BALTIMORE
HIROSHIMA-NAGASAKI COMMEMORATIONS
For the 32nd year, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will remember
the atomic bombings of Japan on August 6 & 9, 1945, which killed more than
200,000 people. It has been 71 years since these awful events occurred.
Other organizations involved in the commemorations are the Baltimore Quaker
Peace and Justice Committee of Homewood and Stony Run Meetings, Chesapeake Physicians
for Social Responsibility, Crabshell Alliance and Pledge of
Resistance-Baltimore.
The HIROSHIMA COMMEMORATION, on August 7, was a
wonderful event. Next up is the NAGASAKI COMMEMORATION on Tuesday, August
9, 2016 at Homewood Friends Meeting, 3107 N. Charles Street. At 5:30 PM,
savor a potluck dinner with members of the peace and justice community. David
Eberhardt will again share some poetry, and there may be some music in the
room. At 7 PM, Firmin DeBrabander, a professor of philosophy at the
Maryland Institute
College of Art, author of "Do Guns Make us Free?," will
offer some possible solutions to the gun violence epidemic. Contact Max
at 410-366-1637 or mobuszewski [at] verizon.net.
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Here's Why
the NRA's Favorite Gun Slogan is Complete Baloney
July 21, 2016
The
following is an excerpt from the new book "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People": And
Other Myths About Guns [3] by Dennis A.
Henigan (Beacon Press, 2016):
"Guns
Don't Kill People, People Kill People." This is, no doubt, one
of the greatest advocacy slogans ever conceived. Its first sentence seems
plainly false on its face; that is, until one reads the second sentence, which
is plainly true and, at the same time, appears to confer truth on the first sentence.
The first sentence captures our attention; the second persuades us with a
proposition we cannot deny.
The slogan
is, of course, intended to convey the idea that guns are simply inanimate
objects that are not dangerous unless and until they come into contact with
human beings. As pro-gun partisans have been known to say, “I’ve never seen a
gun get up off a table and fire itself.” The slogan makes the point that guns
are morally neutral. They are not dangerous in and of themselves. They become
dangerous only in the hands of evil, or disturbed, or careless people. As one
Idaho gun dealer put it, “Firearms are not guilty of crime; the individuals who
possess the firearm are guilty of doing something with it.” Countless gun
owners have observed that they have owned guns for years and none of their guns
has ever been involved in a crime or other violent act. Best-selling author Tom
Clancy has pointed out that “no firearm has ever killed anyone unless directed
by a person who acted either from malice, madness or idiocy.” There is no gun
problem. There is only a people problem. For the gun partisan, this means that
the only laws that make sense are those directed at how people use guns, not at
guns themselves. When Charlton Heston was the NRA’s president, he was asked by
then Senator John Ashcroft during a congressional hearing, “What can be done,
and specifically what can Congress do, to stem the tide of violent crime?”
Heston’s answer: “Punish criminals, Senator.”
How does
this thinking fit with how we treat other “inanimate objects” that tend to
become dangerous only when they come into contact with human beings? Are we
content simply to punish the person who misuses the product? Or are we
interested also in placing barriers between the product and those most likely
to misuse it?
Cars Don't
Kill People, People Kill People
Cars do not
often exceed the speed limit without a driver behind the wheel. Sitting in a
driveway, a car seems pretty innocuous indeed. Does this mean that the sum
total of our public policy response to reckless driving should be severe
punishment of drivers who violate the law? Few would think so.
For
example, most of us are quite comfortable with the idea that before anyone is
permitted to operate an automobile, she must be licensed by the government to
do so. Although the requirements vary from state to state, this generally means
prospective drivers must be of a legal age to drive, have undergone driver
training, have passed a written test, and have shown they can safely operate a
car. When I was a teenager in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I had to endure a
“behind-the-wheel” test (which included the dreaded parallel-parking
requirement) with a very large and intimidating state trooper in the passenger
seat. No one seriously argues that since cars are not dangerous unless driven
by dangerous people, we don’t need to license drivers, only to punish dangerous
driving. It makes sense to have a system in place to prevent potentially
high-risk people from driving in the first place.
If you find
this logic compelling, you will be mystified that for decades in this country
convicted felons were legally prohibited from buying guns from gun dealers, yet
there was no uniform system of background checks to ensure against such sales.
Before the Brady Bill was signed into law by President Clinton in 1993, in
thirty-two states it was possible for a convicted felon to walk into a gun
store, fill out a federal form falsely claiming to have no the Brady Bill,
arguing that background checks at gun stores make no sense because criminals
don’t buy guns at gun stores; they either steal them or get them “on the
street.” An NRA lawyer wrote that the Brady Bill was “simply not workable”
because “criminals do not, to any appreciable degree, buy handguns from
federally licensed firearms dealers.” This, of course, was always an example of
muddled thinking: even if some criminals acquire guns through theft or “on the
street,” it is hard to believe that other criminals don’t simply go into gun
stores and lie on the federal form.
After all, gun stores are where the
guns are. There is a nice selection, there is a store clerk to offer help,
and you even get a warranty against defects. A Justice Department survey of
adult prison inmates, taken before the Brady Bill was enacted, asked those who
had used a handgun in a crime where the gun had been acquired. The guns were as
likely to have come from a gun store as from the “black market” and three times
more likely to have come from a gun store as from theft.
One
additional reason we know the NRA was wrong in saying criminals don’t buy from
gun stores is that they are still trying to do it after the
enactment of the Brady Bill. According to the Department of Justice, since
Brady became law and through 2012, over two million legally prohibited gun
buyers have been blocked from completing their purchases at licensed gun
dealers, or denied gun permits, with felony conviction being the most common
reason. Not only do the Brady background checks block these prohibited
gun purchases; they also establish that the prospective buyer violated federal
law by lying on the federal form. If thousands of criminals still try to buy
guns from stores in the face of a background-check system that provides
evidence of their criminal culpability, can you imagine how many bought them
from stores before such a system existed?
That guns
are inanimate objects that require the intervention of people to inflict injury
is, therefore, not a sound argument against public policies designed to screen
those who seek to own and use guns. Thanks to the Brady Act, we at least have a
system to screen gun buyers at gun stores. In all but a handful of states,
however, gun buyers do not face the equivalent of a parallel-parking test; that
is, there is no licensing requirement for gun ownership that would require
training and testing to establish that those who want to handle guns know what
they are doing. If we are to treat guns like cars, such licensing, with its
training and testing mandates, should be part of a sound gun policy. Nothing in
the notion that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” should counsel
otherwise.
The NRA has
a creative response to the guns/cars licensing analogy. “[A] license and
registration,” it points out, “is not required to merely own a vehicle or
operate it on private property, only to do so on public roads.” If all you do
with your car is drive it on your own property, as opposed to a public
thoroughfare, you need no license. (I presume they have in mind a rancher
driving his pickup around the North Forty, not a suburbanite driving the family
Volvo up and down the driveway.) Therefore, the argument goes, you should not
need a license merely to own a gun but only to carry it, concealed, in a public
place. (As explained above, the NRA position is, however, that the police
should be required to give concealed-carry licenses to anyone who does not have
a criminal record and can legally buy a gun.)
The problem
with this argument is that the risk posed by the gun owner’s use of a gun on
her property is far greater than the risk posed by the car owner’s use of a car
on her property. How many auto-accidents occur on the property of the owner of
the automobile? It is surely true that a virtually undetectable percentage of
driver miles occurs within the confines of the owner’s real estate. On the
other hand, a substantial part of the risk posed by guns is created by the use
of guns in or around the home of the gun owner. Large numbers of unintentional
shootings occur in the home. Indeed, one study, examining only shootings in
which the gun involved was known to be kept in the home, showed that guns in
the home were four times more likely to be involved in accidents than to be
used to injure or kill in self-defense. Suicide, a significant but often
underemphasized part of the gun violence problem, also occurs largely in the
home. A landmark study by Arthur Kellermann and his colleagues, published in
theNew England Journal of Medicine, showed that a gun in the home
increases the risk of suicide by nearly five times. Many of those suicides are
committed by depressed adolescents with guns left accessible by adults. Indeed,
firearms are the most common method of suicide in adolescents, accounting for
60 percent of suicide deaths among youth under the age of nineteen. The risk of
unintentional shootings and adolescent suicide could be substantially reduced
by safety training emphasizing the increased risk posed by guns in the home and
the elements of safe handling and storage practices. Thus, the analogy between
cars and guns strongly supports licensing gun owners. With respect to both
products, persons should be licensed before they engage in the risk-producing
activity with the product. With cars, that activity is driving on public
streets. With guns, the activity is possession of the gun, whether in the home
or on the person in a public place.
Not only is
there broad consensus favoring government intervention to screen drivers of
cars, that consensus extends to regulation directed to the cars themselves. The
fact that an automobile is innocuous sitting in the owner’s driveway does not
persuade us against government regulation to make the car safer when a driver
is at the wheel. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA)
has long had the power to issue minimum safety standards for cars, to test cars
for their crashworthiness, and to recall defective cars. Only the most extreme
libertarians would argue that government has no proper role in the design of
cars, even though traffic injuries and fatalities often are caused by some form
of driver negligence, recklessness, or illegal behavior.
Does any reasonable
person argue that the government should not mandate seat belts, air bags,
shatterproof windshields, and crash-resistant bumpers because “cars don’t kill
people, people kill people”? No, because it is more likely that people will
kill people with unsafe cars than with safe ones.
Excerpted
from “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” And Other Myths About Guns
and Gun Control by Dennis A. Henigan (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with
Permission from Beacon Press.
Dennis A.
Henigan is director of legal and policy analysis at the Campaign for
Tobacco-Free Kids and formerly vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent
Gun Violence.
[5]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/dennis-henigan
[2] http://www.beacon.org
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Dont-Kill-People-Control/dp/0807088846/?tag=alternorg08-20
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Here's Why the NRA's Favorite Gun Slogan is Complete Baloney
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://www.beacon.org
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Dont-Kill-People-Control/dp/0807088846/?tag=alternorg08-20
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Here's Why the NRA's Favorite Gun Slogan is Complete Baloney
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment