Since the most recent horrific massacre of school children in the Newtown School, Sandy Hook, Connecticut, Friday, December 14, 2012, there has been the expected spate of media articles and pundit opinions in all levels and types of media. Once again the heated question of gun control or outright confiscation has found a conspicuous place in the list of important national debates in the United States. And once again, very little is going to be done. It is my contention that we are having the wrong debate. Guns are not going to be controlled or confiscated to the degree that no evil or mentally unbalanced perpetrator can obtain one or more of them to commit mass murder. Instead, we should narrow our focus to the question of how can our school children, theater goers, mall shoppers, or any other people who gather in groups be made safe.
I am seventy-two years old and grew up in the West. I have a long history with guns, target shooting, and hunting. My house has trophy heads; my gun safe is full; and I carry a concealed weapon as a necessary self-protection from cougars and coyotes in the hills around my home and occasionally for social forays into cities. I am a member of the National Rifle Association. I spent ten years in the navy during the Viet Nam war. I have never shot at or killed anyone; no one in my family has ever used a gun in a crime or had a gun accident. Nevertheless, I am an advocate of serious measures to protect people from violence including select measures of gun control. I would like to share my seemingly conflicting opinions because I strongly wish to see a safer society in my country and especially for my grandchildren in elementary school, high school, and college. I also believe that the second amendment to the US constitution guarantees the right of law abiding citizens to bear arms and that the self-protection and sport value of certain weapons is a privilege that should be protected.
The ever recurrent national debate is in full swing at the time of this blog post and has descended, as it always does, to a partisan political issue. There is the “money” congress and the “gas” congress. This issue, like abortion and immigration, is a gas congress vote-getting project for both sides of the debate. Facts, factoids, truths, lies, and statistics fill the airwaves and the Ethernet. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics; and I will take up some space here to deal with statistics.
Do We the People have a violence and gun problem: Yes, we do.
15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. An organization called Mother Jones has tracked and mapped gun use and shooting incidents, especially massacres, in the United States for at least thirty years. From 1982 until the hideous crimes in Newtown, Connecticut in December, 2012, there have been 62 mass murders with firearms involving thirty states all the way from Massachusetts and Connecticut to Utah and Hawaii. Twenty-four incidents occurred in the seven years since 2006 alone. 90% of the guns used were illegal; 9% were illegal; and in the last 1%, investigators failed to make a firm determination. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy, a relatively objective think-tank, reported that violent crime and murder rates have fallen in the United States but that mass murders have increased somewhat. Between 2006 and 2011, the general murder rate declined by 19% to a low of 4.7 per 100,000 people in the population. There is controversy about whether gun-based homicides are increasing, and most investigators do not see any major increase at least, particularly when the rapid increase in the population is taken into consideration.
The evidence for mass killings with guns—or any other form of lethality—is quite clear that there is no increase, in fact, the opposite. During the first decade of the 2000s, mass killings with guns dropped to the lowest rate in fifty years. The peak incidence year for mass killings was 1929. In the decade of the 90s there were 42 massacres, and there were 26 in the first ten years of the 2000 era.
There does seem to be some increase of late. All one has to do is turn on any news program on any television or radio program or read any national newspaper on any given day to see the alarming tendency in our country. The Newtown School event resulted in the second largest mass killing of innocent civilians in American history. Gun deaths by homicide, suicide, or accident peaked at 37,666 in 1993 before declining to a low of 28,393 in 2000, the data show. Since then the total has risen to 31,328 in 2010, an increase of 2,935, or eight more victims a day.
Mass murders are uncommon if not outright rare, but any sentient person in the United States has to be aware that shooting injuries and deaths are not. On average, 85 Americans are shot to death every day; 53 of them suicides and 32 homicides. Every day, one of those killed by firearms is age 14 or younger and still more children die in accidents, suicides, and from homicide and neglect. More than 200 people go to U.S. emergency rooms every day with gunshot wounds. In 2008 alone, the U.S. had over 12,000 firearm-related homicides. An embarrassing and tragic fact is that of the world’s 23 most developed, best educated, and most affluent countries, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost twenty fold greater that of the other 22. The same year, all of Japan—a nation with the most stringent gun laws and the fewest guns per capita—experienced just eleven gun murders. This was fewer than were killed at the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting alone. The University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Centers for Disease Control estimate the annual cost of gun violence in U.S. society to be $100 billion.
According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shooting deaths in 2015 will probably rise to almost 33,000, and those related to autos will decline to about 32,000, based on the 10-year average trend. That prognostication is probably not far off the mark, but it does not pertain directly to the mass murders in schools, shopping malls, theaters, and other places where people gather for public interaction. There is a significant anti-gun bias in media reporting with pro-gun advocates being given short-shrift; for example, almost nothing is ever reported about individuals who protect themselves and others by producing a gun—yet rarely having to resort to killing to achieve that protection. There is a non-stop barrage of “news” mixed with opinion about the evils of guns every time an incident occurs. As indicated above, the anti-gun bias is loath to comment on the decline in massacres or to the increasing population of the United States. This blog post relates not to murders in general but to mass murders, and it is the opinion of the writer that there are active, positive, real-world things that can be done to prevent them.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) based in Fairfax, Virginia, and other pro-gun advocates point to Israel and Switzerland as exemplars of a society where guns abound but the violent crime rate is low. Both countries have requirements for at least certain households to keep and maintain in readiness fully automatic assault rifles, and concealed weapons licenses and an assortment of serious firearms are easily obtainable by law-abiding citizens. In fact, the proponents of the argument say, the presence of so many guns is an actual deterrent to crime. A decade ago, that argument was correct; but times have changed. Now gun ownership among citizens of both countries has decreased to the point that neither have high levels of gun ownership as a personal choice, at least in comparison to gun ownership rates in the United States. Both countries now require citizens to have a reason to have a gun, i.e. gun ownership is a privilege, not a right. One needs a reason. Further, gun owners are required to go back to the permitting authority every six months to assure them the reason given is still valid. In Switzerland the laws are done canton by canton (province). Everyone in Switzerland serves in the army, and formerly the cantons required their citizen-soldiers to have the guns at home. Over the past decade, the Swiss government has adopted an active policy of moving guns into depots. The Swiss are, by culture, very law-abiding, and the removal of their guns has not been accompanied by any apparent level of protest.
Would We the People be free of massacres if guns were somehow removed in toto from private ownership? No, unfortunately, we would not.
Violence is as American as apple pie and always has been. The massacre by terrorists on September 11, 2001 involved airplanes. The non-gun violence statistics are appalling from that heinous event. The total number killed in New York was 2,753. The number of firefighters and paramedics killed was 343, NYPD officers 23, and Port Authority police officers 37. 115 foreign nationals were killed. No remains of 1,717 victims were ever found. 1,609 people lost a spouse or partner. 3,051 children lost a parent. An estimated 422,000 New Yorkers suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder as a result of 9/11. 1,506,124 tons of debris were removed from the site. An estimated amount of insurance paid worldwide related to 9/11 was $40.2 billion. It cost $7.5 billion to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways; the cost of cleanup was $600 million; and FEMA spent $970 million on the emergency. The U.S. economy was devastated: In New York City, alone, there were approximately 430,000 jobs lost and $2.8 billion in lost wages over the three months following the 9/11 attacks, and 18,000 small businesses were destroyed. When the NYSE reopened it recorded a point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average of 684.8. Indirectly, the 9/11 attacks led to the war in Afghanistan with a cost of more than $5 trillion to the time of this blog post.
The American terrorist, Timothy McVee, perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in middle of Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It remained the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Wikipedia, The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage. That act of terrorism was not a mass shooting; it is no less a mass murder for the lack of gunfire.
The statistics above on guns do not include killing and wounding by knives—poisons such as strychnine, arsenic, and Fumitoxin pellets which, when mixed with water, release deadly phosphine gas—blunt force trauma, strangulation, intentional starvation, arson murder, torture, carbon monoxide poisoning, being thrown from a height, or intentional vehicular murder. In 2003, an 86-year-old man mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal of his car instead of the brake and then panicked, plowing into an open-air market in Santa Monica. Ten people were killed and 63 injured. In Los Angeles on August 29, 2012, a 100-year-old man backed his car on to a sidewalk and hit 11 people, including nine children, across from an elementary school in South Los Angeles just after classes had ended. Four children were critically injured. It is apparent that those deaths and injuries were accidental, but cars, like airplanes could easily be a means of causing something of a mass murder if an evil or mentally impaired individual lacked a gun but had homicidal intentions.
I am told that Mexico has triple the homicide rate of that in the United States and a significant percentage of them are by knife owing to the poverty of the people which limits their access to guns. In June 2001, a 38-year-old unemployed man, Mamoru Takuma, burst onto an elementary school in Osaka and stabbed eight children to death with a knife and injured 13 other students and two teachers. There is a news story that a school invader in Japan used a katana sword to behead 17 children. If true, it was the worst school-related killing in Japan’s history. If not, the 2001 stabbings qualify for that dubious honor. Japan has extremely stringent gun restrictions and negligible homicides by firearms. During the second week of January, 2012 there was an attack on 22 students in a Chinese elementary school by a disturbed man wielding a knife. None of the children or teachers were killed. On August 27, 2012, Taliban militants beheaded 15 Afghan men and two women with swords because they participated in a party where music was played. No guns were used or needed.
It would be difficult to forget the murder of innocent Japanese subway riders by cultists employing sarin gas. The sarin attack on several Tokyo subways, was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo cult on Monday, March 20, 1995. A single drop of sarin the size of a pinhead can kill an adult. On the day of the attack, ambulances transported 688 patients and nearly five thousand people reached hospitals by other means. Hospitals saw 5,510 patients, seventeen of whom were deemed critical, thirty-seven severe, and 984 moderately ill with vision problems. Eight people died, and most of the remaining patients were well enough to go home the following day, and within a week only a few critical patients remained in hospital. Japan has gone to considerable lengths to ensure that such a poison attack never occurs again. The potential for using sarin to cause a catastrophe if employed by determined and better equipped and trained terrorists is incalculable in a crowded urban society.
I witnessed almost all of the inhumanities of man to fellow man during my medical and surgical training and during my service in the navy in the Viet Nam era and included them in my two books, SAGA of a NEUROSURGEON, a novel in six books, and LAST PHOENIX, a novel of the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Southeast Asia. Take away guns, and there are other tools. I am fully confident that killers will find a way.
Why is America so violent, and why do we have so many killings and massacres involving guns? The answer is convoluted and unclear—or unproved.
In the short run, it probably is not particularly important why a small fringe of our population is so violent. At least for the purposes of this blog post, the fundamental issue remains: how do we prevent further massacres? In the long run—over decades—perhaps our society will become less vehement about the “right” to bear any and every weapon and will agree to put the most dangerous firearms in a certified and managed depository in a gun range.
There are multiple hypotheses about why we kill innocents with guns (or knives, or poisons or with arson) but no scientific theory that holds up against evidence to the contrary. Many people, especially parents, blame the desensitization of our youth by long exposure to violence in the media. Others blame the dissolution of the traditional family. Still others blame the NRA, gun manufacturers, arms dealers, and an ignorant gun-loving populace.
For the most part, the killings do not appear to be revenge killings, although youth who have been bullied are sometimes involved in both accomplished or thwarted violent attempts. It is speculated, but unproved, that the mass murderer may be delusional or otherwise mentally or psychologically impaired and has the motive—almost incomprehensible to the rest of us—centered on the desire to have a few days of fame (or infamy) and publicity derived from them even though the shooter is more likely than not to be dead and unable to enjoy his fifteen minutes of notoriety. Most of the rest of us attribute such thinking to a delusion. There may be something to the apparent trend that each new attacker is seeking to top the one that came before in some way in a clear bid for a place in the evil hall of fame. Despite their own pundits voicing the opinion that the action may be generated by the desire for such fame, the media continues to indulge a twisted obsession by unbalanced people. The general public overwhelmingly believes that the reward for this behavior should be anonymity and be awarded instead the label of unstable loser. Most rational people think that approach would cause the attacks to taper off.
We blame our significant population of mentally ill citizens, mentally challenged individuals, and lenient courts who treat them carelessly. Mental illness does appear to be one of the most likely factors. A survey by Mother Jones found that at least 38 of the 62 mass shooters in the past three decades “displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings.” Nevertheless, the accumulation of careful scientific studies leads to the disheartening conclusion that researchers still do not fully understand the exact connection between the mental illness and crime—especially mass murder. That is an important deficit in our understanding because we cannot accurately predict which mentally ill person will snap and go on a shooting spree, and we cannot lock up every mentally ill patient simply because he or she has a psychiatric condition. Advocacy groups for the mentally ill such as the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) bristle at any attempt to stigmatize mentally ill people by declaring them incompetent to handle firearms, and label such attempts as invasions of privacy and infractions against the civil rights of the mentally ill. They generally strive to prevent such characterizations on a social and legal basis and oppose serious gun handling limitations.
We blame the medications they take for their psychiatric illnesses. Careful observes note that anti-depressants and similar drugs were introduced in the 1980s and billions of pills have been used by millions of Americans. It may not be coincidence that the spate of massacres in the United States showed a crescendo rise at about that same time. These medications have helped many disturbed people to have better lives but have also been clearly linked to homicidal ideation—thoughts of murder and suicide. In 2010 a publication from Harvard Medical School and a Wake Forest research team found that 31 drugs were statistically significantly connected with actual violence against others.
Finally, it is common to blame government for failing to pass effective legislation to control guns, police forces for failing to pursue the laws already on the books, and ourselves for lacking courage to stand up to big business and the rich and uncompromising gun lobby.
There are certainly cultural differences among the different regions of the country. The southern states, roughly those which seceded from the union prior to the War Between the States, have the highest gun possession per capita, the highest membership in the NRA, the most so-called assault rifles, the highest violent crime rates, the lowest educational achievement, and the lowest socioeconomic status of the several US regions. American cultures and the society in general differ strongly from other nations. We are more diverse and less homogeneous, less bound to tradition, less socialistic, more independent, more affluent, more paranoid, less willing to obey the dictates of governments with which we do not agree or to obey laws that we consider inappropriate or plain wrong. Guns were taken from the British, the Australians, the Germans, and the Japanese with very little objection and with mixed results on their crime rates. In the matter of gun control and obedience to unpopular laws, we are not British, Australian, German, or Japanese. There are estimated to be some 300 million guns in the United States in the hands and gun safes of stubborn citizens—1.8 per adult—who are not going give all of them up to any governmental unit.
Is it as simple as the availability of guns being the most important factor as most anti-gun advocates like Piers Morgan, the television personality, would have us believe? It is impossible to verify how many guns are owned legally or illegally in the United States, Johns Hopkins University reported. A survey in 2005 estimated the number of firearms around 300 million. In late 2012 and early 2013, following the terrible school attack in Sandy Hook and the threats of gun control measures to be enacted by governments, gun dealers have recorded all time record sales of all sorts of firearms throughout the nation. AR-15 semi-automatic rifles have continued to sell at rates that tax the ability of gun stores and manufacturers to keep up—many stores report AR-15 sales in one day that exceed sales during an average month previously. The percentage of gun-owning households has fallen since 2004 to 32 percent in 2010, according to the General Social Survey by NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey indicates that there are at least 1.8 firearms per household, in at least 70 million households nationwide, Tom Smith, the General Social Survey’s principal investigator, reported in a statement that antedated the abrupt rise in purchase rates as the nation enters 2013. Sociologists studying graphs of gun ownership plotted against acts of violence reached the following conclusion: The most striking features of the data are how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries—except possibly Estonia and Mexico
Researchers have found a fairly clear-cut connection between the availability of guns and homicide; more guns generally tend to lead to more murder, and guns make any mass attack far deadlier than attacks with knives. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found there to be substantial evidence that more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states. This finding is certainly not infallible: consider the regional differences in the United States. Gun owners in the West do not murder as often nor have many victims as gun owners in the South. Israelis and Swiss have a fairly high gun ownership per capita somewhat comparable to the United States, but their murder rate is far smaller. Mexicans have more murders and fewer guns.
None of these hypotheses alone appears to be a complete or even an adequate explanation of causation for the violence that prevails in America, especially for the gun-based rampages resulting in mass murder; perhaps a combination of several or all of them is responsible. An article in the American Journal of Public Health, 2010, came to that conclusion. They stated: “To understand and prevent rampage violence, we need to acknowledge that current discipline-based violence research is not well suited to this specific challenge. There are numerous important, unanswered research questions that can inform policies designed to prevent rampage violence.”
To be continued….
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Carl Douglass – Author
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