that the NRA effectively lobbied the Congress to ban the use of federal money to collect, analyze and report gun homicide data.
“In 1996, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that people who kept guns in their homes faced a nearly three-fold greater risk of homicide and a nearly five-fold greater risk of suicide. In response, Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican who described himself as the National Rifle Association’s ‘point person in Congress,’ submitted an amendment to strip the CDC budget of $2.6 million, the amount it spent on firearms research the previous year… The so-called Dickey Amendment has since then almost entirely stopped federal funding of firearms research.” AOL
The NRA pays its politicians well, from state houses but especially to Congress-people. In the federal arena, lifetime contributions range from a high of $7,740,521 to Senator John McCain (R-AZ) right on down through the ranks. All of the top ten recipients of NRA largesse in each of the Senate and the House “are Republican. The highest ranked Democrat in the House is Sanford Bishop, who ranks 41st in career donations from the N.R.A. Among the top 100 House recipients, 95 are Republican. In the Senate, the top two Democrats are Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who rank 52nd and 53rd — behind every Republican but Dan Sullivan of Alaska.” New York Times, October 4th.
The gun manufacturer’s de facto lobby, the NRA, is perhaps the most powerful such advocate in the country, and their effectiveness is legendarily effective. For decades, one mass killing after another, they have fought tooth and nail against any meaningful and reasonable gun control legislation proposed across the land. The bodies from their exceptionally successful efforts are buried everywhere. Does that make them “pure evil”? Many think that their morality hovers barely above the doctrinaire terrorists we have sent armies to defeat.
You already know how I feel about this rather abusive belief in virtually open laws to enable just about any adult to own just about any kind of gun. Most Americans go along with the need for some pretty significant restrictions on guns in this country, but don’t expect that to happen. But Donald Trump got elected to widen gun rights. He doesn’t agree that major restrictions on guns are necessary. Neither does the GOP-controlled Congress, the majority of state legislatures (GOP-controlled), and Breitbart ace and former Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, threatened Trump with an all-out social media assault if the President even attempted to consider such gun control limitations. There virtually no GOP legislators, which also includes more than a few Democrats, who are willing to risk their careers battling that over-funded gun-manufacturing lobby, the seemingly invincible NRA. Gun manufacturers win. Gun owners win. Killers win. Most of the rest of us lose, either in our wallets… or much, much worse.
I’m Peter Dekom, and ask yourself if you were living overseas and considering a vacation to the United States how you would consider all these shootings; remember we actually live here.

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