Guns are not drugs (and other obvious thoughts)
As per our national usual, we’ve followed up “thoughts and prayers” with the arguments that gun control will never work because something something NRA blah blah…
“Guns are essential for home defense.”
In the first nine months of 2017, children under the age of four shot 43 people. “On average, someone gets shot by an American toddler a little more frequently than once a week, similar to previous years.” (Source: Washington Post.) By year’s end, at least 285 children under 17 had accidentally shot someone, and more than 70 accidental shooting deaths had been caused by children.
Here’s a map of the all the unintentional shootings by children so far in 2018. (There had been 31 as of midday on 2/18.)
Having guns around kids tends to make them less safe, not more so.
Not only do children access guns and accidentally (or intentionally) shoot people, adults accidentally shoot sneaking teenagers up past curfew, sleepwalking spouses, pets, and neighbors. And not all of those accidental shootings are even because the shooter mistook the victim for a “bad guy.”
Bullets travel, through furniture, windows, walls, and bodies. In all but the most isolated rural home, firing a gun inside carries the risk of injuring or killing someone walking their dog or riding their bike or playing outside, in the next apartment or condo, or standing in their kitchen.
“But the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Thriller writer (and author of an awesome trilogy of under-read fantasy books), Chris Holm pulls this argument apart nicely.
Here’s a quote from his post:
“ So how many were ended by armed civilians? Five, for a total of 3%, although four of those five were actually on-duty security guards. That’s right: out of 160 mass shootings examined by the FBI, only one ended favorably thanks to the intervention of an armed Samaritan. For those playing along at home, that works out to about 0.6%.”
To this, I’ll add and reiterate that the journal Pediatrics found an average of nearly 1300 children were killed by gun violence in the years between 2012 and 2014, and while there have been 138 people killed in school shootings since the group Gun Violence Archive started tracking school shootings in 2014, that’s a small number compared to the number injured or killed in homes and on streets due in part to improperly-stored firearms that end up in the hands of kids.
Speaking of kids and improperly-stored firearms, I used to work with kids in the juvenile justice system. Most were there for burglary, fighting, or drugs, but there were some who’d shot, stabbed, killed, or maimed. Something I learned from the burglary kids is how “bad guys with guns” get them. They’re stolen from homes without gun safes. That shotgun under the bed for “protection” ends up being sold to a potentially nefarious person to fund the thief’s life, whether that includes buying drugs or candy or just paying mom’s electric bill to get the power back on.
“If you ban guns, only bad guys will have them because they can still find them on the black market.”
I just mentioned this, but for those who skim, I’ll repeat it: Your improperly-stored firearms that make you feel safer as you sleep are the ones your boogeymen buy on the black market.
Don’t give me your “but I have an alarm” because teenage thieves know the response time of the local PD better than your alarm company. They know the alarm company calls you first and that they have time to shove the valuables out the window first. They also know portable stuff without serial numbers is best (think all that gold jewelry you meant to wear or sell yourself), but firearms can be used or sold easier than your new iPad.
And the locks and the hurricane-proof windows and…? Yeah, they know how to get around it if they think you’ve got something good in there. And that NRA bumper sticker? Good chance you’ve got some pricey guns in there.
Beyond that, do you know how to buy a black market gun? Do you know how much they cost?
I want military-grade weapons to be harder to buy than toilet paper. Sure, a few determined souls might still get one, but I want them to have to work for it. I want there to be multiple spots along their journey for someone to find their plan and intervene; multiple snags that might stop them; multiple times for them to rethink their decision, get help, or outgrow their anger.
I want cost to be a factor. I want them to have to drive to a shady neighborhood or talk to a creepy militia nut in the parking lot of an old warehouse. Pulling up to a gun show parking lot with a few hundred bucks is way too fucking easy. I want them to have to figure out how to stockpile four times that much cash and worry about being robbed or I want them to have to figure out bitcoin. It may not stop them all, but it’ll weed out the “woke up pissed about Tuesdays and stupid bitches” guys.
I also want ammunition sales limited. If you want to shoot 17 or 20 or 60 people with a particular kind of weapon, I want you to have to stockpile ammunition for so many months the odds of you carrying out this shooting go down to the same chance of you winning PowerBall.
Barring that, I want you to have to prove you know what the hell you’re doing before you’re sold ammo. No one should have a concealed carry or open carry permit unless they can prove they know how to use a damn gun, that they train to use the damn gun, that they understand the laws about the damn gun, that they aren’t too violent to be trusted with a gun, and that they’re sane enough to have a gun — and they should have to re-certify every damn year. And I want you to have to show that certification to buy the ammunition. Domestic violence arrests? No, you don’t need bullets because you shouldn’t have a gun to put them in.
“We ban cocaine and people still do it.”
Cocaine, when deadly, kills the person using it. It’s unfortunate and we should probably have a better system for dealing with mental health in this country so fewer people would use illegal, unregulated drugs to treat things probably best managed with therapy and medication, but cocaine doesn’t mass murder innocent bystanders.
Oh, sure, there was the Cocaine Cowboy days of drive-bys and bricks on the news, but the majority of violence associated with cocaine (and other illegal drugs) is connected to trafficking, not end users, and most of that violence is committed with guns, so this argument smells like sick-cat farts on two levels.
Even if we agree that cocaine use makes a certain percentage of users more violent than non-users, this goes back to what means they have to commit that violence. Are they limited to fists? Broken beer bottles? Rocks? Knives? Or are we assuming they’re all on a sustained cocaine binge that involves bomb-making?
“Knives kill people, too. Here’s that news story from China!”
The key phrase in all stories about the Kunming attack is this: “A group of knife-wielding men attacked a train station…” It wasn’t a lone knife-enthusiast. It was a group, organized and committed to killing as many as they could in a public place. No, banning knives would not have prevented that tragedy, but let’s consider how many more that group of five could have killed if they were carrying AR-15s instead of knives.
Done thinking about that?
Want to link another knife story from China? How about one more recent? One death. One is too many, yes, but those people running and “flipping tables” would have all still been fairly easy targets if they killer had been armed with an AR-15 instead of a knife.
As that article points out, they still have disturbed people determined to act out violence because of “personal discontent” or “grudges against society,” but they’ve also tried to increase security in schools and prevent the rash of school attacks they experienced in 2010. School attacks have declined while in the US, they appear to be rising each year.
Seriously, I looked at the data in that chart and the numbers injured in school shootings went from a monthly average of 2.25 a month in 2014 to 10.3 in 2017. In 2018, we’re at an average of 25 injured a month and February isn’t even over. Between 2015–2017, an average of 2–3 people (closer to 3 because the mean is 2.783) were killed in school shootings each month.
Are we okay with that? Really? And our argument is “China has knives”? Really?
“But, but, I just like guns. They’re cool.”
Go read this. Because holy fuck is that not a good enough argument anymore.
Can’t be bothered to click? Here’s the summary:
Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s all an AR-15 is. It’s something fun to take to the range and put some really wicked holes in a piece of paper. Good for you. I know how enjoyable that is. I’m sure for a certain percentage of people, they might not kill anyone driving a Formula One car down the freeway, or owning a Cheetah as a pet, or setting off professional grade fireworks without a permit. Some people are good with this stuff, and some people are lucky, but those cases don’t negate the overall rule. Military style rifles have been the choice du jour in the incidents that have made our country the mass shootings capitol of the world. Formula One cars aren’t good for commuting. Cheetahs are bitey. Professional grade fireworks will probably take your hand off. All but one of these are common sense to the average American. Let’s fix that. Be honest, you don’t need that AR-15. Nobody does. Society needs them gone, no matter how good you may be with yours. Kids are dying, and it’s time to stop fucking around.
And before you yell that the writer is just a stupid bleeding heart liberal, know that she’s also an Army veteran.
The kids have every right to be furious. Adults have failed them. The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High were barely older than the first graders at Sandy Hook in 2012. In the time since, they’ve all learned how to respond to mass shooters, they’ve done the drills, they’ve seen something and said something, they’ve watched politicians offer nothing but thoughts and prayers after the Aurora theater shooting, Orlando club shooting, the Las Vegas concert shooting and every one in between.
They’re students who don’t remember Columbine as anything but a Google-able piece of history, yet they can tell we put more thought into that than we have any school shooting since.
Maybe because back then mass shootings weren’t so common that we had time to think about them in between them. Maybe because we also didn’t have Russians and porn stars to distract us. Maybe we just thought if we researched enough about video games and bullying, we could prevent the next tragedy, but we gave up somewhere along the way. Or we just decided a couple of “no bullying” posters were enough.
The students have every right to be mad. They found themselves being talked through a school shooting by other survivors on social media. Because we have enough school shooting survivors for there to be a fucking network of them. They have every right to scream down the rafters and call out every adult with an ounce of power. Every last one of them has the right to take every adult since 1999 to task.
And it’s time we listened. It’s time we offered more than platitudes and bullshit. It’s time we actually did something.
Because if we don’t, 2018 is on track to be the deadliest year yet for our schools and that’s topping what’s already considered terrifyingly deadly by the rest of the world.
