More Guns, Less Gun Control Yes Please!

 

More Guns, Less Gun Control? Yes Please!

“[The] NRA has long supported various federal laws and appropriation riders as well as laws at the state level to prohibit the collection and centralization of firearms records. While these laws are intended to prevent the creation of firearms registries, they also prevent researchers from conducting accurate studies with the number and distribution of firearms as a variable.”                                                                                                                                                                  

An admission from Josh Savani, the NRA’s director of research and information, in a January 2021 report to the NRA board meeting in Dallas

The Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 United States federal government omnibus spending bill which mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." Wikipedia’s description. After initial efforts to stifle the CDC from even gathering data about gun homicides, statisticians have created workarounds to generate the relevant numbers anyway… backed up by reputable private sources like Johns Hopkins University. That Amendment is still federal law.

Writing for the May 10th New York Times, Roni Caryn Rabin and Tim Arango, present some alarming trends within the last two years: “Gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, as gun-related homicides surged by 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday [5/10]… ‘This is a historic increase, with the rate having reached the highest level in over 25 years,’ Dr. Debra E. Houry, acting principal deputy director of the C.D.C. and the director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said at a news briefing.

“More than 45,000 Americans died in gun-related incidents as the pandemic spread in the United States, the highest number on record, federal data show. The gun homicide rate was the highest reported since 1994…That represents the largest one-year increase in gun homicides in modern history, according to Ari Davis, a policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, which recently released its own analysis of C.D.C. data.” US mass shootings, furiously enabled by a proliferation of assault weapons, are now approaching 160 so far this year; they barely make the headlines anymore. But why is that remotely shocking? If it still is. Red states have been tripping all over themselves to loosen gun laws resulting in ever so many more guns in the hands of American civilians. 

As right-wingers complain about rising crime, believing that more well-armed police (who are also being shot in record numbers) will easily fix the problem. A case is even pending before the Supreme Court to make the ability to carry concealed guns a fundamental American right under the already horrifically misconstrued Second Amendment. Yet these same right-wingers continue to enable the weapons that unpin much of that criminality. Indeed, even in blue states, Trump-appointed federal judges erode most state legislative efforts to impose reasonable gun control over this explosive reality. 

Kevin Rector writing for the May 12th Los Angeles Times points one recent example: “A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday [5/11] that California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic rifles to adults younger than 21 [but over 18] was unconstitutional… In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the 2nd Amendment ‘protects the right of young adults to keep and bear arms, which includes the right to purchase them.’

“‘America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army,’ Judge Ryan D. Nelson, an appointee of President Trump, wrote for the appeals court. ‘Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.’”* Obviously, this case will rise through the appellate system, but we fully expect the US Supreme Court, if it even accepts the case for consideration, will continue its pattern of rubber-stamping right-wing policies.

For all those same radical right-wingers, who want to shut our border to Latin American “brown” asylum seekers fleeing cartel violence, they turn a blind eye to why these innocents are terrified: millions of guns, especially semi-automatic (easily converted to full automatic) guns, manufactured in the United States (over 95% of cartel weapons come from the US… illegally). Wholesale slaughter, unbridled government corruption yielding control to those cartels, with bullets flying over everything from punishment to turf wars. There is only one legal gun store in Mexico, and the process to buy a single weapon takes about three years.

As I have blogged before, US gunmakers (which proliferate in blue Connecticut and Massachusetts) have openly catered to Latin American “buyers” with marketing materials and even engravings of famous Latin American shooters on the weapons themselves. It got so bad that last August, the Mexican government filed suit in a Massachusetts federal district court – Estados Unidos Mexicanos vs Smith & Wesson, Barrett, Ruger, Colt et al – to stop the trade and hold the gunmakers financially responsible for the gun havoc in Mexico, demanding massive compensatory and punitive damages yet to be determined. Large-scale purchases from unregulated US gun shows, focused purchases in states with the lowest level of checks on gun sales and from a huge but unregulated informal trade with private gunowners, have fueled the cartels’ rise to power.

Red states have so loosened the right of citizens to carry weapons, openly in most and concealed without a permit in many, such that the July 9, 2021, Louisville [Ky] Courier Journal carried this page one banner headline: “You can't bring your own mask into the Kentucky Capitol, but you can still bring your gun.” The above picture shows non-governmental protestors carrying assault weapons into the Kentucky State Capitol building. Except for nations at war, no other country in the world allows such easy and open access to guns, especially not military grade assault weapons that are not even appropriate for use in permitted hunting; they are designed to be people killers.

Still, once an organization created to teach gun safety adding a paid lobbying wing for gunmakers in the mid-1970s, the NRA and its wildly successful marketing and litigation efforts have produced a nation with almost as many guns as residents. Even as statistics continue to show that for every 35 civilian gun homicides, only 1 is deemed justifiable, the NRA continues to promulgate the myth that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” California has been a particularly favorite NRA target. As the NRA fights restrictions on guns and efforts to track gun homicides. Writing for the May 10th Los Angeles Times/Trace, Will Van Sant explains:

“California has long played a pivotal role in the study of gun violence, maintaining a unique repository of detailed information on gun owners that it shares with researchers… The National Rifle Assn. and other gun rights groups have filed lawsuits challenging that long-established practice. The lawsuits — which come as researchers confront an uptick in gun- related injuries, driven by a surge in homicides — were filed a year after the NRA’s research director acknowledged at a private meeting that the group’s opposition to gathering such data has severely hampered gun violence studies in the United States.

“With narrow exceptions, all firearms transactions in California must go through licensed dealers, who relay information on purchasers — including name, address and date of birth — to the California Department of Justice… For more than 30 years, the department has shared this data with public health researchers, who have used it to try to untangle the connections between gun ownership and homicides, suicides and other violence. They say this base-line information is key to understanding the risks and benefits of having a gun and, ultimately, to reducing injuries and deaths.

“‘California is special,’ said David Studdert, a professor and gun researcher at Stanford Law School who focuses on the intersection of law and public health. ‘It’s not possible to do this kind of work elsewhere in the country. You need to be at the individual and household level to make the connection between the gun and a violent outcome. You can’t measure what you can’t see.’

“In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a law that formalized standing practice and authorized the Department of Justice to share the data with accredited researchers… This prompted the NRA and other gun rights groups to file their lawsuits — one in state court and one in federal court — to end the arrangement.” Seriously… I think we just found that “bad guy.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and as dangerous a gun violence is in the United States, the proliferation of illegal US-made weapons in Latin America has created unlivable cartel ultra-violence, pushing terrified residents to flee their homes to escape the resulting carnage.

*P.S.  Since the blog was written, what appears to be a racially motivated hate crime just raised the number of US mass shootings. Of those shot on May 14th in Buffalo, NY at a grocery store in a predominantly African American neighborhood, 11 were Black, 2 were White. At least ten died. The shooter, White, was… oh 18… and used a military assault rifle. Kind blows up Judge Ryan D. Nelson’s reinstatement of California’s “under 21” gun control” law, huh? Like most of these radical anti-gun control trolls.