Bullets for God and Country, But Not for Hunting?

 

"There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons”

Then California Gov. Ronald Reagan in May 1967

"We will not allow anti-gun politicians and elitist billionaires to jump on the back of a horrible tragedy and blame good people for an act of pure evil… We will always defend our right to defend ourselves. And no one is going to take that away on my watch. No one is going to take that away as long as NRA stands and fights for freedom."

NRA CEO, Wayne LaPierre, August 2019

Funny how numbers show the opposite of NRA claims. Let’s look beyond the statistic that tells us that of 35 civilian shootings in the United States, only one on average is deemed legally justifiable. Here is what a government sponsored study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH) tells us about keeping a firearm in the home (ostensibly for self-defense):

“Data from a US mortality follow-back survey were analyzed to determine whether having a firearm in the home increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or number of guns in the home. Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method (adjusted odds ratio = 31.1, 95% confidence interval: 19.5, 49.6). Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.”

Every time there is a mass shooting, you get quotes from the NRA and the politicians who fear them (or cherish their campaign contributions) that mirror the above LaPierre remark. Indeed, the NRA not only champions weapons everywhere for “self-defense,” has successfully lobbied Congress to defund gun homicide research (e.g., the 1996 Dickey Amendment which is still law to this day), but it maintains that citizens are justified in taking up arms against what they believe is a repressive government. Since 2008, accelerating during the Trump years, red state gun laws have relaxed any notion of gun control, and recent Congressional efforts in response to the Buffalo and Uvalde killings – see my recent Small Band Aids for Massive Hemorrhaging blog for the details – are pitifully underwhelming.

What is sorely lacking in existing and proposed federal gun control legislation is the removal of unpermitted concealed carry laws, ending general open carry laws and the “too easy” excuse of “stand your ground” statutes to justify what would otherwise be criminal homicide and, most of all, the complete ban of military-grade assault weapons and oversized magazines (of which AR-15s are the architype… with an estimated 15 million such firearms in civilian homes). These latter weapons, easily converted into fully automatic long guns, have absolutely no justifiable use as hunting guns… unless you are slaughtering an entire herd.

A normal AR-15 clip holds thirty rounds, when even without the fully-automatic-add, can fire the entire magazine in well under a minute. It can be replaced in seconds with a second clip… or you can save the effort and just use a heavier 250 round magazine. Semiautomatic means the trigger needs to be pulled for each shot, while fully automatic allows the shooter to hold the trigger and unleash a full spray of bullets.

The bullets for assault weapons are designed for a maximum kill zone. They carry a larger charge in the cartridge, which make them accelerate faster, go farther and much more powerfully. The bullet itself is intended to roll over, end-over-end, to ensure that the target is either killed or totally debilitated, a defined military goal. Most ordinary firearms do not carry that impact… and their bullets, while deadly, fire in a straight line. The above chart shows bullet action (relative explosive power) from a normal gun at the top, an AR-15 in the middle and a shotgun at the bottom. The differences to the human body are alarming.

Laura Ramirez-Feldman, writing for Yahoo! News (June 9th), explains why such assault weapons, with those bullets designed specifically to kill people, are particularly and gruesomely deadly: “‘This is a gun whose purpose it is to shoot a lot of high-caliber bullets very, very quickly and do a lot of damage,’ Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, said on MSNBC earlier this month.

“Dr. Bindi Naik-Mathuria, a pediatric trauma surgeon at Baylor College of Medicine, told Yahoo News that injuries from this type of weapon are ‘almost unsurvivable, essentially,’ because of the significant damage the bullets cause to the victims… Naik-Mathuria, who is also a fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, told Yahoo News that some of her colleagues treated patients of the Uvalde school shooting, but that few of the victims survived. ‘They received very few patients, because unfortunately, this is what happens with assault weapons,’ she said.

“She explained that ‘the blast effect, or the cavitation effect’ that a handgun shot causes is not as wide and devastating to internal organs as the one inflicted by high-velocity weapons such as the AR-15 and similar rifles. ‘When you see handguns, you often just see a little hole on the outside on both sides; shotguns, which are a little bit higher velocity, a little bit bigger. But assault weapons, it's much bigger,’ she said, adding that as a bullet from this type of weapon penetrates the body, it typically creates a large cavity that can cause significant bleeding from vessels and completely destroy soft tissue, as well as organs.

“‘The organs, for example, like the liver or the spleen, that aren't very elastic, they can't handle that. They would basically rupture,’ Naik-Mathuria said… She added that the reason the AR-15 is so deadly is that victims are hit by more than one bullet, with multiple injuries at a time.” Smaller victims, like children, do not stand a chance, as Uvalde evidences. To the argument that an assault weapon ban would only leave such guns in the hands of criminals, I have to remind us all that every single jurisdiction (state and country) that has introduced meaningful gun control has experienced a significant reduction in violent criminal activity.

In 1996, after a mass shooting, Australia banned most guns (paying owners when they turned in their weapons)… and the gun homicide rate plunged. We need to stop the insanity… not of the mentally ill with guns… but a society that believes assault weapons in civilian hands is a benefit to our entire nation. Or we can just watch more children mowed down, bystanders picked off and political radicals justify mass killings (often suicide message) with little or no change. If there are AR-15s out there, shooters will find them… one way or other.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are not going to reduce the explosion of innocents dying from gun violence unless we backout the recent spate of progun laws and purge assault weapons and oversized magazines from our nation… it can and must be done!