Gun control

This resulted from a post in today’s Villages Daily Sun. What follows is my (limited to 300 words) response. I will then append a bit more

“A recent letter attempted to deflect attention from the real issues of the “gun control” debate. The writer maintained that “An NRA instructor neutralized the shooter with a gun.”  The sentence immediately following begins with “Democrats……. spewed nonsense without knowing the details.” This isn’t a partisan issue. The details are: First, the shooter was discharged under behavioral and mental conditions which required the Air Force to notify federal and local law enforcement, which it failed to do. Second, Texas has no law requiring firearms dealers to initiate background checks prior to transferring a firearm if the buyer is licensed to carry or even a felon if five years gave elapsed since conviction. There is federal law, but not state law. Private sellers have no obligation to perform checks. Third, the weapon was an assault rifle which, off the shelf, can   hold up to 30 rounds of ammunition. 91 percent of Democrats, along with 76 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans, said they are for banning such assault-style weapons. Finally, the shooter was actually “neutralized” when he shot himself in the head.

       There is no real argument re: background checks. There is bipartisan agreement on the issue.  90 percent of Democrat and 81 percent of Republican gun owners support of mandatory federal data base background checks. Additionally, 72 percent of NRA members support them. The writer is in a small minority even within her own organization!

  

      In a final burst of whimsy, the writer styles herself and other gun owners as the “sheepdogs” protecting the rest of us from “the wolves.” No thank you, ma’am. As a 26-year, military retired, handgun certified, E-9 who wouldn’t have one in the house, don’t help me. It‘s the armed self-styled  “sheepdogs” who, in recent years, have shot fathers in front of their children in movie houses, threatened another’s dog in The Villages at a dog park, shot teenagers over loud car radios or  stalked and shot them in their apartment complexes,  and that’s just  in Florida.”

        There;  300 words on the nose!   Now for the “rest of the story” as the late Paul Harvey (yet another right-wing sycophant) used to say.

        The Texas shooter had a list of abuse and mental issues which were frightening, including fracturing his infant son’s skull while still on active duty. The Air Force, doing what the services generally do, gave him a military court martial with some less than vigorous punishment and then shoved him out and onto the laps of local law enforcement, except they forgot to tell local and federal authorities that they were saddling them with a violent abusive offender with serious mental status issues.

       Texas “allows” for voluntary background checks at point of sale of firearms, but has no state law requiring it. I cannot wrap my head around such a concept. If the prospective buyer lies on the local form, as the TX shooter, (intentionally not using his name) did, tough, who are you gonna check with anyway? Any claim to responsible gun sales in Texas is specious at best.  

        The other issues which ring increasingly hollow as we read of accidental shootings of innocents by well intentioned, but mistaken, gun owners are that much of the NRA argument (not over background checks as the statistics show, but from on high in the organization’s  leadership) is really two-fold. The first, more common among rank and file is the assumption that “We morally superior people are responsible and should have guns because of that superiority.”

 Naturally,  this assumption of the moral high ground is human nature. Our nation has nuclear weapons, but we lose our minds over that thought that another country which we don’t like might also develop them. Why? Well, because  we are a moral people (just ask us) who would never use such destructive force unless it was justified (insert: “in our national interest” here) but “they”…..?  In like fashion, the afore mentioned writer essentially brags about this fact on behalf of herself and her husband. Of course, the inference is that they are incapable of making fatal mistakes or losing their temper and shooting someone in the heat of the moment. When a gun is present in a situation of domestic violence, it increases the risk the woman will be killed fivefold.

Sadly, unlike the military or uniformed civilian services who are armed and trained by law, these persons never receive any meaningful training or definitive instruction in the use of deadly force and when it is authorized. This was a key part of watch stander training, even on submarines, where such a threat is relatively low. Here, in The Villages, there has been at least one verified instance of a handgun brandished at a dog park. A friend also reported a woman in her eighties with her handgun loaded on the seat of the golf cart beside her when going to get the mail at the lighted post office box kiosk. Ageism aside, who the hell knows what she might construe as a threat and who or what might get shot? Similarly, a retired policeman in Wesley Chapel shot a man to death in a movie theater as his wife and child watched. The victim was unarmed save for a bag of popcorn.

The other issue is the question of where the money comes from. While it is true that major corporations within the industry donate a lot (hundreds of millions over the years) this money cannot by law be used for the NRA’s Political Action Committee. That said, it can be used for the sort of propaganda which spurs private donations, by pandering to the scare tactic motivation that “freedoms” are in danger. The actual nature of such concerns is shadowy and irrelevant to the majority of NRA members, yet they donate. A call for assault rifle bans is morphed by the NRA spin machine as an agenda to take all guns, which no significant public figure has even suggested. Similarly, a call for mandatory federal criminal data base checks prior to allowing a purchaser to take possession of a gun is decried as some shadowy plot to “keep tabs” on the citizenry. Here’s your wake up call – “they” can already do that if desired, but having such checks mandated by every state might stop any number of mass shooters from accumulating the wherewithal to commit their crimes.

So what to do? According to a study by the Department of Justice, between 1994 and 2014, federal, state, and local agencies conducted background checks on more than 180 million firearm applications and denied 2.82 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers. To date, the background check system has blocked over 3 million firearm sales to prohibited purchasers… but not in Texas. Additionally, these checks are waived for gun “shows,” which translates as unregulated sales to God knows who for God knows what usage. As long as states can under -regulate firearms sales, the carnage can continue.

On a strictly personal note, The concept of doctor patient privilege serves a real purpose, however, when such confidentiality   endangers the rest of the population, I feel there should be a standard of the common good which allows a therapist or other mental health care professional to alert law enforcement in an attempt to remove the possibility that said unbalanced individual may obtain a weapon or weapons which threatens the welfare of innocents. Events in Colorado, Texas, Charleston and Virginia Tech might have been significantly altered if such a provision was in place.

No legitimate hunter, or target shooter’s access to weapons appropriately obtained, is, or has ever been, at risk or under threat, except in the fever dreams of the NRA hierarchy, which plays its members like a Stradivarius, Sadly, handguns are a different story, as they are involved more frequently in a spectrum of shootings, accidental , intentional and suicidal. The perpetrators and victims of accidental and negligent handgun discharges may be of any age. Accidental injuries are most common in homes where guns are kept for self-defense, and are self-inflicted in half of the cases. (So much for handgun safety training?)  Firearms are the most popular method of suicide due to the lethality of the weapon. 90% of all suicides attempted using a firearm result in a fatality, as opposed to less than 3% of suicide attempts involving cutting or drug-use.  The risk of someone attempting suicide is about five times greater if they are exposed to a firearm on a regular basis.  

Simply as a statistic worthy of note, The number of gun murders per capita in the US in 2012 - the most recent year for comparable statistics - was nearly 30 times that in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1 per thousand in the UK. If guns stopped crime, this would be of no matter, but they don’t. Weapons which the owners classify, usually loudly and proudly as for self-defense, rarely ever serve that purpose, and frequently involve the owner themselves getting shot.