The Myth of the Responsible Gun Owner: An American Nightmare
By: Alan Berlow (Washington Monthly)
long article. i excerpted some of it
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
This article is the first part of an investigation. The second part can be found here.
...Are most gun owners reckless and rage-filled? Probably not. But the data show that the gun lobby's promulgated myth of the responsible gun owner is just that—a myth. An extraordinary number of gun owners are not responsible stewards of firearms and the assumption that they are informs public policy. Last year, in an opinion authored by Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court struck down New York's 109-year-old gun law, which required gun owners seeking a concealed carry license to demonstrate "proper cause," a special need for such permission. In its ruling, the 6-3 majority repeatedly referred to the rights of "law-abiding" and "responsible" citizens. Most importantly, more than 230 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, the Court discovered a right for these "law-abiding, responsible citizens" to carry handguns in public for their self-defense.
Millions of hunters, sportsmen, collectors, and other ordinary gun owners view the Second Amendment as a right that comes with responsibilities. But there are plenty who are less fastidious.
In two weeks this spring, the country experienced at least 25 mass shootings. In addition, two seven-year-old Virginia twins and a woman were shot after a dispute over a bicycle. Two Maryland men were shot in a road rage incident after they inadvertently cut off a motorcyclist. In a San Antonio, Texas, road rage incident, a man fired into a car, injuring a six-year-old child. Also in San Antonio, a 21-year-old mother and her 20-year-old husband argued over possessing a handgun when it went off, killing an eight-month-old infant. In Fort Worth, Texas, a 14-year-old girl was shot and killed by her older sister after they found a gun in a closet. In Arlington, Texas, a two-year-old boy fatally shot himself with a gun left lying around his home. In Virginia, a three-year-old boy shot and killed himself with a gun he found in a teenage sibling's room. In Ohio, a four-year-old boy accidentally shot himself in the abdomen after finding his brother's .9mm pistol in the back seat of his SUV. A 14-year-old boy playing with a gun on a North Carolina school bus accidentally shot a 16-year-old student in the buttocks. A Tennessee woman shot her one-year-old grandson sitting in her lap when she reached into her purse and accidentally pulled the trigger of her gun. And that's just a partial list.
...Gun purchases in all states require a federal background check, but only if the seller is a federally licensed dealer. In 35 states, criminals can avoid background checks by purchasing firearms from sites like Armslist.com—a sort of Craigslist for guns—through online auctions, buying from friends, relatives, and other private sellers, or shopping at gun shows. Only eight states require a permit to purchase a gun.
These laws—or the lack of them—matter. The young men responsible for the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which left 13 dead, acquired their firearms at a gun show with the help of an older classmate. The gunman who shot 23 people dead at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 purchased his AK-47 and 1000 rounds of ammunition online.
In states that require a license to carry a concealed handgun, too often, dangerous sorts are still perfectly free to get a permit to pack heat.
Consider stalking. A reliable predictor of intimate-partner homicides in as many as 75 percent of cases, 30 states nonetheless allow convicted stalkers to keep their guns, and 22 let them carry concealed weapons, according to a database compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety. In 31 states, those convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor may not legally own a firearm, but only 17 require those domestic abusers to turn in their guns.
Found not guilty by reason of insanity? No problem. Twenty-one states have no law barring gun ownership by someone found not guilty by reason of insanity, and 23 allow gun purchases by someone found incompetent to stand trial.
And then there's alcohol, a frequent factor in firearm homicides. A University of California Davis survey of more than 78,000 gun owners over 13 years found that those who legally purchased firearms following a conviction for alcohol-related crimes—primarily DUIs—were nearly three times more likely to commit a violent crime or a crime with a firearm—including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—as those with no prior criminal convictions. Nevertheless, only 18 states bar those with multiple DUI convictions from carrying concealed weapons.
...Data on American gun owners paint a different picture. It reveals that millions have little or no training. Sizable numbers are ignorant of the law, careless with their weapons, have severe problems with anger and alcohol, and are regularly involved in violent or criminal activity. And where we find some of the most egregious behavior by gun owners—and dealers—there is almost always a NRA policy to encourage it.
To appreciate why this matters, it helps to understand that the standard measures of gun violence—homicides and suicides—vastly understate the scope of the problem. Imagine if you learned that 1,166 people had been raped, robbed, assaulted, or threatened by someone with a gun today. Well, that's what happened every day, on average, between 2012 and 2020. That's more than four million direct victims of gun violence in one decade. And that's not counting homicides and suicides, which totaled 134,500 and 224,600, respectively, and the more than 192,000 injured in firearm accidents.
If you add indirect victims of gun violence, the numbers are astronomical. To cite just one example, the 380school shootings (as of May 1) since the 1999 Columbine massacre have resulted in the deaths of 199 students and school personnel (about eight each year) and another 428 injured (about 17 each year), according to a Washington Post database.But 352,000 children attended those schools when the violence took place and, thus, were victimized by it. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released on April 11, 19 percent of adults said they had a family member who was shot and killed or committed suicide with a gun. An NPR Marist poll released May 24 found 41 percent of those surveyed said they or someone they know had experienced gun violence either as a victim of a shooting or by being threatened with a gun.
In a nation where as many as 81 million adults own an estimated 434 million firearms (about half of the world's supply), the assumption that "most" are responsible and law-abiding may be accurate. But that still leaves plenty of room for bad stuff to happen, which it does, every day.
Alito, for his part, is dismissive of gun violence statistics. "[W]hat does this have to do with the question whether an adult who is licensed to possess a handgun may be prohibited from carrying it outside the home?" he asked last June.
The answer is that courts have traditionally balanced the government's interest in public safety against Second Amendment rights. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in the 2008 Heller case established an individual's right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense while allowing many gun regulations to remain on the books, including bans on concealed weapons.
...It's impossible to know how many people carry concealed handguns on any given day. Still, a 2017 PEW survey suggests that more than 15 million may carry all the time and an additional 18 million some of the time—about 10 percent of the population. Concealed carry promoters insist that these "armed citizens" make us safer, and they attest that licensed gun owners are among the most responsible and law-abiding citizens.
There is, however, a growing body of evidence to suggest that the growth of concealed carry has made us less safe, not more. Here are a few examples:
- A National Bureau of Economic Research study released last June found that right-to-carry laws increased violent gun crimes by 29 percent and gun homicides by 13 percent in the largest U.S. cities, while gun thefts increased by 35 percent.
- During the first eight years after Wisconsin passed its concealed weapon law in 2011, the state experienced a 33-percent rise in gun homicides compared to the previous eight years, a 56-percent increase in aggravated assaults with firearms, and a 63-percent increase in assaults on police officers.
- Records I've examined for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida show that more than 71,000 carry licenses were suspended or revoked during the last five years, largely due to felony and misdemeanor arrests or convictions and domestic violence injunctions.Extrapolating nationally—and assuming a similar lawlessness rate - would amount to more than 900,000 licensed and not-so-responsible gun carriers.
Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration reported that in 2022 it had found 6,542 guns in carry-on bags at 262 U.S. airports, about 18 guns per day. That number surpassed the previous record of 5,972 guns in 2021, which was no surprise to the TSA. Except for 2020, when people stopped flying because of Covid, the numbers have increased yearly since 2009. During the past decade, the TSA confiscated 33,000 of these illegally transported firearms.
What, if anything, do these numbers tell us about how committed millions of gun-carrying Americans are to responsible gun ownership? Most of those stopped by the TSA offered an Elmer Fudd, "I forgot I was carrying" defense which, even if true, is hardly comforting. "What we see in our checkpoints really reflects what we're seeing in society," TSA administrator David Pekoske told the Associated Press. "There are more people carrying firearms nowadays." The NRA hasn't weighed in on these particular gun owners but has offered this guidance: "The armed citizen must be conscious of his responsibilities 24/7."
Tags
Who is online
191 visitors
There is a part two to this article that I will post another time
I have a neighbor who is an extremely irresponsible gun owner. He has repeatedly been told not to shoot into two of our other neighbors' property when he target practices, sometimes for hours at a time. He refuses to abide by that request. The last time they told him to stop shooting onto their land, they also called the sheriff, and a deputy came out and told him to knock it off. He waited until she was a few miles away, then set off some sort of explosive that was heard for miles. She came back, because she'd heard he explosion.
And basically, nothing has been done, except to tell him to be a good boy and stop doing that.
Nothing will be done, until he kills somebody.
One of my son's elementary school classmates lost his mother years ago to an idiot who didn't check that all was safe behind his target, when he was target practicing. He was shooting into a small neighborhood where kids were out playing in the yard. The mother realized what was happening, and went to the window to yell at the kids to get inside. She took a round to the head. The shooter felt awful - actually had a heart attack when he was told what he'd done. But the fact remains that that young boy lost the only parent who'd ever had anything to do with him, in a terrible manner.
There absolutely are responsible gun owners. And there are irresponsible ones who do not suffer consequences until they've caused irreparable harm to others.
It seems to me that irresponsible gun owners are a form of russian roulette or a ticking time bomb. At some point something bad will happen with these people. Luckily that "at some point" might be decades away and they die off first. But who is to say it will stay that way?
"A National Bureau of Economic Research study released last June found that right-to-carry laws increased violent gun crimes by 29 percent and gun homicides by 13 percent in the largest U.S. cities, while gun thefts increased by 35 percent."
I doubt if it's the "responsible and law-abiding gun owners" who are doing the killing and the stealing.
Legit gun dealers and gun shows must do background checks and abide by existing laws.
What happens outside in the parking lots of these shows and stores are human interactions that cannot be monitored or regulated.
That would include sales and trades between friends, neighbors, relatives, or strangers.
Criminals and the criminally insane would still be able to steal or get their hands on guns regardless of any laws.
Once again, what is your solution(s)?