Tag Archives: gun violence

The Science of Murder

(The Atlantic)

(The Scientific American)
Some editorials simply hurt to write. This is one.

At least 19 elementary school children and two teachers are dead, many more are injured, and a grandmother is fighting for her life in Uvalde, Tex., all because a young man, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, decided to fire in a school.

By now, you know these facts: This killing spree was the largest school shooting since Sandy Hook. Law enforcement couldn’t immediately subdue the killer. In Texas, it’s alarmingly easy to buy and openly carry a gun. In the immediate hours after the shooting, President Biden demanded reform, again. Legislators demanded reform, again. And progun politicians turned to weathered talking points: arm teachers and build safer schools.

But rather than arm our teachers (who have enough to do without keeping that gun away from students and having to train like law enforcement to confront an armed attacker), rather than spend much-needed school dollars on more metal detectors instead of education, we need to make it harder to buy a gun. Especially the kind of weapons used by this killer and the white supremacist who killed 10 people grocery shopping in Buffalo. And we need to put a lasting stop to the political obstruction of taxpayer-funded researchinto gun-related injuries and deaths.

The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.

In the U.S., we have existing infrastructure that we could easily emulate to make gun use safer: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Created by Congress in 1970, this federal agency is tasked, among other things, with helping us drive a car safely. It gathers data on automobile deaths. It’s the agency that monitors and studies seat belt usage. While we track firearm-related deaths, no such safety-driven agency exists for gun use.

During the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to explore gun violence as a public health issue. After studies tied having a firearm to increased homicide risk, the National Rifle Association took action, spearheading the infamous Dickey Amendment, diverting gun research dollars and preventing federal funding from being used to promote gun control. For more than 20 years, research on gun violence in this country has been hard to do.

What research we have is clear and grim. For example, in 2017, guns overtook 60 years of cars as the biggest injury-based killer of children and young adults (ages one to 24) in the U.S. By 2020, about eight in every 100,000 people died of car crashes. About 10 in every 100,000 people died of gun injuries.

While cars have become increasingly safer (it’s one of the auto industry’s main talking points in marketing these days), the gun lobby has thwarted nearly all attempts to make it harder to fire a weapon. With federal protection against some lawsuits, the financial incentive of a giant tort payout to make guns safer is virtually nonexistent.

After the Uvalde killings, the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, said he’d “rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens.” Sen. Ted Cruz emphasized “armed law enforcement on the campus.” They are two of many conservatives who see more guns as the key to fighting gun crime. They are wrong.

A study comparing gun deaths the U.S. to other high-income countries in Europe and Asia tells us that our homicide rate in teens and young adults is 49 times higher. Our firearm suicide rate is eight times higher. The U.S. has more guns than any of the countries in the comparison.

As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up. These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored.

Science points to laws that would work to reduce shootings, to lower death. Among the simplest would be better permitting laws with fewer loopholes. When Missouri repealed its permit law, gun-related killings increased by 25 percent. Another would be to ban people who are convicted of violent crime from buying a gun. In California, before the state passed such a law, people convicted of crimes were almost 30 percent more likely to be arrested again for a gun or violent crime than those who, after the law, couldn’t buy a gun.

Such laws, plus red flag laws and those taking guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and people who abuse alcohol, would lower our gun violence rate as a nation. But it would require elected officials to detach themselves from the gun lobby. There are so many issues to consider when voting, but in this midterm election year, we believe that protection from gun violence is one that voters could really advance. Surveys routinely show that gun control measures are extremely popular with the U.S. population.

In the meantime, there is some hope. Congress restored funding for gun-related research in 2019, and there are researchers now looking at ways to reduce gun deaths. But it’s unclear if this change in funding is permanent. And what we’ve lost is 20 years of data on gun injuries, death, safety measures and a score of other things that could make gun ownership in this country safer.

Against all this are families whose lives will never be the same because of gun violence. Who must mourn children and adults lost in domestic violence, accidental killings and mass shootings that are so common, we are still grieving one when the next one occurs.

We need to become the kind of country that looks at guns for what they are: weapons that kill. And treat them with the kind of respect that insists they be harder to get and safer to use.

And then we need to become the kind of country that says the lives of children are more valuable than the right to weapons that have killed them, time and again. Since Columbine. Since Sandy Hook. Since always.

Time to Kiss the Toad

Image result for the outer limits trump

There is nothing wrong with your computer screen. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper….You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer D.C. Limits.

Anyone familiar with these waters knows that sharks infest them. And their favorite chum is stupidity, so religion and Trump are high on the menu. They’re entrees, not appetizers.

But in keeping with Evidentialism’s core tenet that we celebrate the fact we get more todays than yesterdays (or tomorrows even!), we must acknowledge — today, right now —  that the president (and the federal government writ large) did exactly what the Founding Fathers envisioned: They acted for the good of the people they serve.

This shouldn’t be news. Governments are supposed to act for the betterment of their charges. But, particularly now, the notion seems quaint and antiquated, and has been trampled underfoot by political peacocking. (BTW: Can the GOP please hire a high schooler who can work Microsoft Paint? Those signs make Vegas look understated.)  Image result for gop signs at hearing carton

Still, we have to give credit to the president and both sides of the aisle for actually working on a Friday. Trump signed into law a $1.4 trillion set of spending measures Friday that not only averted another government shutdown, but raised the smoking age to 21 and secured funding for studies on gun violence.

It would be hard to argue against the logic of either measure. Does anyone contend the age should go down? Or that we need to be spending less to examine our gun crisis? (Under the new legislation, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will receive $25 million to conduct research on gun violence. That came after a more than two-decade block on such research at a federal level.)

We get it. It’s hard to compliment an intellectually incontinent narcissist, particularly one whose sole talent is doing touchdown dances. But even the CNNs and MSNBCs of the world had to give the president — and deeply divided Congress — credit for a flurry of bipartisan bills that averted another Grinchian Christmas gift to “non-essential” federal employees, right? Nope.

Let’s thank Donnie while we’re at it, no matter the gag reflex. The president could have easily upended the system he publicly abhors (but privately milks). He could have insisted the $1.4 billion was just a fraction of the $5 billion he demanded for a wall (which is true) and refused to sign it. He could have told his yokel base: “See what happens when Dems impeach? Your government breaks.”

But he did neither. And Congress passed an enormously consequential bill. Yet, when I flipped to the outlets that are the president’s greatest critics, CNN and MSNBC, this is what I found:

And here’s how MSNBC summed up the day:

This is why we have the reputation we do. Have we gotten so entrenched in our echo chambers that anything outside it resembles a home invasion? Why is good news so difficult for us to hear, let alone repeat?

The position of the 24/7s is particularly disappointing given the tiny amount of work you’d need to exert to have today’s news fit your narrative. Consider this simple story angle: We have now raised to 21 the drinking and smoking ages. Why not gun ownership?! You could still appease your base with a ‘this is a good start’ criticism. But to not acknowledge your opponents getting something right is to diminish when they get it wrong.

Better yet, consider how we would have covered the passage of the bill had it been signed by Hillary Clinton. Dollars to donuts that Anderson Cooper would yodel the praises of a president brave enough to stare down big tobacco and sign into law a study the NRA does not want published, let alone  funded.Image result for anderson cooper

Again, none of this acknowledgment need bother the woke angels of the Left’s nature. Trump is not Lord Voldemort. We won’t be hectored and haunted should we speak President Napalm’s name. If you can call out his errors, call his base hits, too. Image result for trump voldemort

We can do better than what the 24/7s are offering us. Is the bill too bloated? Absolutely. Do we need to eventually pay off the card? No doubt. Do journalists ask themselves question in order to make a story look more substantial? Perhaps.

But there’s a reason “Fake News” has taken off with the masses. Let’s be honest with ourselves, fellow reporters and the curious-minded: You don’t have to offer fabricated details for a story to be fake news. It just need lack context.