Gun shootings have been in the news pretty much on a constant basis since Newtown. So much so, we've stopped feeling the shock and outrage at the senselessness of these shootings. It's been 544 days since December 12th, 2012 and we've had 74 school shootings since that awful day at Sandy Hook. Joshua Holland did the math. We've averaged a school shooting every 7.33 days since Sandy Hook in Newtown.
We had another school shooting yesterday and the main stream media has mostly moved on.
We had 137 school shootings between 1980 and Sandy Hook - there could be more, but that's all Slate found.
We've had 74 school shootings in the 18 months since Sandy Hook. Almost one every other day in January 2014.
At the rate we are going, I'm about to become an advocate for home schooling; except that's an unhelpful, knee-jerk reaction that misses the real issues. Guns are left loaded and unattended in a Target, discharged in a YMCA, and used in a shootout in Walmart. Guns are in our homes, neighbor's homes, and available to the mentally disturbed. We even tolerated a congresswoman being shot in the head. Despite guns being everywhere, we still have to address why schools are the place for nearly 30% of mass shootings and businesses 40%. School and work are stressful places. It's a vicious cycle. When we make changes to make schools safer, that creates more stress on the students and their families. Same goes for work. Then there's the crazy exceptions. The Broward County courthouse makes all visitors go through magnetometers, but court house employees bypass all screening. Really? Ever heard of "going postal"? Fort Hood? Kirkwood, Missouri? The Washington D.C. Navy Yard?
If we add up all gun incidents (currently around 415k per year) and analyze it, we have way too many mass shootings. We have way too many freaking gun incidents.
If gun incidents were viral in the traditional sense, we'd have attempted a cure a hundred different ways by now.
Gun incidents are viral. It is a disease. A disease of ignorance, willful disregard for life, placing profit over safety, hypocrisy and denial. Our country's approach to guns reflects a mental health problem of mass paranoia and mass delusion (a fervent belief of information demonstrably untrue). We have a a group of people who have no problem sacrificing an ungodly number of people for a flawed interpretation of second amendment rights. This is a violent problem we aren't studying. It's a physical problem we aren't studying. We have evidence all across our country telling us we have a widespread, pervasive problem. We have ideas of what's causing the problems, but too little peer reviewed analysis of what's with the guns.
Gun news is grim, but murder rates aren't as bad (except when comparing the U.S. to the world). Murder rates from 1965 to 2009 show we had a peak in 1993 and a steady decrease ever since. Gun violence, however, decreased and is on a current upswing. Homicide as a cause of death dropped in the rankings from 15 in 2009 to 16 in 2010 (Deaths, final data, see tables 18 & 19), but gun incidents are on an upward bounce. They dropped from 1.2 million in 1993 to a low of 331 thousand in 2008 rising to just under 415 thousand in 2011. Violent crime in general has dropped dramatically since 1990, from 792 cases per 100,000 to about 390 cases per 100,000 in 2012.
So, if violent crime is down, then why are so many people so upset with these mass shootings? It's because there are more mass shootings, or as the FBI refers to them as Active Shooter Events (ASE). The number of people injured in these shootings is increasing with Aurora, Colorado contributing to this increased stat.
One or two numbers don't tell the whole story. FactCheck.org put together this graphic attached to a very long story (which I'm showing under fair use) that shows gun murder down, but gun injuries are up. Gun manufacturing and gun ownership and gun suicides are up, but gun robbery is down. The jump out stats are that gun manufacturing has nearly doubled since 2007 and there are 88.9 guns for every 100 people in this country. That's a lot of guns.
These shootings do induce fear. It is domestic terrorism. The question is who is scaring us and what is their agenda? More confounding is what we can do about it? Gun owner advocates coat their words with calls for training and responsibility, but shriek like banshees when anyone thinks out loud about responsible gun regulation. It's more than guns. If we restricted and regulated guns and eliminated the stupid gun fails, we'd still have a violence problem. Nothing would stop a person who was denied a gun but hell bent on killing from picking up a knife or a baseball bat and going on a rampage. But, knives and baseball bats require both proximity and physical effort to wield them. It would give the potential victims a "fighting chance" to survive.
We have a substantial number of people use guns to compensate for their unfounded fears, a fear of change (pdf), a sense of loss for what never really existed in America. We have a population segment that has gone all out in denying facts. They aggrandize ignorance and finds true intellectualism suspicious. They desperately want to avoid change they can't believe in. To many within these groups, owning a gun makes them a "real" American.
We hear this mind set in violent speech, see it in violent headlines. This talking head takes "a shot" at that talking head with the "shot" being harsh words (I've done it myself). We love our violent movies, television shows and video games. We have rampant inappropriate anger and poor anger management. Our political discourse has no room for compromise. Civility seems out of reach. We have lost our societal sense of boundaries between speech and entertainment with reality.
When it comes to guns we keep talking about background checks and gun sale loop holes. What isn't addressed is the lack of uniformity in gun regulation. There are lots of common sense regulations about punishing gun owners who fail to keep their guns secure that lose traction and never leave committee. We have to have a driver's license to operate a car, regardless of who owns the car; but we don't require a gun handler's license regardless of who owns the gun? To me, a gun handler's license would post paid to the idea of a well regulated militia.
We aren't going to get decent gun regulation with this Congress or even the next one, so we get to play defense. The ideas for safety are much like they are for rape prevention.
The message is
Don't Get Shot!
instead of
Don't Shoot!
or even
Don't Shoot Innocent People!
Don't get shot is the idea behind a podiatrist's invention of a bullet resistant blanket with the idea to make millions selling them to schools. I suspect he would find a substantial home market as well. As appalling the idea of issuing bullet resistant blankets to school children is, it's preferable to issuing guns to teachers with inadequate training or having more guns available to more inadequately trained people in schools, work or where ever.
After every shooting it seems we come back to the same ideas, but we seldom hear a call for implementing the laws already on the books. Jerad Miller was a felon without his rights restored, he should never have had access to a gun. Did he have his wife buy the guns? Did he buy them at a gun show? The Bundy ranch may have made him leave, but they didn't report him for having a gun illegally, which to me, makes them somewhat complicit in the Las Vegas shooting. We require certain people to report gun shot wounds and stabbings and other crimes to the police or the health department. Why not require people who have guns legally to report someone they knew or should have known can't have legal access to a gun?
I hear calls for better mental health care and a better way to prevent people with mental health from obtaining guns. Well, better mental health care would be nice, but not because of the gun thing. Usually the mental health sufferer is the crime victim. Plus, we've had two incidents (Aurora, Colorado and UCSB) where people did try and report the potential for violence and the process took too long to work in time to prevent the shootings. What's more, what would be the work around for a deceptive client like Elliot Rodger? How many people are aware of the mental health issues of their loved ones? My experience is that it's not many. Most families are very impatient with their family member's mental health issues. How many of us deal with anger well? How many of us take the time to talk to our children about how movies and tv shows aren't real and effective people don't break things when they get angry?
What's lost on many people who call for better mental health care and diagnosis reporting is the fact that the arguments of the U.S. gun debate reflect some of the least effective mental health coping mechanisms: denial, regression, acting out, projection, reaction formation, repression, displacement, intellectualization and rationalization. Some gun owner's confuse their gun with their dick, or it satisfies dick envy. A gun conveys power and power can be abused. The people who call for better mental health diagnosis reporting fail to realize that in the eyes of many mental health professionals, these "sovereign citizens", gun owner advocates, gun nuts if you will, often have a zealousness bordering on OCD and a troubling ideology with a real potential for violence - you know, something that should be reported. We don't tell these obsessed gun advocates their political gun position is fanatical because we're afraid we'll get shot.
One area of gun violence that never seems to get seriously addressed is the idea of self-control and training. After I post something about a child gun fail incident, one gun advocate or another often replies the children weren't trained and/or disciplined properly. How many of us trained our kids about what a gun looks like and what to do if they see one laying around? How many of us know which of our friends and acquaintances own guns? So many of my liberal friends are shocked when they find out I "gun proofed" my kid which entails formal training and lots and lots of reinforcement, rewards and consequences; but the reality is one mistake on either the gun owner's or child's part is criminally tragic. I was a gun owner, years ago; then, I moved on. I didn't need it. When my daughter was a toddler, it was too great a risk to have a gun. To a gun fanatic, my baby girl would be an excuse to amass an arsenal. The difference between me and a gun nut is that I know I can protect my family and myself without a gun. My ways might not work for every situation, but we've seen a gun is no guarantee of success either.
We had another school shooting. Two people dead this time. We aren't reliving the fantasy played out in Ground Hog Day. This is real. People are dying senselessly on a weekly basis because we, as a nation, don't have the guts to tell people that guns aren't always the final answer to conflict.