gun culture Archives - Occasional Planet

Gun crazy: Senator Roy Blunt edition

Willy Kessler — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 22:21:40 +0000

We’ve all heard the tragic stories about parents who just look away for one distracted second while disaster strikes their helpless toddler. There’s the kid who got into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo, or the children in Texas who drowned while their mother was occupied with her cell phone. When I think about the damage that is being done to our society by the latest evolution of our gun culture, I can sympathize with those parents.

I’m not a gun aficionado, but, for a long time, I felt that settling the 2nd amendment questions about gun ownership weren’t my first priority when it came to political activism – at least not in a society where we have had to fight every day to defend the economic and social progress we made in the 20th century. Social Security, reproductive rights, civil rights for minorities – all came before guns.

Guns, after all, just didn’t seem like that big a deal. When I was a child and we were living in a rural area, my father owned an old shot gun that was kept, unloaded, in the back of a closet. It was only used once that I know of, to stop the suffering of a pet dog that had been too badly badly mauled by coyotes to survive. Later, when we moved to a small city, few, if any, of our urban neighbors had guns, or, if they did, they were securely locked away and nobody thought much about them. So who cared if a few nuts were hot and bothered by the 2nd Amendment? Like those distracted parents, I looked away.

When I looked back again the disastrous view took my breath away. There are more than 300 million guns in circulation – in a country of 300 million people – although only about a third subscribe to gun ownership. In 2015 there were 372 mass shootings (i.e., four or more individuals shot) , which killed 475 people and wounded 1,870. Overall, excluding suicide, 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, and 26,819 people were injured.

And make no mistake, this is an American phenomenon. In the U.S. 60% of all murders in 2015 were the result of gun violence, while only 31% of the murders in Canada, 18.2% in Australia, and just 10% in the UK were attributable to guns. I should add that Canada, Australia and the UK all have strict gun regulations.

Concomitant with America’s gun blood-bath is the rise of what Evan Osnos, a writer for the New Yorker, calls the rise of a “concealed-carry lifestyle” that leaves me shaking in my (metaphorical) boots:

“Something really profound has changed in the way that we use guns,” Osnos tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Concealed carry, as it’s known, is now legal in all 50 states.”

Osnos, who writes about the evolution of concealed carry in the current issue of The New Yorker, estimates that there are about 13 million people who are licensed to carry a concealed gun in the United States — more than 12 times the number of police officers and detectives in America.

He says that gun manufacturers market a “concealed-carry lifestyle,” which uses fear to sell guns.

“If you are somebody who is considering buying a gun, or you’ve become part of this phenomenon of carrying a gun in daily life, you are constantly being reminded of ways in which you could encounter a threat,” he says.

This means that anyone in my neighborhood could be packing at any time. Couple this fact with a Missouri law awaiting the Governor’s signature that would extend stand-your-ground, and any paranoid lout or half-drunk old geezer who is offended by the way I allegedly looked at him, by an overheard conversation, by the political signs in my front yard, or just about anything that strikes his or her fevered imagination as threatening, can be inspired to fire off a few rounds in my direction. The possibilities opened up by concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws do not make me feel safe. They make me instead think about getting out of Dodge.

In his New Yorker article, Osnos describes how, in the interest of increased sales, the NRA uses racially-tinged fear of crime and populist fears that “powerful Americans are seeking to disarm and endanger less privileged citizens” to whip up the paranoia that fuels gun fervor. And to support this union of fear and guns, the NRA regularly pays off pet politicians. Politicians like Missouri’s Senator Roy Blunt:

Since 1998, no current member of Congress has accepted more in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt. A new analysis this week from The Washington Post, and highlighted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, showed that Blunt has received $60,550 from the NRA.

Go ahead. Guess where Blunt has come down on all the recent efforts to keep military assault weapons out of the hands of civilians – including suspected terrorists.

To be fair, Blunt did vote for two GOP-sponsored amendments that pretended to keep suspected terrorists from buying guns while doing nothing or even, according to some calculations, making the gun situation worse. Nothing like pretend government. Maybe Missourians should all just pretend to vote for Blunt next November.

[Editor’s note: Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has vetoed the 2016 bill that would have enabled concealed-carry without a permit. Republicans, of course, are threatening to override that veto.]

The post Gun crazy: Senator Roy Blunt edition appeared first on Occasional Planet.

5 terrifying takeaways from the NRA’s 2013 national convention

Gloria Shur Bilchik — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:00:45 +0000

While there may be some people who have some reasonable arguments for owning a hunting rifle, it doesn’t help their cause to have the NRA espousing the most radical, irrational positions against reasonable regulations on gun ownership. And for those who attended the recent [May 2013] NRA convention, the crazy was on full display. AlterNet recently reported on the worst of the worst. Here’s AlterNet’s top five:

1. Armed children

The NRA wants to appeal to….children! The New York Daily News reported that at the convention, “two 10-year-olds took aim with air pistols, an 11-year-old gawked at a semiautomatic weapon and a 3-year-old soaked up applause for being the youngest member.”

That wasn’t the only instance of children attending the NRA convention. The Daily Mail Online notes that Will Marshall, a 12-year-old from Florida, “has been a member of the NRA for 11 years and owns four guns.” In other words, he joined when he was one.

The presence of young kids at the NRA comes as the problem of children holding guns has been tragically highlighted. One April week saw four people shot by toddlers. And in early May, a five-year-old boy in Kentucky accidentally killed his two-year-old sister with a small rifle.

2. A bleeding target that looks like Obama

For two days, a vendor at the NRA convention hawked a gun target that had an image that looked like President Obama bleeding on it. The vendor, Zombie Industries, was asked to take the product down because it looked too much like the president. Zombie Industries sells life-sized targets for gun owners to shoot at.

Asked by a BuzzFeed reporter whether the Obama likeness was intentional, a Zombie Industries worker replied: “Let’s just say I gave my Republican father one for Christmas.”

3. Guns and the Boston Marathon bombing

There’s plenty to parse in NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s speech at the convention. But what attracted the most attention is this remark: “How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?”

LaPierre continued by saying that Bostonians were “frightened citizens…sheltered in place with no means to defend themselves.”

4. Pink bra holsters

The NRA is an overwhelmingly male organization. But they’re trying to broaden their appeal to women–and so vendors sold bras that could hold guns.

5. Mayor Bloomberg as a Nazi

The Obama image wasn’t the only distasteful optic that occurred at the convention. In this case, though, the speaker wasn’t asked to take it down.

Glenn Beck delivered a speech to the NRA that was supplemented by an image of Mayor Michael Bloomberg looking like a Nazi, as New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli notes. Bloomberg has been in the NRA’s sights since he started railing against lax gun laws in the country and funding candidates favorable to gun control.

The post 5 terrifying takeaways from the NRA’s 2013 national convention appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You can’t have a gun culture without guns

Arthur Lieber — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:00:36 +0000

Many supporters of guns say that our problem is not too many guns, but rather a culture of guns that emanates from mass media and video games. It’s just incidental that the U.S. has almost one gun per citizen.

The problem with this argument is that, in countries like Japan and South Korea, there is as much, if not more, presence of “gun-tertainment” as there is in the United States. Yet their incidence of actual gun violence is but a small fraction of that of the United States. Japan’s firearm death rate is 6percent of that of the U.S., and South Korea’s is 12 percent. What’s the difference between the U.S. and these countries? It’s clear; it’s that the guns per capita in the U.S. is much greater than in Japan or Korea. For every one person in Japan who has a gun, 147 Americans have a gun. For every person in South Korea with a gun, there are eighty people in the U.S. with a gun.

It has become more acceptable for those Americans who have concerns about the high rate of crimes committed by firearms to challenge our gun culture. Pro-gun control advocates can find some degree of common ground with anti-gun control advocates on the issues of media and entertainment. But it’s difficult to take action because of real issues with the First Amendment, not the Second Amendment. Possible infringement of free speech is as much of a real issue in limiting guns and violence in our movies, television shows, and video games as it is with limiting the flow of money in politics into candidates’ hands.

And in spite of the NRA’s opposition to background checks, many pro-gun people join the anti-gun people in wanting to keep guns away from those with criminal records or a histories of mental illness. But that’s about as far as the bond of common ground can stretch.

As Occasional Planet journalist, Bill Kesler, recently pointed out in his post “Mental health gun-control misses the bigger point,” that the exclusion of those individuals with criminal and/or mental health issues represents just a small portion of gun owners in the U.S. If we were to ensure that no one with a criminal record or history of mental health issues had a gun, we would still have far more guns per capita than the second most “gunned-up” country in the world, Yemen. Thus, the gun culture would still be pervasive; the worship of guns would continue to be prominent in many sectors of our society.

Some of the best insights into our society occur when individuals go “out of their bailiwick.” Such was the case in December, 2012, when sports commentator Bob Costas related the fetish with guns in the National Football League to our societal gun problem. He clearly illustrated how a gun culture will not necessarily relate to high incidents of homicide and suicide if guns are not readily available. He made an impassioned, if not thoroughly direct, plea for us to reduce the number of firearms in our society.

Not long after his remarks, Sandy Hook occurred, and suddenly other leaders in our society, including the president and vice-president as well members of Congress, have spoken out for action. As we possibly move toward meaningful legislation, let’s keep in mind that the easiest actions will provide the least amount of benefit. As difficult as it is, we need to start the long, slow process of not just disarming America, but also disarming Americans.

The post You can’t have a gun culture without guns appeared first on Occasional Planet.