Murder, Inc.

We do love to help people murder people. If America were to list its hobbies, after we run past all the standard team and individual sports that we love to watch (and sometimes participate in), maybe adding watching the boob-tube(s), we really have tell it like it is. We love guns more than our children or our family, more than our cherished religious institutions, more than our schools, more than our personal property, more than food, clothing or shelter. Somebody (guess who?) totally fabricated the intention of the Second Amendment (quoted above), a constitutional guarantee that made sure that our citizen soldiers – trained and ready to defend our nation as part of a well-regulated militia – were able to own the guns they would need to mount that defense. That’s it. Historians have pretty much sustained this hard, cold fact.

According to the framers of the Bill of Rights, individuals do not have blanket right to own weapons of every sort and kind outside of this rather narrow bandwidth of well-regulated militia. Further, if we can regulate ownership of fully-automated machine guns – which are indeed banned everywhere in the U.S. except for police and military purposes – we have actually embraced the notion of limiting gun ownership. If the Second Amendment were a blanket right to own guns, those laws would be unconstitutional (the Supreme Court tells us they are not). So what’s going on? Why can we have Sandy Hook, Aurora, Portland… 74 school shootings in the last 18 months (according to Everytown for Gun Safety) occurring almost every week?

Instead of finding ways to take guns away from crazies and make firearms infinitely more difficult to get, the only changes we are seeing are expanded “stand your ground” and “home as a castle” license to kill, and “open carry” statutes in states primarily in the South and West? “After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, President Obama promised ‘meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.’ His gun reform push, focused on a background check measure that had overwhelming public support, failed in the Senate last year, and Congress hasn't passed any other gun legislation.” Huffington Post (which also presented the above map), June 12^th.

Why are people outraged when someone suggests that our access to guns needs strong new limits? There’s no open-ended constitutional right to have guns, but the brilliance the National Rifle Association’s marketing has convinced gun owners and legislators alike that the Second Amendment stands for a blanket right to bear arms. It doesn’t and never has.

Speaking of “blanket rights,” there’s one business that’s cleaning up from all the mess! “The alarming rate of school shootings across the country appears to have added an unsettling new item to parents' list of ‘back to school’ items: bulletproof armor for their children. Among such items, the Bodyguard Blanket, a portable, bulletproof covering for children, has seen its sales exceed its manufacturer's expectations in less than two weeks on the market.

“Stan Schone, managing partner at manufacturer ProTecht, [reported that] consumer response to the product has ‘far exceeded our wildest expectations’ in the 10 days that the blanket has been available for purchase.” Huffington Post, June 12^th. At $1,000 a pop (average per student annual expenditure in our public schools is $11,000), it’s pricey. When school districts can’t foot the bill, mommies and daddies seem more than willing… but seriously, why in the world do parents even think this is necessary?! Hey, people might attack with knives too, and don’t we need to deal with that?

Data tells us that the choice of weapons in the hands of one with a murderous heart impact the severity of the wounds and the number of casualties. “It's called ‘the instrumentality effect,’ and we owe the original scholarly findings (more than four decades old at this point) to the eminent University of California criminologist Franklin Zimring. Others, including [Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss, from Stanford and Duke, respectively], have validated and built upon his insights.

“The idea that the weapon matters emerges in studies of robberies and assaults. When committed with a gun, these crimes are far more likely to result in the victim's death than are similar violent crimes committed without a gun. For example, the likelihood that a victim will die when robbed by a firearm-wielding attacker is three times as high as when the victim faces an attacker bearing a knife and 10 times as high as when the attacker has another type of weapon. For victims injured in an assault, the likelihood of death is also greater when a gun is involved, especially in cases of domestic violence.” CNN.com, April 14^th.

Still you get the inane NRA mantras like, “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” (yet they oppose strong background checks) and the “only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” (yet pretty much have defined good guys as anyone who can get their hands on a legal weapon).

Yup, you are so much more likely to die in the U.S. from a domestic bullet, for which there is little control, than you are to be killed by a terrorist, for which we have spent hundreds of billions to prevent. “Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack -- by far the biggest in its history -- roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.

“Let's put that in context. That same year in the United States:

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·         71,372 died of diabetes.

·         29,573 were killed by guns.

·         13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.

“That's what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let's take a longer view. We'll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.

“Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

·         roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483 -- in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

·         roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.” The Atlantic, June 10^. 2013.

The First Amendment gives us the right to follow our religious believes. Apparently, the Second Amendment gives those who oppose those beliefs the right to own guns that they can use to vote their displeasure with a well-place bullet or two. “A priest was fatally shot at a Catholic church and another was left critically injured, Phoenix police said early [June 12^th].” NBC.com, June 12^th. Try and get gun reform through the House of Representatives. It’s not happening! Too many Americans, high on NRA stupid pills, don’t care about the mounting death-by-gun tolls, growing well-faster than at any time in the last 100 years, that seem to accelerate precisely at the same rate as state legislatures enable broader gun ownership, open carry laws, and ubiquitous access to guns that flow like the wind across state lines.

I’m Peter Dekom, and how would you feel about guns if your child were killed while sitting in a classroom?