Number One with a Bullet

 

This blog is not about any one particular recent mass shooting using a military grade semiautomatic assault rifle. It is about all of them, the increase in such shootings and the bland “thoughts and prayers” acceptance by the American public that such events are routine parts of American life. That helpless children are increasingly the victims does not seem to matter. Just look at what even our police face.

Let’s start with the proposition that too many rank-and-file police officers feel ill-equipped against a public, from gang members to mass shooters to ordinary citizens who might want to take the law into their own hands, that has way too many more assault firearms than they do. We already know from the GOP response to the violent assault on the Capitol on 1/6/21 that they support angry mobs over uniformed police officers and that they do not trust a federal police force that is (or used to be until recently) comprised mainly of conservative Republican agents: the FBI. “Police departments that once deferred to SWAT teams wielding military-style rifles for active-shooter situations have in recent years started equipping the rank and file with AR-15s and other long guns, as those weapons have flooded neighborhoods and communities.

“Many officers welcomed the change, some even buying their own AR-15s and using them for sport or hunting when not on duty. But police often say they still feel outgunned and ill-prepared — struggling to balance demands that they avoid using force against the knowledge that at any moment they could be called to stop a mass killing in progress.

“Those potentially conflicting impulses reflect a policing paradox deepened by America’s obsession with the AR-15: The weapon can, depending on the circumstances, be an officer’s greatest threat or a potentially lifesaving tool… ‘Police academies often aren’t well equipped to train with long guns,’ said Pete Kraska, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University who studies police militarization. Years ago, he argued that law enforcement agencies were adding tactical weapons unnecessarily. But with both mass killings and open-carry laws on the rise, he said, ‘It’s now a credible argument to say we have to engage in an arms race because we’re outgunned.’” Robert Kelmko writing for the March 27th Washington Post.

The nation is roughly equally divided on passing a new ban on semiautomatic assault weapons. But in Congress, the GOP has nary an elected member who would vote for such a measure, claiming “Second Amendment” rights would never permit such legislation. “One indication of how far apart lawmakers are is a bill introduced last month by Republican Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama to make the AR-15 assault-style weapon the ‘National Gun of America.’… Fellow House Republicans Rep. Lauren Boebert and George Santos were seen wearing AR-15 lapel pins.” ABC News, March 29th. But such bans have worked; fatalities were down when they were in place.

For those who cannot imagine a federal assault weapon ban (in the hands of non-military and non-law enforcement persons) as possible, rest assured there was one in the modern era, from 1994 until it expired without renewal under a 10-year sunset provision. As Axios summarized (6/3/22): The statute was passed in 1994 after a series of shootings in Stockton, California, and on 101 California Street in 1993… The ban called for a federal criminal code ‘to prohibit the manufacture, transfer, or possession of a semiautomatic assault weapon.’… It included more than a dozen specific firearms and guns with certain features… The law also banned ‘transfer or possession’ of large-capacity ammunition devices that could carry more than 10 bullets.”

Immediately after the ban expired, the sale of semiautomatic firearms exploded. Today, it is estimated that there are somewhere between 20 and 30 million AR-15-style military grade such assault rifles in civilian hands… out of about 350 million overall civilian guns. In effect, one out of every 20 adult Americans has an AR-15-style assault rifle. The notion of “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” dies in the face of mass shooting statistics and the fact that out of every 30 gun homicides, on average, only one is deemed “justifiable.”

Assault rifles take a greater toll than any other gun. “Adil Haider, a trauma and critical care surgeon who directs the Center for Surgery and Public Health at BWH. He and his colleagues aimed to address that gap in their study, published in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association. ‘The biggest take-home message is that in an active shooter incident, an assailant with a semiautomatic rifle may be able to hurt and kill about twice the number of people compared to if they had a non-semiautomatic rifle or a handgun,’ he says.” Scientific American (9/11/18). With updated statistics, CBS News (March 29th) says five times as many people!

What does a bullet from such weapons look like? Let start with the fact that an automatic version of the AR-15 was once standard issue for Navy Seals. The idea is to be able to debilitate your enemy so they cannot fight back. “The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child… ‘It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect,’ said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital…During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue ‘literally just crumbled into your hands.’” N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza and Manuel Canales writing for the March 27th Washington Post.

Death by gunshot is now the leading killer of children in the United States. Roughly 20% of such fatalities. It is increasingly clear that the proliferation of assault weapons has increased the overall death toll, that no other country on earth (that is not at war) has anywhere near the homicide statistics that we do, that most shooters acquire their guns legally and that it is not simply because we have so much mental illness. I seriously doubt that the United States has a statistically vastly greater pool of mentally ill people than anywhere else. It is equally clear that the minimalist approvals of laws requiring more background checks, more filtering out those who should not have guns and raising the age limit for gun ownership have done much of anything to stop that explosion of mass killings, many at schools, using the mass shooter’s weapon of choice, an AR-15 style semiautomatic assault rifle.

I’m Peter Dekom, and until we cherish our children more than guns, expect a lot more innocent American lives to be lost to assault weapons.