I recently attended a town hall held by my newly elected member of Congress, Dean Phillips. It was pretty nice getting to go to a town hall held by my representative in Washington, because the previous representative, displaced last election by Representative Phillips, went for years and years without having any actual town halls. He’d have an occasional fake town hall we’d hear about after the fact, but no actual town halls. Phillips is holding town halls on a regular basis.

Many topics were covered during the event, including guns, and Phillips gave an OK response to an early question on the issue. He runs politically in the middle of the road but definitely in favor of more regulation, which is probably good for the district where a significant number of citizens hunt, and we have not suffered any local mass killings of children. (Though this district does include a school suicide hot spot.)

But then something happened at the end of the town hall. The last questioner said something shocking. He told Representative Phillips and the audience that he had researched which kind of weapon would do best to kill “his deer.” (“His deer” or more us ally “my deer” might be a Minnesota expression referring to the deer you expect to get during hunting season.) He had determined that what he called an “AK-47” rifle, his AK, was the best weapon with which to kill a deer. It was the most effective at killing, and thus, best for the deer. For this reason, we should not really be regulating guns like people want us to.

The audience sat and listened, then waited for Representative Phillips to say something, and he did. He said something assuaging the person who asked the question, and I think Phillips and most of the audience were quietly embarrassed by this hunter’s remarks. Most people just glanced away and were glad to have this not develop into a fight. That, by the way, is a key component of the widely known “Minnesota nice.” No matter how bone-headed a remark or behavior made in public might be, just let it go. Not worth it. Give it a stern look and move on.

Now, before I tell you why the hunter was wrong, the audience was wrong, and Representative Phillips was wrong, in what they all said and did and did not do an did not say, a brief digression. This is advice I’ve since passed on to a few different elected officials, and now I’m giving it to you.

Always have a last question of your own, in case the actual last question is a real bummer like this one was. Don’t have a person ready with an ideal last question that you turn to at the end. That is smarmy and dishonest. But much less smarmy and reasonably less dishonest is to have a question in your head. A question someone once asked you, that you have a kick-ass excellent answer to, the kind of answer you want your public appearance to end on.

Then, if the last question you actually get at the actual event is a great one, and you don’t blow the answer, you are good. Be done. But if that last question is like this guy’s question, so that the public event will end with a squirm and a whimper instead of an inspiring exposition and a tear in the eye, pull out your emergency question. “Thanks for that. By the way, something someone said earlier reminded me of a question I got the other day, but no one touched on here. It is about kittens and how much I love them, and how I saved some baby bunnies from a snake the other day…” or whatever.

Anyway, yes, the deer hunter was wrong because he made the case that a tactical rifle, sometimes called an “assault weapon,” was the best way to kill a deer. This is not true. Tactical rifles trade off effectiveness of accurate killing of a large mammal at a modest distance for lightness, shortness, ability to point around and blast scary things that are near you as you prance through a dangerous situation wearing armor going “hut hut hut” like this:

Meanwhile, to kill a deer, you use the following elements.

1) You hide in a tree overlooking a place deer are expected.

2) The deer pass into the zone of expectation, walking slowly, frequently stopping to browse or listen and smell the surrounding environment.

3) You point a large, long barreled, highly accurate, high caliber rifle with good sights at the deer and when ready pull the trigger.

Like this (fear not, no deer are harmed in this video):

The guy at the Town Hall was wrong.

The audience was wrong. Why? Because — wait for it — no one gasped. Well, I did, and I got a stern look or two, but nobody else did. What should have happened is that everyone should have done that thing they do in the British Parliament. Like this:

Or words to that effect.

What should Representative Phillips have done? I’m not sure. I wanted him to walk up to the guy and slap him, but that is exactly the opposite of what the mild mannered and friendly Phillips would ever do.

Maybe he could have sung a song, like this:

Ok, that was all very fun but I do want to get very serious for a moment. I have a specific suggestion I’d like to give my fellow Town Hall goers and activists interested in gun violence.

Go get hypnotized. Get a post-hypnotic suggestion that has the following effect. Next time you are in a public space and someone takes the floor and belittles any project or suggestion to reduce gun violence by limiting access to tactical assault weapons, high capacity magazines, or similar, or to reduce suicide and accidental discharge of weapons in homes by requiring that guns be firmly secured, or anything along those lines, you will suddenly believe that you are in a room where the entire audience is made up of the loved ones and survivors of Sandy Hook massacre, the Red Lake massacre, the Virginia Tech massacre, the Fort Hood massacre, the Aurora theater massacre, the Columbine massacre, the Parkland massacre, and all the other massacres.

You would imagine, through this post hypnotic suggestion, that there are thousands of people in the room with you, all of whom had lost a child, a parent, a sibling, a student, a teacher, a co-worker, a neighbor, or some other loved one or close acquaintance, to a shooter who would never have been a shooter if this country had an entirely different gun culture and entirely different gun laws.

Imagine the person making the case about his choice of deer hunting weapon in a room full of those people.

And in the balconies, the vast balconies that surround this room that has now come indelibly into your head, are the loved ones of the gun suicide victims, which accumulate at the rate of thousands of years, and the victims of accidental shootings, which happen at about the rate of one a day, and the victims of crimes carried out with guns, which are frequent only in societies where there is a strong and vibrant gun culture like the US. There are millions and millions of people in these balconies that extend far beyond your ability to see.

And that person, who is comparing his deer hunting needs to the sorrow of all those millions, is in front of the room making his case.

Imagine this unthinking hunter explaining how it is important to him to have his choice of hunting rifle, even if that meant decreased lack of safety for others.

No, let me try that again. Imagine this asshole yammering on and on about how he needs a fucking assault rifle to get “his deer” even if that means that we continue to live in a society in which babies and college students and everyone in between are occasionally gunned down in a massacre, and tens of thousands of others die annually through gun violence, including suicide, in order to allow let that piece of shit have is goddamn toy.

Yeah, like that. Imagine it that way. I want all of you, in the actual audience when the actual deer hunter stands up to make his case, to imagine being in that room full of those people.

Then, react.

Because, you know what? They are in that room with you, in spirit. They need you to assume you are with them, watching, listening, waiting, for you do do the right thing. And the right thing is not a stern look, or to look away, or to sit quietly.

The right thing to do is to gasp, then take a breath, then let it out. Shout that person down. End that conversation. Make that conversation highly unlikely to happen again in that room with those people. This is not a matter of respecting someone’s voice. It is a matter of insisting that a misguided believe that a the needs of a hobby are equal to the lives of thousands and thousands of victims of our out of control gun culture.

React.

Obviously if someone breaks into your house, breaks open your gun safe, takes your gun, goes down the street and robs a bank with it, that is not your fault.

But if you leave a loaded gun laying around unsecured, and a four year old grabs it and shoots a five year old dead, you, the gun owner, have just committed homicide.

Almost everything else is in between, and yes, there is a line there, or more than one, that has to be found. But we are a civil society and we can deal with the difficulties of drawing that line. And, anyone who is uncomfortable with there being such a law can easily address their anxiety. Just live in a gun free home.

I bring this up because the Washington Post has a new piece by John Cox and Steven Rich addressing this issue. Here.

And, right, if your car is locked up and in your garage and the key is with you in the house, and someone breaks into your garage, hot wires your car, drives down the street and uses the car in the commission of a crime, that is not on you. If, on the other hand, you leave your car unlocked and running on the street and somebody jumps in it and takes off and commits a crime with the car, that is at least partly on you. And somewhere in between lies this line, see?

Every four years in Minnesota, we elected a new gubernor. We’re doing that right now.

This is an especially important race, for four reasons.

1) We have to have Democratic rule in Minnesota for the next eight years in order to ensure rapid change towards fossil-fuel-free energy systems, rapid change to universal single payer health care, and other issues.

2) We currently have a Republican legislature (both houses) and a Democratic Governor, who has been doing as good a job as possible to keep the Republicans from totally ruining everything. But, while Governor Dayton can stop the Republicans most of the time, he can’t make them move forward in the above mentioned directions.

3) Our state legislature is VERY likely to go totally blue in November. The Senate is so close, it could happen by simple political Brownian Motion all by itself. The house is less close but we will prevail there.

4) However, never before in the history of this state, owing to the self destructive voting habits of Minnesotans, has a DFL candidate (DFL=Democratic) taken the Governorship in an open race following a DFL incumbant. Dayton is retiring this year, it is an open seat, and if the DFL candidate wins, that will be the first time for that happening ever.

Even though history says no, history, especially this kind of history, history of patterns in electoral politics, is often wrong. For years the tallest candidate won the presidency. Until that stopped happening. That sort of thing. (By the way, if Clinton had beaten Trump, that would also have been highly unusual, as the same pattern pertains nationally.)

There is one candidate, Rebecca Otto, who has the best chance of winning sate wide in this politically bifurcated state. I know this because I’ve carefully analyzed the data. See: Rebecca Otto: by far the strongest and most progressive candidate for Minnesota Governor in 2018. To quote myself,

All the available data strongly indicates that Otto will beat all the other contenders across state in the upcoming Governor’s race…

Otto vastly outperformed both Governor Mark Dayton and Congressman Rick Nolan in every county on the Iron Range and across the entire 8th Congressional District in 2014, improving her margins after [a highly risky vote in favor of the environment and against a big mining company that wants to mine there] …

Otto grew her margin in every Iron Range county in 2014 by an impressive average gain of 9.51 points, for a 72% bigger margin across the Iron Range as a whole.

…Otto outperformed Nolan by 12.15 points on the very Iron Range that was supposed to cost her re-election. And Otto’s margins were even better on the Iron Range than they were in the 8th CD as a whole, where she outperformed the Congressman’s margin by a stunning 10 points.

Otto’s strong popularity is why Nolan asked her to headline or speak at events…

Otto is also an exceptionally strong performer in urban/suburban areas, outperforming Congressman Ellison’s margins in 14 of 20 house districts, and across the 5th CD as a whole….

And so on.

Otto is the environmental candidate. Her main competitor in this race, Congressman Tim Walz, has a very mixed environmental voting record. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic Party (DFL) Environmental Caucus endorsed Otto. Famous climate change scientist Michael Mann endorsed Otto. Much of this has to do with Otto’s clean energy plan, which is probably the most advanced and clearly worked out state level energy transition plan out there. (There is no federal plan.)

For these policy reasons, as well as others (too many to mention here) I have been supporting Rebecca Otto for some time now. I also know her as a person, and trust me, she will make the best governor.

Guns and gun violence

The other main candidate in this race for party endorsement, Tim Walz, has been an NRA funded pro-gun representative in Congress for 12 years. He consistently supported NRA backed legislation, and has constantly taken NRA donations, and donations from other groups. I’ve carefully documented Walz’s waltz with the gun lobby, and the fact that regardless of what was happening in our schools and with other mass shootings (hundreds dead over Walz’s time in Congress).

But then he got Vinicked. Parkland happened. Suddenly, it was better to be anti gun as a person running for governor across the state. Suddenly Tim Walz favored policies he had worked 12 years to oppose. I regard this as nothing other than a craven attempt to garner votes he does not deserve.

During the 4,700 days (12 years and 10 months) since the Red Lake Massacre, which occurred just as Tim Walz was starting his political carer, over 500 people have been killed and over 1,300 wounded in mass killings. During the same period, over 300,000 Americans have died of gunshot wounds, mostly from suicide, with criminal homicide next in line as a cause. A large number of those suicides and plenty of the homicides (which are often domestic abuse related) were made possible or made deadly because of the prevelance of more than 300 million guns in America and the dearth of regulations requiring guns to be safer, better secured, and accounted for….

When the news of Parkland shocked this nation, hundreds, possibly thousands, of activist Minnesotans with the DFL (Democratic Party), Indivisible, and other groups, raised their voices against the politicians in Washington who supported guns. Then, over the subsequent few days, those same concerned activist started to realize that their own guy, Tim Walz, was one of the people that had caused this problem, as a full-on NRA and gun lobby supporter.

It was only then, as Walz started to see his position in the top tier of candidates for Governor of Minnesota slip away, that he turned on his NRA keepers….

One could congratulate Congressman Walz for changing his stance on an issue in deference to his constituents. But in my view, a dozen years of strict adherence to a particular position that is so closely associated with danger to our society is not something a politician is allowed to suddenly walk away from.

And now, I’ve just learned this, from Rebecca Otto:

I’m pleased to announce that I have received the Gun Sense Candidate distinction from Moms Demand Action.

Our kids are counting on us to be the grownups in this discussion-and when they’re practicing active shooter lockdown drills in kindergarten we have to stop and ask ourselves what we are doing to them.

It’s time for some evidence-based, commonsense public safety measures to reduce gun violence. That is why I have been pushing to resume studying it as a public health issue for years. We need evidence to pass appropriate legislation, and for that legislation to withstand a court challenge by the NRA. It’s also why I support a ban on assault-style weapons, bump stocks and high-capacity magazine clips, as well as universal background checks.

For too long, politicians have paid lip service to ending gun violence while taking NRA money and eagerly cosponsoring and voting for NRA bills. My opponent Tim Walz did that for over a decade before recently changing his stance when it became expedient. By working together, I’m confident that we can move past the big money politics of the gun lobby and arrive at a solution that serves the common good, but it takes someone who will lead. That’s what we do best in Minnesota – we lead.

In her press release, Rebecca asks people to consider finding the nearest March for our Lives March here.

I will ask you to CLICK HERE and give Rebecca $17. The most widely used “Glock” is the Glock 17. Send a message.

It says, “while you are busy protesting the fact that dozens of children and teachers are murdered in their schools per year — and good for you for doing this — note that in your suburban school system of 5,000 students, about one will die per year of their own hand, using Uncle Bob’s Glock that he keeps on his night stand just in case.”

There is a great deal wrong with “walk out NOT walk up” because it is bone headed self aggrandizing yammering about how wrong people are in their ability to perceive things, and their tone, which in and of itself is wrong.

I’ll give you the short version of why #walkoutnotup is #wrongandstupid here, and point you to a longer post I wrote a few weeks ago, seeing this tone trolling coming, because it does, always, come.

The concern and tone trolls live in all the woodwork from which they will always emanate all the time.

In this case we are being asked to tone down the protest of gun massacres in schools. We are told that school shootings are very rare compared to other gun deaths, including suicide.

This is actually true and a good point, but in truth, that has nothing to do with school shootings being horrific and something we very much want to stop.

If there was a specific sort of event that caused the occasional traffic death, say a really badly designed intersection, to the tune of a dozen to 30 a year, we would not say, “this means nothing because the other traffic deaths are myriad!” If it was a bad intersection, we would freakin’ fix the intersection!

(Also, I note that school shootings are part of a somewhat larger “mass shooting” category which is probably internally homogeneous enough that we should think of them together, which does bump up the numbers by about 300-400%. But I digress)

Anyway, here’s the thing, something you likely did not know. Both suicides and a good number of single or mass shootings, including many if not all school shootings, and many domestic violence related killings, are allowed to occur because of commonalities among all of these different forms of violence and mayhem vis-a-vis guns.

Some of this emerges from our gun culture, or more accurately, our widespread fetish of gun culture (to the extent that people who don’t love guns bow down to the right of gun ownership no matter how many die from gun shots being more important than safety). We don’t look down on people who own assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammo, and bump stocks. We stand back (really far back if we’re smart) and acknowledge the sacredness of their Constitutionally protected ownership of killing machines. We are not shocked when a deadly crime happens and reporters and investigators don’t even question, and rarely report about, the source of the gun, who owned it, was it locked up, etc.

Gun culture protects the ownership and use of guns, as long as the user is sufficiently white, much like the patriarchy protects boys being boys and widespread religious practice protects rapists in the church.

(These are all things that are changing, of course. Slowly.)

Some of this emerges from legislative and agency inaction in demanding that dangerous weapons be hard to get (to own) and hard to get (to grab off a shelf and employed to kill and wound others), which in itself is buttressed by the fetish of gun culture.

The undue respect for guns and gun ownership, the lack of will to impede ownership, the culturally received assumption that we should not ask gun owners to keep their guns out of the hands of children and children killers, and so on, allows for a much higher than necessary rate of gun death through suicide, domestic violence, a handful of other homicide scenarios, and a good number of mass shootings including and especially school shootings.

Bottom line: Many of the things we would do to reduce suicide apply to gun related homicide in general, to mass shootings in general, and to school shootings in general.

I wrote about it here a few weeks ago, suddenly this post is more current than ever: Gun Control and School Shootings

A rifle has a long rifled barrel. Rifling is a spiral groove that causes the bullet to spin. A spinning bullet flies straighter, so point-blank range is longer. Point-blank is not gun-to-the-head (or rifle-to-the-head) distance, it is simply the distance over which a straight sighted shot will hit its mark without compensating for the bullet falling in the Earth’s gravitational field.

In the old days, to fire a second (or third, etc.) bullet from a gun, you had to shove powder and shot and wadding and stuff down the barrel. Over time this got easier to do, so we ended up with things like revolvers and the rough (but different) equivalent in long guns, a way to get the second bullet into the right place (the chamber) by pulling and/or pushing on a bolt, lever, or other doohickey. Then they invented a way for the bullet to load itself up so that it was ready to go, generally using some of the energy from the previously fired bullet. These were initially called by terms such as “self-loading,” “repeating,” or “auto-loading.” I think the term “semi-automatic” emerged at a later time to clarify the distinction between what eventually became known as “fully automatic” and “semi-automatic.”

An fully automatic weapon fires a series of bullets with only one pull of the trigger.

A rifle is a gun, a gun is a weapon, a rifle is a weapon, and many weapons are rifles or guns.

An assault weapon is often thought of as a rifle or rifle-like gun designed to attack and kill people, maximizing casualties and ease of use during hut-hut-hut situations.* It may have a way to suppress muzzle flash, it usually has a pistol type grip allowing it to be maneuvered and aimed more quickly, it may be light weight, it usually can carry a lot of bullets or can be modified to carry a whole-bunch-of bullets, etc. There is not a formal definition of assault weapon, though in the process of legislating guns, some statues define the term, but that is not official-Webster-linguo-defined. An assault weapon need not be fully automatic

Most gun aficionados will tell you that an “assault rifle” is always a fully automatic. Period. And, to them, this is true. Not an assault weapon, an assault rifle. Totally different thing, they say. You’re using the wrong word, they’ll tell you.

Yet, a gun is a weapon, so a semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip, flash suppressor, large magazine, etc. is an assault rifle.

Why is this important?

It is not. Not at all. Means nothing. There is nothing whatsoever to the problem that people who talk about guns and rifles and stuff use terms that do not match what a subset of the terms currently active gun aficionados prefer.

But if you use these terms in a way not anointed by the gun slingers, you will be corrected, and that correction will be used as a tool to derail the discussion. You will be trolled. Slinger-trolled.

When it comes down to banning guns, when a bill is passed that bans specific guns in a specific state or country, definitions must be created for use in statute, as referred to above. Even though many gun slinger trolls will tell you that all the terms are defined, understood, and fully deployed across the gun-o-sphere, they are not. There are all kinds of edge cases and vagueness. For example, an automatic rifle fires several shots, but to most gun slingers, an automatic pistol does not. But a machine pistol is a fully automatic pistol, which is a pistol not because of its pistolosity so much as its lack of long rifled barrel and relative smallness. And so on. It will not do to ban firearms without attending to the definitions very clearly. Meanwhile, it will not do to have the conversation constantly derailed by yammering gun slinger trolls insisting that they own the English Language. They do not.

When the famous Clinton assault weapon ban went into effect decades ago, the fist thing the gun slingers did was to eviscerate it by insisting that definitions had to be very very clear, in a certain way, such as naming specific known weapons or lines of weapons. The production of this clarity was demanded in order to allow the creation of loopholes big enough to pass a naval gun through. The purpose, on the part of the pro-gun lobby, of screwing around with definitions, was to avoid actually banning entire categories of guns. Ultimately, the legislation did not work very well.

For much of the time they’ve been manufactured, a typical semi-automatic rifle that is also an assault weapon, depending and varying across time and space, can be turned into a fully automatic weapon with a kit that goes with that rifle. Newer regulatory standards have made it more and more difficult to make this conversion. There was a time when it was trivial, now it is harder. As the old method of making a weapon fully auto (removing the bit that causes the firing pin to only hit the bullet once, then adding a part that controls the hammer’s cycle so it does not try to fire a bullet before it has entered the chamber, etc) has become more difficult, the bump-stock was invented, a device that totally circumvents the measures take to make this conversion very difficult. And so on.

My message is this: When talking about regulating guns, beware the pedant: the person who tells you that you don’t know what you are talking about because you are not using specific terms, and tries to make that the main point of the conversation.

Yes, ultimately, we will need to have proper and correct definiteness, but it is simply not true that adherence to this absurd level of specificity is required to have a productive conversation. It isn’t true because one of the most important differences between weapons is semi- vs. fully-automatic, and that distinction is artificial. Eventually, we will likely see the difference between an “assault weapon” and a “hunting weapon” similarly mucked up, as we decide as a society to ban assault weapons but protect hunting weapons. There will be a weight limit put on weapons, so light weight (a feature of assault weapons) is not allowed. So heavier weapons will be created that can be lightened by changing the stock. Flash suppressors will not be allowed, but there will be instruction to make and add your own. All of it.

Face it: Gun slinging trolls are simply not honest contributors to this conversation. And that does not matter. It does not matter because we are tired of listing to them.

*the hut-hut-hut situation:

But we know that for most issues, Trump has no conviction. He’ll say one thing one day, change his mind the next day, accept a deal that totally tosses out what he promised the week before, etc. Therefore, his comments on these issues over the last several hours are meaningless.

If Trump sticks to his guns, as it were, for several days, this is going to macerate many of those Republicans, and contribute significantly to the process of the GOP digesting itself.

This is working out like the first draft of some good fiction.

In the end, Trump’s actions over the current crisis will cause a number of Congressional Republicans to get kicked out. We will never know which ones, but certainly some of them.

By the way, some of you know that I was asking around about popcorn poppers. I decided on the Presto 04841 Orville Redenbachers Hot Air Popcorn Popper, and I’m very happy with it. I wonder what made me think of that?????

The answer that comes from the anti-safeguard lobby, those who mainly want guns to be unregulated with respect to ownership, safety, use, or disposition, is that such laws would not have stopped the tragedy that prompted the conversation.

They may be right (but see below). But they have missed the point. The problem is, the people who suddenly want to do something about senseless gun deaths have also missed the point.

About 33,000 times a year, in the United States, a bullet fires out of a gun, penetrates a human, and kills them. The number of times that a bullet leaves the gun and penetrates a human and only wounds them is considerable.

Since the difference between being dead and being alive is mostly random (with respect to the variables at the scene) and partly a function of the excellence, and presence or absence of, trauma specialists, it is worth noting that about 50,000 times a person is shot in some manner in the United States. But when working with gun relates statistics, we tend to focus on death, because in most cases, as tragic and horrific as a death may be, it will usually have one good feature: The data point representing it is well behaved. An embarrassing accidental discharge of a firearm resulting in a minor injury is unlikely to be reported at all. But when you are showing off with your Glock and a bullet is fired through the wall of your apartment and the toddler next door is blow away, that data point is going to exist and it will be carefully examined, verified, reported, and curated.

Of the ~33,000 killed each year, only a tiny percentage (but see below) of those individuals are killed in any kind of mass shooting, including school shootings.

In other words, the sad and macabre fact is that if we were given the choice of eliminating school shootings as they currently happen, vs. all the other shootings, we would be foolish to pick ending just the school shootings. We would be better off with the Watership Down alternative. Stop the carnage overall, but pay the price of a few of our children for that freedom from violence.

But you might be thinking, “Those 33,000, they were criminals shot by good cops, and gang member shooting each other, so who cares?”

Stop thinking that.

The statistics on gun violence are hard to get a handle on for several reasons, but what I’m going to tell you here is close to the actual reality and verifiable. I’ve included some sources below. These numbers are based on estimates from the last few years of available data.

Over the last five or six years, 33,000 people in the US died of a gunshot per year. Most of them, ~21,000, killed themselves intentionally (suicide). Of the rest, about one tenth of a percent were cops killed by gunfire in the line of duty (most cops who die in the line of duty are killed accidentally in car accidents, etc.). About 2% were citizens killed by cops. About 24% were murdered in the usual ways.

The number of times per year a person dies because of a simple accident, like the gun goes off while being cleaned, or in a hunting accident, is probably just over 300 (a little less than once per day). The number of people killed each year, on average, in a mass shooting roughly similar. This is about three quarters of one percent of the total gun carnage.

If we wanted to reduce the gun carnage as quickly and efficiently as possible, we might do things that reduce the largest of these numbers: suicide. We immediately realize that this is a mental health issue, and by the way, mass shootings may often be a mental health issue as well. Heck, considering that homicide is often an extension of day to day interpersonal violence which can go even worse, maybe a lot of those 11,000 shootings are also mental health issues. Putting it another way, if we could wave a magic wand and make all the mental health issues go away, assuming most suicides are in this category, then the number of dead per year would drop to a few thousand instead of a few tens of thousands. That would be great. So lets do that.

But while we are busy shoring up our approach to mental health, lets look at other ways to address the gun carnage.

Let’s start with the largest number, suicide.

When I bring up reducing gun carnage by addressing suicide, I often get push back from poorly informed libertarian-thinking people who are angered that I would want to take this basic right away from people. If someone wants to kill themselves, they should be able do to it. What about someone with a terrible, painful, disease who just wants to end it? What kind of monster am I to deny them of this right?

The other push-back is this: If someone wants to commit suicide, and you “take away the guns,” they will still kill themselves.

Let me tell you right now, that most of the time, when you hear either of these arguments, you are hearing from someone who, because they’ve had this conversation with people like me before, knows they are lying. They are simply trying to seed doubt, to dampen the anti-gun argument, because they are anti-protection. For all I know, they may even like the carnage. Certainly, they are willing to ignore basic facts in order to not have to be restricted in any way in the pursuit of their dangerous hobby (or business, in the case of those who trade in these weapons of death and mayhem).

Many people who attempt suicide are young and very few are sick and in pain. A large percentage of those who attempt suicide with something other than a firearm fail. Most who attempt suicide with a gun manage to kill themselves. Most people who attempt suicide and fail then get mental health care and they do not ever end up killing themselves. Across all age groups, 90% of those who make an attempt of suicide and survive never end up committing suicide. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive. It is estimated that 71% of the time, the suicide is decide on in less than one hour before the act.

OK, now, I’m going to take a break and go unload the dishwasher or something while you put those facts together and see what you come up with.

… tick … tick … tick … tick …

A partial but important solution to reduce the gun carnage is to first reduce the number of available guns, but also, to firmly secure the guns that to exist. Lock them up, and lock up the ammo in a separate place, and make the use of a gun for anything something that requires more thought, and not something that can be easily done by a non gun owner by simply grabbing an available firearm from Dad’s dresser drawer or a neighbor’s coffee table hidy-hole.

In the US, in the majority of households that have both children and guns in them, the guns are not stored safely away, and are often loaded and unlocked. A minority of US gun owners with children in their homes store the ammo separately and keep it all locked up.

May people who kill themselves with guns decide at the last minute to do so, and their access to the guns is unfettered. Often, this is a young person living in a household where an adult has a loaded firearm readily available, “just in case.”

The reason to have a firearm readily available and loaded is this: If someone comes into your house that you did not invite, you get your chance to shoot them to death. Yay. But what happens far more often is that your child or some neighbor or some other person in your household decides to kill themselves, and they use your gun to do it. Or your teenager offspring sneaked out of the house to party and is sneaking back in through the bathroom window, so you wake up, groggily grab your gun, and start shooting. Or as happened a while back to my neighbor: you are a recluse living in what the neighborhood kids mistake for an abandoned house, one of the kids sneaks into the house on a dare, and you grab your gun off the nightstand and blow him away.

What needs to happen instead is that it is required by law that you not be a knucklehead. You should be required by law to keep your gun unloaded and locked up, and the ammo also locked up at a different location. You, yourself, since you have the key or combination and know where everything is, can easily put it all together and eat a bullet any time you want to, so don’t worry about that right being taken away from you. But hopefully the extra work you need to go through to do so will allow your forebrain to catch up to your limbic system and call off your own suicide. More importantly, your hobby as a gun owner will not as easily allow someone else to use your gun to die or to kill. The total number of suicide deaths would go down dramatically, and we will have tackled the largest number among those cited above.

The next biggest group of gun deaths is homicide. Having guns more secured would probably reduce this as well. Just as suicide can be impulsive, and thus, aided by having loaded guns laying around, some homicides are impulsive as well.

A fair number of homicides involve violent criminals shooting at each other and killing either the other bad guy, a cop, or an innocent bystander. Some, perhaps many, of those guns are stolen. They are stolen from gun owners who did not secure their guns. You might say, “a determined criminal can yada yada yada… so it does not matter.” But you are wrong. Properly secured houses are burglarized far less often than improperly secured houses. Properly secured and hidden items in the house are stolen less than items left around in obvious places. When a criminal breaks into any home, one of the first places they check for stuff are the obvious places people are known to keep their loaded guns. The criminal wants to take that gun right away in case the home owner shows up, and because it has real value as a stolen item.

So, once again, properly locked up deadly weapons would reduce those numbers. I’ll even suggest this: Of those 300 or so accidental discharges per year (some of which result in death), a good number are little kids finding your boy-toy (gun) and pulling the trigger. That can’t happen with properly secured firearms.

“But it is not enforceable” you lament. “You are legislating what people do in their own homes and you can’t enforce it anyway” you cry out from your Libertarian perch!

Bull. First, any time there is a criminal act involving a gun, it is possible (not always, but often) to trace back the source to see if that was ever a properly secured gun. Every time there is a suicide there is an investigation. Frequently, it will be possible to determine if the gun was improperly stored. A set of widely known best practices with an accompanying law can and will be enforced sufficiently that there will be deterrence against sloppy gun storage.

Second, having a law and accompanying training, information, learning, and a general cultural shift towards being smart rather than stupid about something, does and can work even without a lot of enforcement. When seat belts were first deployed by regulation, a lot of people balked at the idea. They didn’t want the restrictions, the wrinkles, the trouble. Two things happened early on in the history of seat belt adoption. First, there were many apocryphal scare stories about how if you wear a seat belt in certain kinds of accidents, you would actually die instead of live. Second, they started making cars that automatically put your seat belt on for you (remember those?). Tensions rose.

But then a third thing happened. Laws requiring the use of seat belts started to spread. Once there is a law about something, that aspect of an event (an accident or a crime) is automatically addressed by investigators. It became routine for the seat belt wearing status of an accident victim to be reported. Then the news started to regularly report whenever a fatal accident happened and the person was not wearing their seat belt. Over time, the reporting seemed to indicate that mainly reckless youth and drunk-out-of-their-mind drivers were the ones not wearing their seat belts, and thus dying. In other words, foolish people were making foolish decisions and suffering the ultimate consequence, in such a way that all can see and all can learn and all can quietly eschew that behavior. Seat belt compliance continues to rise, and many lives are saved.

That is what we need with guns. We need a decade of reporting on how Uncle Joe effectively killed his niece by having a loaded gun around that she used to kill herself at the age of 14, and how he got fined or jailed for his role in her death and, worst of all, had his permit to own a gun revoked. We need a decade of reporting about how this or that wanton criminal was convicted of homicide, but that the owner of the stolen gun he had used had never secured that gun, so it was easily taken from his home by a burglar, and the original gun owner was held partly liable for that act, and fined and his gun rights taken away. We need a decade of stories distributed by suicide prevention groups about all the kids who lived because Dad and Mom had their weapons secured. All that.

So again, regulations requiring proper storage of firearms and ammo will reduce a good portion of the next largest parts of the gun carnage.

The cops kill nearly a thousand people a year. Why? In part because there are so many guns out there that the cops are constantly on edge. In the old days, it was rare for a cop to pull their gun. Now, they have their guns out frequently. In fact, when a cop walks over to pretty much anybody these days, they have their hand on the gun so they can pull it out instantly if needed. The other day, a community resource cop, a cop who’s job it is to sit with kids and read them stories and talk about safety and stuff, felt the need to be heavily armed in the classroom, with a gun designed to be discharged instantly (no safety) just in case. When a kid grabbed that gun and fired it in the classroom, it made me wonder if something was wrong with our system…

The point is, if guns were routinely secured, and their sales better regulated, and yes, this would take a few decades but this will matter to future generations, there would be fewer illegal guns in circulation, and fewer legal guns in criminal hands, and that would cause a down-cycling of how many people carry guns around out of fear, and that would make it less likely for those 50 cops that get murdered by gun a year to be killed, and then maybe the cops would not shoot 1000 people a year.

Which brings us to the mass shootings. The mass shootings, including the ones in school, happen (apart from previously discussed mental health issues) because we have a culture in which we eschew any regulation on guns. Anybody who wants to be a school shooter can easily get the guns, partly because there are so many, partly because we don’t regulate guns very effectively. We have no problem as a society allowing people to own thousands of rounds of ammo and dozens of assault style weapons.

Also, our gun culture stops us from asking important questions or taking important actions at key moments. The most recent mass school shooting, one of the worst ever, was apparently carried out by a guy who was known to be a gun nut, known to be threatening others, known to be hanging around the school he did not attend in a threatening manner.

Why did no one bother to check out this situation, to discover his gun cache, to stop him before he killed all those children? I do not know, but I’ll toss out a guess for you to consider. Our pro-gun culture, especially in rabidly pro-gun states like Florida, where any person can murder any unarmed person if they “feel threatened,” fetishizes the gun and all the freedom it implies to a greater degree than fear of the gun and all the killing it can do imbues caution in our actions. Maybe nobody wanted to look like they were anti-gun.

So, sensible regulation of gun sales, ownership, and storage will probably reduce the number and severity of school shootings from several different angles, including changing the culture of expectations surrounding the gun fetish, and including access to massive arsenals.

The final remaining argument against my position that guns need to be responsibly sold and owned, is this: If someone invades my home, I want my gun loaded, freely available, and by my side right along with my freedom!!!

That might sound to some like a reasonable statement, but in fact, it is ignorant yammering.

I know that the person who truly believes this now, in 2018, is a nonredeemable gun nut so I don’t mind offending you. Such individuals need to be forced to do the right thing and jailed when they fail. But for those watching form the sidelines, it is a bogus argument. Having guns readily available for self defense in the home rarely works as a self defense strategy, but often leads to wounding or killing of household members, in the case where the gun is actually deployed as a killing machine. Often that is totally separate from the context of a home invasion. But even when there is a home invasion, the chances of the gun owner or a family member being killed or injured might actually be higher than the chance of the invasion being thwarted or the invader killed or wounded. The statistics are hard to analyze here, but at the very least, the chances are very close or overlapping.

But that is not the main point I want to make. The point is that playing fast and loose with guns is immoral and bone-headed. It is how we kill our children, not how we protect them. You think you are protecting your home and family, but actually, you are endangering them AND you are endangering everyone else.

But you can still have your cake and eat it too, if you must. In order to address home invasions in a way that also allows you to play with your big gun, simply follow these two procedures.

1) Lock the damn guns and ammo up.

2) Secure your home with an alarm system that will warn you that someone is breaking in. It need not be a fancy expensive system. Anything that makes lights go on and noises happen when someone is trying to get in. Also, do the other things you can do to reduce the chance of a robbery to being with. You can find out what those are from your local police department, or google it. Yes, “a determined thief will break in anyway yada yada yada” but the truth is that if you are the low hanging fruit, you are asking for it, and if you make it hard, you will be better off. You have to be an idiot to allow someone unfettered access to your home in such a way that your only recourse is to reach over to your night stand, grab your gun, and start shooting.

Or, perhaps you are not an idiot. Perhaps you are just waiting for a chance to kill someone, so you arm yourself and make it easy for someone to break into your house. Leave around clues that you have great prescription drugs ready to steal. Then lay in wait. There is that, and perhaps some version of it is not terribly uncommon. People who think that way …

But wait, now were are back to the mental heath fix, so we’ve got that covered as well.

One more thing, something I hinted at above, and if you’ve gotten this far into my rant, you get to hear all about it. School shootings are small part of the overall gun carnage. And, mass shootings in general may be the most difficult of all the gun related violence to actually address with laws, regulations, and tactical responses. Since gun death is large (33,000 a years) and mass shootings in schools is small (a couple of hundred a year) then the school shootings may seem unimportant in the long run, even if they are very shocking when they happen.

So, since that idea is totally wrong and misguided, I want to propose a thought experiment. Suppose we lived in a society with very few guns, and not much gun violence overall. In this imaginary place, we’ll call it Nacirema in honor of the Anthropologists who are known to have worked there and the Naciremas who live there, mental health care is widespread and effective, and many of the problems that cause mental health problems, whatever they may be, have been addressed by ensuring a healthy and fair economy for all, great health care and nutrition, effective early childhood care, and all of it. It is rare for someone to die because of a gun shot.

Then, suddenly, there is a mass shooting at a school. Then another. And then more. After a few years, we realize that a few hundred children are being killed each year, but never before did this happen.

Pause for a moment and substitute my thought experiment with the alternative thought experiment of your choice. Every year, we learn, 300 Nacirema children are killed in exploding school buses. Or, High School football stadiums built by a particular contractor start to collapse, killing dozens of student at a time to add up to 300 a year. Or a mad poisoner is operating in the school cafeteria to the tune of 300 deaths a year.

This should be obvious but in case it is not: a few hundred victims per year of mass shootings, many in schools, is not made less horrific or smaller because others happen to die at the muzzle of a gun.

Selected resources and other posts:

The Truth about Suicide and Guns

CDC on Homicide Data (various links, start here)

CDC on Suicide Data (various links, start here)

Guns and Suicide

Gun violence by the numbers

How much like Byron Smith is the average gun owner?

Various WaPo pages on number of people shot dead by cops.

US police shootings: How many die each year?

Causes of Law Enforcement Deaths

A selection of my posts on gun violence and related topics (This blog has recently been re-worked, so only those posts I’ve gotten around to re-tagging are on this list. Use the search bar at the top of the page to find more.)

Paper: Mental Illness and Gun Violence: Lessons for the United States from Australia and Britain. Evans Richard, Farmer Clare, and Saligari Jessica. Violence and Gender. September 2016, 3(3): 150-156.

Abstract: In the United States, the nexus between mental illness and shootings has been the subject of heated argument. An extreme expression of one point of view is that “guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do.” This article seeks to demonstrate the falsehood of this argument, by examining the real-world experience of two comparable societies. Australia and Great Britain are both Anglophone nations with numerous points of commonality with the United States, including high rates of mental illness and significant exposure to popular culture that perpetuates the stigma of the mentally ill as a violent threat. However, in Australia, it is difficult to obtain firearms, and a mentally ill person behaving aggressively is unlikely to be able to harm others. On the contrary, police are almost the only people routinely armed in Australian communities and are often too ready to use firearms against the mentally ill. In Britain, guns are even more difficult to obtain, and operational police are not usually armed. The authors examine statistical data on mental illness, homicide, and civilian deaths caused by police in all three nations. They also consider media and popular opinion environments. They conclude that mental illness is prevalent in all three societies, as is the damaging stigma of “the dangerous madman.” However, the fewer people (including police officers) who have access to firearms, the safer that community is.

The mental illness part:

The part about the police:

The part about the guns:

The part about the mass shootings:

Homicides and firearms related deaths in the UK, Australia, and US:

The homicide by firearm rate in each of the three countries that differ mainly in access to and abundance of guns:

The conclusions:

Australia, Britain, and the United States are directly comparable societies. Statistical data confirm that they have similar rates of mental illness, including those forms of mental illness most likely to be associated with violent behavior. …

The significant differences among the three societies are the number of firearms in the community and whether the police are armed….

The benefits of strict gun control and unarmed police are most starkly illustrated by the differences in deaths due to police action. The population of the United States is almost five times greater than that of Britain. This means that, according to data known to be a vast underestimate (Planty et al. 2015), a US civilian is between 171 and 226 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a person living in Britain in the worst recorded year of the past decade (Teers 2015).

The contention that “guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do” is unsustainable. Guns kill people. The fewer guns there are in a community, whether in the hands of civilians or of police, the safer that community is.

You betcha, Texas, give this man all the guns he wants!

“The gunman who turned a Texas church into a shooting gallery had a turbulent past, including a court-martial from the Air Force for assaulting his first wife and child — and a habit of harassing ex-girlfriends.”

But, in Texas, of course you can have as many guns as you want! Who cares!

By the way, half the victims killed by Texas Gun Lover Devin Kelley were kids.

Those close to him were shocked and claim this is out of character, though one of his ex girlfriends was utterly unshocked. Also, I got a recommendation a few months ago for a contractor from for a very simple job, and the best he could do was 300% of the average cost. And, I’ve recently been to two business establishments with excellent reviews on Google and Yelp one of which was mediocre the other, basically, sucked. The lesson here is: recommendations, reviews, and opinions, by anybody of anything, are useless. Especially, it seems, about taco joints and gun nuts.

Texas Gun Nut Devin Kelley was court-martialed in the Air Force because of his violent behavior including against a child. Did I mention that he killed a dozen children in that Texas church? He was actually house-jailed in the military for a year for his behavior.

But hey, Texas, give the man all the guns he wants! Yahoo! Shoot ’em up!

Two of his ex girlfriends claim that Texas Gun Nut Devin Kelly is a stalker. One claims he tried to pay her to hang out with him, called her all the time, pranked her. She claims he would say things that were “very sick” and that she won’t repeat. And eventually, he assaulted her.

But seriously, Texas, you better give this stalky violent assaulter all the guns he wants! Yippe! Bang Bang!

When he was 18, he got himself a 13 year old girlfriend who now recalls being stalked by him after she broke off the relationship. She had to change her phone number over and over because he would not leave her alone.

This guy, Texas, needs a gun, don’t you think? Keep those 13 year old girls in line? And who doesn’t love the smell of gun metal and discharged powder, and the sound of expended shells clinking as they hit the ground until their sound shifts from ping ping to plop plop because they are now falling into pools of your victim’s blood! Yahoo!

He offered that same young girl, later on when he was married, a deal. I’ll take care of you, he said, if you move in with my wife and me, and all you have to do is remain topless. I suppose this helps explain this thing I may or may not have mentioned: He killed a dozen children in his shooting spree. Revenge, I suppose.

That’s the kind of guy I want to give all the guns he wants to! Yesireee! I should be a Texan, that idea feels so good.

It is still not clear if Kelly killed himself after his murder spree, or if he died of wounds inflicted by a Texas Good Old Boy with a Gun who happened on the scene.