“With me at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., no one will lay a finger on your firearms… They want to take away your guns while throwing open the jailhouse doors and releasing bloodthirsty criminals into your communities.”
Donald Trump addressing the NRA Convention on April 14th.
Fresh from the most recent spate of mass shootings in Tennessee and Kentucky, most GOP candidates addressing the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum in mid-April preferred a video presentation rather than an in-person appearance. The speakers were mostly fear oriented, tearing at blue states with purportedly out of control and rampant crime and finding ways to deflect from the obvious reality of “too many guns.”
Even though the crime statistics for San Francisco and New York City are lower than in those red state cities where the mass shooting took place, the theme of rising crime rates from lax blue states (and particularly those cities) combined with a chorus of the rising tide of gun control demands rang true to the NRA faithful gathered in Indianapolis. Trump and former Indiana Governor and VP, Mike Pence, were there in person. Pence declared that there wasn’t a gun problem, only a “crime problem.” “Mental illness” is the most cited cause.
Statistics tell us that only one out of every thirty US gun homicides is deemed “justifiable,” and the gun homicides after the 2004 expiration of our assault weapons ban began to soar. Still, to gun owners, it’s the NRA’s “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and that mythical “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” that still hold sway. Indeed, after several recent school shootings in red states, the recommendation that teachers be armed became a rallying cry, even as teachers balked at that suggestion. With virtually all countries who are not at war having only a small fraction of the civilian gun homicides that we report every year, blaming it all on “mental illness” suggests that the United States must have a vastly larger body of the mentally ill than any other nation on earth. Really?
Still, we have long since reached the reality of more guns in the United States than people, noting that gun ownership is concentrated in less than a third of our total population. Writing for the April 16th Los Angeles Times, Erika Smith, who attended the NRA event, writes: “Consider that the last three years have been the most profitable in modern history for gun manufacturers, even as the country has been plagued by mass shooting after mass shooting.
“In 2020, with widespread unease over the pandemic, sales to new owners hit an all-time high of 21 million, according to the trade group National Shooting Sports Foundation, which tracks applications for background checks. In 2021, the industry recorded its second-biggest year with sales of 18.5 million. Last year, sales fell to 16.4 million, but that’s still more than the 13 million sold in 2019.
“California, with our progressive politics and our stringent gun laws, was not exempt from this trend. Remember that line outside the Martin B. Retting gun shop in Culver City [in Los Angeles] that snaked around the block in 2020? According to researchers at UC Davis, 110,000 people in the state bought a gun in response to the pandemic that year — roughly 47,000 of whom were first-time owners…
“Despite what the NRA insists about needing guns to fend off a tyrannical government, living in a heavily armed society isn’t safe for anyone. As studies have shown and old-fashioned common sense will tell you, more guns just means more guns are likely to get stolen and more people are likely to get shot, both deliberately and accidentally… So it’s not at all surprising that deaths from firearms, both by homicide and, more often, by suicide, reached a record high in 2021, up 23% from 2019, before the pandemic and before we had so many guns floating around.
“But there’s data and then there are feelings. And feeling like the only one without a gun in a heavily armed society doesn’t exactly seem safe either… And so, 29% of Americans have purchased a gun to protect themselves or their families from gun violence, according to a recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Another 40% of Americans have taken a gun safety course or practiced shooting. I’m in the latter group, and I’ve met plenty of people in the former group in L.A. and Indianapolis…
“Charles Harrison, a pastor at Barnes United Methodist Church, has been doing crime intervention work for almost 25 years as president of the Indianapolis Ten Point Coalition… These days, most of the 10-year-olds he encounters have guns, not just the teens. Adults are so scared that some in his congregation have started carrying guns in their purses and under their suit jackets to church on Sundays… ‘They say, ‘Pastor, we know that you are for this nonviolence and that you are out there in the streets, trying to keep the peace,’ ’ Harrison said. ‘ ‘But Pastor, I gotta protect myself.’ ’ ” Clearly, the gun lobby has balked at the majority of Americans who do want better gun control… and has been wildly successful in creating the opposite reality.
We have an issue with all sorts of firearms. With an estimated 350 civilian guns (slightly fewer than 10% of that total being AR-15-style assault weapons), everyone in this country is at risk for being shot anytime, anywhere. The rising chorus of Americans’ demanding better gun control, combined with anger over judges’ attempting to effect a de facto national ban on abortions, augur badly for the GOP that is on the wrong side of popular sentiments on both issues. But then, there are vastly more guns and vastly fewer abortions, under legal mandates, in the US these days.
I’m Peter Dekom, and by the time we even think about reasonable gun control measures, there are just so many firearms in circulation that it might be too late.
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