I find advertising in general extraordinarily interesting. I was a devoted follower of the TV show Mad Men and I teach about advertising in my classes. Advertising is a major part of our culture, and of course, it is a major part of gun culture as well. When I consume gun-related media, I am as drawn to the ads as to the content.

I am also one of the only gun scholars to have systematically analyzed gun advertising. I have published two studies documenting the rise of Gun Culture 2.0 using changes in advertising over time in The American Rifleman (1918-2017) and Guns Magazine (1955-2019), and a third study of the portrayal of women (and men) in ads placed in The American Rifleman (1920-2019).

Without question, advertisements do not simply sell products. They sell certain ideas and ideals which they try to get consumers – often subconsciously – to attach to their products. The male protector is one such ideal I have seen, and ideas about masculinity (and femininity) are frequently sold. (Though see my book chapter on “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertising” for a more complicated gender story.)

Many have looked to Bushmaster’s “Man Card” ad as selling a particular understanding of masculinity in connection with the AR-15 platform rifle. This was especially so in the wake of the mass murders in Newtown, CT, since the murderer happened to use a Bushmaster XM15-E2S (see, for example, the Huffington Post story the day after the event).

But does advertising like Bushmaster’s lead to gun violence? The question of the connection between gun advertising selling masculine ideals and violence committed by people with guns was raised by the plaintiffs in Soto v. Bushmaster and their allies.

As journalist Lois Beckett reported back in 2016:

In the wake of the shooting, some family members of victims questioned whether the gun companies’ aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles was irresponsible, and whether gun companies were intentionally targeting their product to troubled, violent young men like Lanza.

Unfortunately, with the settlement of this case, we will likely never know if what the plaintiffs suggest is true.

Like many others, I personally thought Bushmaster’s “man card” advertising campaign was dumb. But anyone who consumes ad-based media knows that a lot of advertising campaigns are dumb.

If it was supposed to intentionally target troubled, violent young men and therefore play a causal role in mass homicide, however, then Remington needed to fire its ad agency. Available data suggest that the campaign strategy was a terrible failure.

In 2012, including the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people, the total number of Americans who were murdered with all rifles (including but not limited to AR-15 style rifles) was 298 – 2.3% of the 12,888 murders that year.

Both the number (332) and proportion (2.6%) of murders with rifles were higher in 2011 than in 2012, and the number (367) and proportion (2.8%) were higher in 2010 than in 2011, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. (For an unrelated recent post, I provided FBI UCR data showing rifles were used in 2.6% of homicides in 2019.)

Of course, we can never know what would have happened if Bushmaster hadn’t run its Man Card ad. At best, Bushmaster’s alleged “aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles” and “intentionally targeting their products to troubled, violent young men” kept the rifle homicide rate from going down even faster than it did from 2010 to 2012.

But, to me, it seems much more likely that Bushmaster’s marketing was not targeted to “troubled, violent young men” and therefore had no effect on the rifle homicide rate, directly or indirectly.

I sympathize with the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. I don’t know how I would react to the loss of one of my children or loved ones. I am sure I would lash out with anger and experience major depression, and then want to do something about it. I doubt the monetary settlement will help, but perhaps getting the insurers of the former Remington Outdoor Company to settle will.

As dumb as many people thought Bushmaster’s “man card” ad was, if it is supposed to be responsible for mass homicide then Remington needs to fire its ad agency because the campaign was a terrible failure.

Including the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people, the total number of Americans who were murdered with all rifles (including but not limited to AR-15 platform rifles) in 2012 was 298 – 2.3% of the 12,888 murders that year. Both the number (332) and proportion (2.6%) of murders with rifles were higher in 2011 than in 2012, and the number (367) and proportion (2.8%) were higher in 2010 than in 2011. (According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.)

A more likely culprit than gun advertising in understanding mass homicides is the news media. Perhaps the Sandy Hook families should be suing ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN for so excessively publicizing mass murders that they foster copy-cats? Immediately after the Sandy Hook homicides, The Atlantic ran a story suggesting that “The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders.” More recently there was a host of media coverage in the fall of 2015, such one in Mother Jones — like The Atlantic, no friend of guns — about “How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters.”

I have sympathy for the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. I don’t know how I would react to the loss of one of my children or loved ones. I am sure I would lash out with anger and experience major depression, and then want to do something about it. But a lawsuit goes beyond an emotional outburst, and seems to me to be a waste of time, energy, and money that could be put to better use – perhaps in trying to “cure violence” in the places it is most prevalent.

The CityLab article on “The Bleeding of Chicago” I looked at yesterday argues that “the men and women trying to save Chicago’s shooting victims are racing another enemy: the growing lethality of modern weaponry.”

Although the homicide rate in the United States has been going down for the past 20 years — thanks in part to advances in emergency response and trauma medicine — how much more might it have dropped but for these increasingly lethal weapons?

I won’t rehearse all of the longstanding arguments between those who emphasize intentionality (“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”) versus those who emphasize instrumentality (“people with guns kill people”). I see some truth in both positions.

Any weapon — indeed, any thing — is potentially lethal. But some have more lethal potential than others. Which is why, according to the gun culture cliche, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. And why you use your pistol to fight your way back to your rifle. And so on.

How much of the “bleeding of Chicago” is due to the weaponry as opposed to the intention? The Cook County chief medical examiner, Dr. Ponni Arunkumar sides decisively with the instrument:

“There has been this drastic increase in the number of gunshot victims we’ve been seeing over the last two years—but also, we are seeing an increase in the number of wounds . . . Before we’d see gunshot victims with maybe two or four gunshot wounds. Now we see victims with eight to 10.”

No explanation is given for this 200% to 500% increase in the number of gunshot wounds per patient in the past two years. But certainly “high capacity” magazines in semi-automatic firearms have been in circulation, including among criminals, for much longer than that.

By following a link in the CityLab article, I went to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times that also features Arunkumar and says that the doubling of gunshot wounds has taken place over the past 25 years, which makes more sense.

Upon further investigation, it appears that a couple of different facts are being conflated here. The data being cited come from a review of medical examiner’s reports conducted by the Chicago Sun-Times’ “Watchdogs.” The review compared those shot to death in Cook County in August of 1992 and August of 2016, two of the bloodiest months in Chicago history.

The review found:

1. Those shot to death in 2016 had been struck by an average of 4.25 bullets compared to 2.5 bullets in 1992, an increase of 170%.
2. Seven of the 2016 gunshot victims had been shot at least 10 times compared to just three in August 1992, an increase of 233%.

It seems evident that killers in Chicago are shooting more, but the 4.25 bullets hitting the average victim in August 2016 could be achieved with a revolver or even a 1983 model Colt Mustang — the gun pictured in the CityLab story — with its 5+1 round capacity.

The 233% increase in gunshot victims struck by 10 or more rounds seems striking, but these are a small proportion of homicides. It also in itself doesn’t resolve the instrumentality vs. intentionality debate. Consider some other facts uncovered by the Watchdogs:

1. Of those who died after being hit by a single bullet, a larger percentage of the 1992 victims suffered a wound to the body, rather than the head.
2. Twenty percent of those killed in August 2016 were sitting in a vehicle when they were shot, compared with just 5 percent in August 1992.

What these facts say to me is that the level of brutality in gun homicides in Chicago is increasing, and that we are seeing more assassinations (single bullet to head, shot in car). Which is unquestionably an issue of intentionality rather than instrumentality.

I thought I could assign the paper in my Sociology of Guns seminar in Spring 2018. But I have to confess that I have not read the entire article yet. In fact, I did not make it through the article’s introduction.

Why?

I got hung up on a passage which bothered me so much that I couldn’t read on.

Koper writes: “Semiautomatic weapons with LCMs and/or other military-style features . . . tend to produce more lethal and injurious outcomes when used in gun violence.” I did not realize that had been established in the scholarly literature (hence my being excited to read this article).

OK, so I check the citations for this statement. The citations should support the statement being made. Citation #2? Koper’s work assessing the effect of the federal assault weapons ban for the National Institute of Justice: “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.” This work suggested that there was no clear effect of the AWB, but that there might have been an effect if it was in place longer and with fewer loopholes.

I do not know all of the scholarly literature on the topic — which is why I was excited to see Koper’s new article — but I do know that Gary Kleck has presented evidence suggesting that large capacity magazines do NOT produce more lethal outcomes (at least in mass shootings). The intentions of the person doing the murdering are more important.

This is in line with the paper by Koper on the relative hazards of revolvers vs. semi-auto pistols that I just discussed in my last post. Revolvers were nearly 60% more deadly than semi-autos in that study. Again suggesting that the intention of a person to do lethal harm to another may be key to understanding different outcomes, rather than the mechanism used (at least when comparing different types of firearms; remember: don’t bring a knife to a gunfight).

Which brings me to Citation #17, given by Koper to help support the assertion that “Semiautomatic weapons with LCMs and/or other military-style features . . . tend to produce more lethal and injurious outcomes when used in gun violence.”

Citation #17 is to the same study comparing the injuriousness and lethality of semi-auto pistols and revolvers that I discussed in my last post!!!

And you know from having read my last post that Koper’s earlier study that he cites here actually shows revolvers to be equally injurious to semi-auto pistols, AND MUCH MORE LETHAL.

I am still planning to read the rest of the article and possibly assign it in my class in the spring. I’m interested to see what it says and what my students think it says, which are often two different things.

Which is sadly all too true with much of the gun (violence) research used to advocate for public policies regulating guns and gun owners.

Like many observers of gun culture, I mostly see revolvers recommended (a) for ladies, (b) as a backup to your primary, semiautomatic carry pistol, or (c) by old school wheel gun masters like Grant Cunningham.

Cunningham excepted, we often seem to underestimate the lethal potential of revolvers. And WE most definitely includes the authors of this article. In fact, they are so hell-bent on establishing the danger of semi-automatic pistols over revolvers that they cannot even read their own findings correctly. (Recalling my last post on the importance of being truth advocates over political advocates.)

Using police records on fatal and non-fatal handgun assaults in Jersey City, NJ from 1992 through 1996, the authors results are summarized in the two figures below. (I wanted to present them side-by side for ease of comparison, but didn’t have time to do that, sorry.)

Figure 1 shows the results for SEMIAUTOMATIC HANDGUNS. Following the tree from threat to death, bottom to top, we see that in 57.58% of attacks, the victim was injured. This is virtually the same proportion as those attacked with revolvers: 56.34% (Figure 2 below).

Of those injured, 15.79% of those assaulted with semiautomatic pistols died. But the fatality rate for revolvers is actually almost 60% HIGHER: 25% (Figure 2 below).

Revolvers kill!!!!

Respect to the authors for reporting what the data actually show. That is social scientifically responsible. But because the findings depart from their expectations, they go through all sorts of efforts to try to explain how semi-automatic pistols really are more dangerous.

Consider their conclusions:They conclude: “the number of gunshot victims would have been approximately 9% lower had pistols not been used in any of the attacks.”

What? The? Freak? The number of victims would have been 9% lower, but the fatality rate of revolvers is 58% higher (25% vs. 15.79%). So that is an acceptable trade-off?

Even their basis for explaining how much worse semi-autos are than revolvers is suspect. As seen in Table 2 below, the average number of gunshot victims per incident was 1.15 for semi-autos and 1.0 for revolvers. The difference is statistically significant, but is it substantively significant?

Although the difference is not statistically significant, the average number of wounds per gunshot victim (1.5) is actually higher than that of semi-autos (1.44).

Of course we all know that a benefit of semi-autos over revolvers is that you can just rain bullets down on people with semi-autos. Table 1 below shows the estimated shots fired per incident, by pistols and revolvers. The estimated average range per incident (minimum to maximum) for semi-autos is 3.23 to 3.68, and for revolvers is 2.3 to 2.58.

So, basically one more shot per incident on average for semi-auto pistols than revolvers. Not exactly a hail of gunfire in either case, and certainly not a major difference between the two gun action types.

I don’t know whether these results are because revolvers are more reliable or accurate, or because those who use revolvers are more determined or careful. But I certainly interpreted the findings much differently than the authors.

An article we are reading this week – “Firearm Injuries in the United States,” published by 4 authors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is interesting to note – shows that the firearm homicide rate in the United States was 3.66 per 100,000 from 2010-2012.

Taking an aggregate statistic like this, we often hear about how much higher the homicide rate is in the United States than other “similar” countries.

But there is a problem with such population averages: they gloss over important differences between subpopulations within the United States. For example, according to “Firearms Injuries in the United States,” the firearm homicide rate for those 25-34 is more than four times greater than the rate for those 55-64 (8.01 vs. 1.47). The rate for men is 6.13 and for women 1.15. The rate for non-Hispanic Blacks is 14.78 compared to 0.99 for non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islanders.

Of course, these differences in subpopulations are related also to economics, and economics are closely related to residence in the United States. As I have argued previously, the problem with averages is that no one lives in “The United States.”

The second reading for my class this week is by Andrew Papachristos (with Christopher Wildeman), whose work I like so much and about which I have written a number of times (here and here and here and here). His use of social networks to analyze the concentration of firearms injury and death provides some dramatic and easily understood statistics. For example, in one study he found 85% of all firearms injuries in one Boston community took place within one social network of just 5% of the population (depicted below).

As the CDC researchers observe, “firearm violence is not evenly distributed by geography or among the populations living in these communities. Rather it is highly concentrated in specific ‘hot spot’ locations and often occurs within high-risk social networks” (p. 11). Citation: Papachristos (among others).

This extreme concentration of firearms violence in the United States was discovered by the gun violence newsadvocacy outlet The Trace last summer and they were reminded of it recently by some work done by The Guardian newspaper. According to The Trace, “While President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have emphasized the national murder rate when discussing their strategies for tackling violent crime, The Trace has argued that drilling down to the neighborhood level is the best way to understand gun violence.”

Good to know that The Trace is not going to emphasize the national murder rate anymore, since it is unhelpful in solving the problem of crime, injury, and death.

The Trace continues, “St. Louis, as a prime example, had the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States over the last three years. The homicide rates in several neighborhoods in the city are so high that — as we’ve noted — they exceeded those in Honduras, the deadliest country in the world. In other neighborhoods, especially those that are majority white, the risk is negligible.”

Or, as I wrote almost 2 years ago (April 10, 2015):

The problem with averages is that there is no “United States of America” when it comes to guns, violence, and crime, but many Americas. Some of these Americas – like my neighborhood in Winston-Salem – are more like our first world counterparts in the OECD, and some of them are more like the third world politically, economically, and socially.

This is not to say what The Guardian has done isn’t helpful. It is the sense conveyed that they are discovering something that we haven’t known for some time that is bothersome. I very much like the graphical depictions they provide which show the concentration of violence in the United States.

Not quite the 80/20 principle, but same idea…

Burrowing down to particular neighborhoods, e.g., in St. Louis. The murder capital of the United States, but again, some parts more dangerous than Honduras and some part as safe as Switzerland.

Advertising is a major part of our culture, and of course it is a major part of gun culture as well. When I watch gun TV shows, I am as drawn to the commercials as to the shows themselves. As part of my research, I am analyzing advertising in gun magazines over the past 100 years to document the rise of Gun Culture 2.0.

Without question, advertisements do not simply sell products. They sell certain ideas and ideals which they try to get consumers – often subconsciously – to attach to their products. The male protector is one such ideal I have seen recently, and ideas about masculinity (and femininity) are frequently sold.

Many have looked to Bushmaster’s “Man Card” ad as selling a particular understanding of masculinity in connection with the AR-15 platform rifle. This was especially so in the wake of the mass murders in Newtown, CT, since the murderer happened to use a Bushmaster XM15-E2S (see, for example, the Huffington Post story the day after the event).

But does advertising like Bushmaster’s lead to gun violence? The question of the connection between gun advertising selling masculine ideals and violence committed by people with guns was raised again last week in a story about the lawsuit brought by the families of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School against Bushmaster (or Remington which owns Bushmaster, or Freedom Group which owns Remington, or Cerberus Capital which owns Freedom Group – not sure which).

The US-office of The Guardian of London reported that a Connecticut judge will allow the Sandy Hook families to see the internal records of how gun companies market “military-style rifles.” The author of the article, Lois Beckett, wrote:

In the wake of the shooting, some family members of victims questioned whether the gun companies’ aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles was irresponsible, and whether gun companies were intentionally targeting their product to troubled, violent young men like Lanza.

If what the plaintiffs suggest turns out to be true, then regardless of our views of guns generally, we must all conclude that BUSHMASTER IS THE WORST MARKETER IN THE HISTORY OF GUNS.

Why? Because available data suggests their strategy utterly failed.

Including the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people, the total number of Americans who were murdered with all rifles (including but not limited to AR-15 platform rifles) in 2012 was 298 – 2.3% of the 12,888 murders that year. Both the number (332) and proportion (2.6%) of murders with rifles were higher in 2011 than in 2012, and the number (367) and proportion (2.8%) were higher in 2010 than in 2011. (According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.)

At best, Bushmaster’s alleged “aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles” and “intentionally targeting their products to troubled, violent young men” kept the rifle homicide rate from going down even faster than it did. We can never know what would have happened if Bushmaster hadn’t run its Man Card ad.

But, to me it seems much more likely that Bushmaster’s marketing is not targeted to “troubled, violent young men” and therefore has no effect on the rifle homicide rate.

A more likely culprit than gun advertising in understanding mass homicides is the (largely anti-gun) news media. Perhaps the Sandy Hook families should be suing ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN for so excessively publicizing mass murders that they foster copy-cats? Immediately after the Sandy Hook homicides, The Atlantic ran a story suggesting that “The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders.” More recently there was a host of media coverage in the fall of 2015, such one in Mother Jones — like The Atlantic, no friend of guns — about “How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters.”

I also don’t think Bushmaster’s ads target the “troubled, violent young men” who use handguns with extraordinary frequency to defend their “manhood” and “respect” according to what sociologist Elijah Anderson called “the code of the street.”

Gun advertising also fails to reach the many people who use knives rather than guns to enforce the code of the street.

I have sympathy for the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. I don’t know how I would react to the loss of one of my children or loved ones. I am sure I would lash out with anger and experience major depression, and then want to do something about it. But a lawsuit goes beyond an emotional outburst, and seems to me to be a waste of time, energy, and money that could be put to better use – perhaps in trying to “cure violence” in the places it is most prevalent.

The job of the discussant is to read the papers being presented, offer some intelligent commentary on them, and raise some questions for the authors to consider.

After one paper (on mass shooting events was withdrawn), I was left to comment on three papers:

• “Examining Determinants of Race-Specific Gun Violence” by Rick Dierenfeldt, a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

• “The Effect of Large-Capacity Magazines on the Casualty Counts in Mass Shootings” by Gary Kleck of Florida State University

• “The Point Blank Effect: A Preliminary Assessment of the Deterrent Effect of Firearm Possession and Use” by Vincent Ferraro of Framingham State University and Saran Ghatak of Keene State College.

Papers presented at conferences like this are typically unpublished and are often in their very early stages, therefore the three papers I read were in various stages of completion.

The most complete paper, and the one of most interest to readers of this blog, is Kleck’s on large-capacity magazines and mass shootings, so I am writing a separate post on that paper that will go up tomorrow.

“Examining Determinants of Race-Specific Gun Violence”

Dierenfeldt examined racial (black-white) differences in the likelihood of gun use during an aggravated assault using data from the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) from 2009-2011. (The NIBRS is replacing the summary reporting found in the Uniform Crime Reports [UCR] and includes more detailed information on criminal incidents reported to police.) He combined this crime data with demographic information found in the American Community Survey.

Using complex statistical methods, Dierenfeldt found some interesting similarities between the predictors of gun using during an aggravated assault for blacks and whites, and a couple of interesting differences.

• Notable SIMILARITIES are that both whites and blacks are MORE likely to use a gun when their victim is male and when their victim is black. Both races are LESS likely to use a gun when they live in the South and when alcohol use is involved.
• Notable DIFFERENCES include blacks being more likely to use guns when they are younger and whites more likely when they are older. Blacks are also more likely to use guns when their victim is younger, when the assault takes place in public rather than in a residence, and when they live in highly segregated communities.

This suggests that simply saying “gun use during an aggregated assault” is not sufficiently specific to understand its causes and therefore no single/simple public policy can be implemented to address it.

“The Point Blank Effect: A Preliminary Assessment of the Deterrent Effect of Firearm Possession and Use”

In their paper, very much a work in progress, Vincent Ferraro and Saran Ghatak wade into the perilous waters of the guns and crime debate, and if that alone were not enough, they do so with a particular focus on increasingly controversial “Stand Your Ground” laws.

Basically, Ferraro and Ghatak look at state level homicide rates (average number of murders per 100,000 population in 2011, 2012, and 2013 according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports) and try to determine whether state gun policies are related – positively or negatively – net of other predictors of homicide.

They focus on 3 state gun policies in particular:

1. Whether a state’s concealed carry law is shall issue/unrestricted vs. may issue
2. Whether a state has a Stand Your Ground law on the books, and
3. The percent of the state’s population that has a concealed carry permit (according to the 2014 Lott, Whitley, and Riley report).

Although the results here are very preliminary, on their first take Ferraro and Ghatak find the following statistically significant correlations:

• Positive relationship between Stand Your Ground law and homicides rates
• Negative relationship between percent of population with concealed carry permits and homicide rates
• Positive relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and homicide rates
• Positive relationship between percent non-Hispanic black in state and homicide rates

Shall issue licensing had no significant relationship with homicide rates, which is not surprising since 82% of the 49 states in the study are shall-issue (Vermont excluded because its lack of a licensing system). There is simply not enough variation in this “variable” for it to vary systematically with another variable.

Where you find more variation with respect to concealed carry is in the percentage of the population with a carry permit (mean for 49 states is 4.97 with a standard deviation of 3.17). Not every carry law is created equal, even beyond the shall issue/may issue divide. This was one of the points of the Lott, Whitley, and Riley report, and Ferraro and Ghatak’s study seems to bear out the importance of looking at the consequences of different specific details of different shall issue laws.

And in terms of the guns and crime debate (more guns, more crime or less?), only the percentage of the population with concealed carry licenses would seem to bear on the debate directly. More concealed carry licenses would mean more criminal deterrence and less crime – which is what the authors’ data shows. Shall issue vs. may issue and SYG laws are not actually measures of whether there are more guns or not.

Last, bearing in mind that correlation is not causation, I questioned the finding of a positive relationship between SYG laws and homicide rates. It seemed as plausible to me that a higher homicide rate would lead a state to pass SYG laws as the reverse (that SYG laws lead to higher homicide rates, which is what the authors argue).

By Katie Huggins

Given my background, I suppose it is surprising that my immediate thoughts concerning guns are negative. One would think that someone growing up in a military household would be compliant with gun culture, but as my primary exposure to firearms involved driving on base through ID inspection by heavily armed security forces, the idea of guns as an awareness and preparedness for some sort of violent threat is never far from my thoughts. Off base, I grew up in towns where violent crime is a prevalent reality, but I managed to remain removed from it, insulated within the safety of the upper-middle class suburbs in which my family lived. I have never handled a gun, nor have I been in a dangerous situation involving a gun. Even so, I tend to forget about potentially legitimate uses of firearms. The appeal of gun sport eludes me in part because Bambi was a traumatic film experience and in part because I was never around large hunting communities until I moved to Georgia. As this was the first time I had not been surrounded by the military community, I felt out of place amongst the country kids, who quickly settled in my mind as rednecks who shot things and got their pickup trucks as muddy as possible for fun. I spent most of my high school years avoiding this swath of students, thus taking pride in distancing myself from their backwards mentality and backwoods pleasures at all costs. In terms of mere aesthetics, I was anti-gun.

My anti-gun tendencies carry to gun policy. I have become more keenly aware of gun violence during my college years; the Newtown shooting occurred during finals week in the fall semester of my freshman year. On some level, I link that shooting with an increased awareness of the difficulty of the “real world,” marking a move from my childhood naiveté in which I did not have to worry about such violence. As a Criminology student, I must foster this heightened awareness for academic purposes, and as a result of my studies, I have a hard time accepting the gun rights defense that “guns don’t kill people; people do.” I understand the sentiment that individuals with the intention to kill another person will carry it out by any means available to them, but as I learned in Dr. Bechtel’s Criminal Homicide course, guns facilitate the perpetrator in succeeding as the use of a firearm, instead of some other weapon, almost certainly guarantee lethality. As mainstream news media continues to sensationalize mass shootings, I am reminded of the trends I have studied: that the US has the highest homicide rate of any industrialized nation, and that many of those homicides are carried out with a gun, which, as Dr. Bechtel observed, aids the perpetrator in causing more damage and taking more lives. Even though crime rates and homicide rates are declining, the frequent exposure to particularly horrible acts of gun violence are hard to ignore. I was abroad in the spring, and Europe’s stricter gun control laws meant that the worst thing that could happen to me was pickpocketing. It was hard coming home to multiple high-profile mass shootings in a relatively short span of time. After the shooting in Virginia a few weeks ago, my mom sent me an article that identified mass shootings as an overwhelmingly American phenomenon, a tragic reality that is in keeping with the disproportionately higher rates of homicide than other national peers. It is hard for me to observe these trends and accept the role guns currently hold in American culture.

In my vision of a perfect universe, guns would be banned outright. My mom and I had several conversations about gun control over the summer, spurred on by the shooting in Chattanooga. We both expressed the hope that, if no guns were legal, law enforcement would be able to prevent more violent crimes by removing all firearms. In our eyes, the sanctity of human life is more a more precious right to protect than the right to bear arms. We also talked about how guns were controlled in Germany when we lived there. Our landlord was the local forest meister and an avid hunter, but he was required to store his firearms in a controlled facility that functioned much like a country club. I would not be opposed to allowing guns used for sport to be managed in that way. However, we hit a snare when thinking about self-defense. My mom grew up in New Mexico, so she is aware of the centrality of the ranching culture in that region and the ranchers’ need to have a rifle to protect the livestock from coyotes and other predators. We did not address the desire to own a gun for protection from the violence of other people; it was not an argument that occurred to either of us. Part of my family’s privilege is that we live in a neighborhood where we can count on law enforcement for our protection, so the need for a gun born from that sense of fear is difficult for us to fathom. Furthermore, based on what we have studied in these first few weeks of class, it is not a problem that would sort itself out with complete disarmament, as the example of the absolute failure of Prohibition indicates. If the ban of alcohol created a rise gun violence through the development of organized crime, how much worse would this trend be escalated by the ban of guns themselves? Even so, guns play too central of a role in the American identity; we cannot ignore history altogether by abolishing the Second Amendment. By more realistic standards, I would support stricter regulations for background checks and other such proposed measures of gun control, but I am not sure the effect such measures would have on illegal gun use – if it would help at all. This reality leaves me at an impasse as to any concrete ideas as to how the balance between gun control and gun rights should be carried out. I just know that I have a problem with the status quo as it stands.

For some reason, he is very enamored of the VPC’s “research” on concealed carry killers, even though as far as I can see it is a terrible [great] example of [terrible] advocacy research. So, I wrote the following comment on MTGG’s recent post:

You state: “According to the FBI, less than one out of five fatal shootings in the United States takes place during the commission of a serious crime. Homicide is impulsive, it usually grows out of disputes between relatives or friends, and if a gun is present the argument gets very violent, very fast.” You link to 2012 FBI Homicide data which shows: 8,855 firearms homicides, but 3,438 have unknown circumstances. So, 5,417 fatal shootings have known circumstances. Of those, 1,437 are “felony” type or “suspected felony type.” So, already we are up from “less than one out of five” to just over one in four. But what about the 823 “other than felony” fatal shootings that are classified as gangland killings, juvenile killings, and sniper attacks? Certainly these aren’t impulsive disputes between relatives or friends. So, 1,437 + 823 = 2,260 / 5,417 = 42%. And this charitably includes the 1,124 “other not specified” circumstances for the “other than felony” category. So, there are at least as many fatal shootings taking place in criminal circumstances as there are arguments gone out of control — at least according to the data you cited.

The thing is, you don’t even need to exaggerate like this because you are right that there are too many fatal shootings (and knifings and bludgeonings and beatings) that grow out of romantic triangles, brawls, and arguments. But what is the role of concealed weapon permit holders in this? Is the homicide rate for concealed weapon permit holders higher, lower, or the same as others? There is no comprehensive federal database of concealed weapon permit holders (thank goodness!), but some states release data on crimes committed by concealed weapon permit holders. What do those data show? (You know what they show!)

Looking at this new and improved VPC concealed carry killers site, to me it looks like lipstick on a pig. It says: “Concealed carry killers are a threat to public safety. The evidence is clear that all too often, private citizens use their concealed handguns to take lives, not to save them.” But it also goes on the clarify (still, alas) that it includes suicides committed by concealed carry killers. How is suicide a “threat to public safety”?

You know I had to title a recent post, “What is Worse, The Violence Policy Center or the New York Times Editorial Board?” Please MTTG, don’t make me have to add you to this list!