by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
THE LAST GUN
OTHER BOOKS BY TOM DIAZ
No Boundaries:
Transnational Latino Gangs and American Law Enforcement
Lighting Out of Lebanon:
Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil
Making a Killing:
The Business of Guns in America
THE LAST GUN
How Changes in the Gun Industry
Are Killing Americans and
What It Will Take to Stop It
Tom Diaz
NEW YORK
LONDON
© 2013 by Violence Policy Center and Tom Diaz
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2013
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Diaz, Tom.
The last gun : how changes in the gun industry are killing Americans and what it will take to stop it / Tom Diaz,
pagescm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59558-841-8 (e-book) 1. Firearms industry and trade—United States. 2. Firearms—Law and legislation—United States. 3. Gun control—United States. I. Title.
HD9744.F553U6282013
338.4'7683400973—dc23
2012047230
The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.
www.thenewpress.com
Composition by dix!
This book was set in Minion
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
With the deepest humility, I dedicate this book to all of the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandchildren, friends, neighbors, companions, and passing strangers whose lives have been needlessly cut short by gun violence in America, and to the many times that who are our walking wounded, mutilated in body and soul by guns, and to the many, many more times the sum of all of that whose arms and hearts ache day and night for the embrace of their forever lost loved ones.
May a compassionate God have mercy on us all.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Reign of Terror
1.Our Daily Dead: Gun Death and Injury in the United States
2.Supreme Nonsense and Deadly Myths
3.Women and Children Last
4.Two Tales of a City
5.The Third Wave: Beyond the Gunshine State
6.As Close as You Can Get Without Enlisting
7.Top Secret: America’s Guns
8.Paper Tiger
9.Solutions Worthy of the Name
Afterword
Appendix A A Week of Reported Gun Death and Injury in August 2011
Appendix B Glock Handguns in the News: May 2011–April 2012
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support of my former employer the Violence Policy Center. Executive director Josh Sugarmann did yeoman work in checking facts and offering substantive suggestions for the text. Marty Langley helped enormously in gathering data and assembling it into charts and tables. Kristen Rand’s encyclopedic knowledge of federal law was invaluable.
The New Press and its fine staff are, of course, the keystone of this book. I thank editorial director Marc Favreau for giving me the opportunity to revisit this subject in depth.
Finally, I must thank my family. Writing is solitary work. Writing a book is monastic. They have paid the price.
THE LAST GUN
INTRODUCTION
A REIGN OF TERROR
In the four decades between 1969 and 2009, a total of 5,586 people were killed in terrorist attacks against the United States or its interests, according to a May 2011 report by a conservative Washington policy institute, the Heritage Foundation. This number includes those killed in the terror attacks within the United States on September 11, 2001.1 By comparison, more than 30,000 people were killed by guns in the United States every single year between 1986 and 2010, with the exception of four years in which the number of deaths fell slightly below 30,000—1999, 2000, 2001, and 2004. In other words, the number of people killed every year in the United States by guns is about five times the grand total of Americans killed in terrorist attacks anywhere in the world since 1969.2
Here is another perspective. In 2010, five Americans were killed worldwide by terrorist attacks.3 In the same year, fifty-five law enforcement officers were killed by guns in the United States—out of a total of fifty-six officers killed feloniously.4 (The fifty-sixth officer was killed by a motor vehicle.) In plain words, more than ten times the number of law enforcement officers were killed by guns in the United States in 2010 than all of the Americans killed by terrorism anywhere in the world that year.
It gets even worse. Every year, more Americans are killed by guns in the United States than people of all nationalities are killed worldwide by terrorist attacks. Figure 1 compares the number of people killed worldwide in terrorist attacks in the six years 2005 through 2010 with the number of people killed by guns in the United States in the same years.
Figure 1. Worldwide Terrorism Deaths and U.S. Gun Deaths, 2005–10
Terrorism deaths, U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism, 2008 and 2010; gun deaths, 2005–2010, Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, WISQARS, “2001–2010, United States Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000.”
America has engaged in a “War Against Terrorism” at tremendous social and financial cost since the so-called 9/11 attacks of September 11, 2001. As of March 2011, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a program called Operation Noble Eagle to enhance security at military bases, had cost American taxpayers $1.283 trillion.5 In addition to the money spent on these wars, increased federal, state, and local costs for “homeland security” totaled more than $1 trillion over the decade between September 2001 and September 2011.6 The scholars who compiled this number concluded in their 2011 book on the subject that “most enhanced homeland security expenditures since 9/11 fail a cost-benefit assessment, it seems, some spectacularly so, and it certainly appears that many billions of dollars have been misspent.”7 According to Ohio State University professor John Mueller, one of the authors of the homeland security cost study, an American’s chances of being killed in an automobile accident are about one in 7,000 or 8,000 per year; of being a victim of homicide, about one in 22,000 per year; and of being killed by a terrorist, about one in 3.5 million per year.8
There is little sign that this “counterterrorism state unto itself”—as the conservative Washington Times called it—is likely to wither away soon.9 The Department of Homeland Security’s budget request was $56.3 billion for fiscal year 2011, $57 billion for FY 2012, and $39.5 billion for FY2013.10 In contrast, the combined budget request for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry was $11.3 billion for FY2012
and $11.2 billion for FY2013.11
The specter of terrorism that drives these costs also has inspired infringements on civil liberties that at least some would have thought unthinkable before the attacks.12 “The courts have been failing terribly,” law professor Susan N. Herman, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times in 2011. “The Fourth Amendment has been seriously diluted.”13 One of the features of the war on terror most salient to this book’s subject has been what former attorney general John Ashcroft called “a new paradigm,” which among other things added the “new priority . . . of prevention” of terrorism to the Justice Department’s traditional focus on criminal prosecution.14
The questions compel themselves.
Why is there no equivalent “war” against gun violence, which takes and shatters the lives of more Americans than does terrorism by many, many times every single year?
Why, when other articles of the Bill of Rights—such as those involving searches, wiretaps, and preventive arrests—are “balanced” against the fear of terrorism, is the Second Amendment fiercely claimed to be “untouchable” by the gun lobby and by the politicians who hew to its line, and is slavishly protected by activist conservative judges? Why do even many who favor some form of gun control continue to focus on “illegal guns” and the prosecution of criminals instead of adding “a new paradigm” of prevention?
Given the lack of widespread public outcry for a reordering of our national priorities, Americans and their political leaders appear either to be ignorant of, or to have become inured to, the endless torrent of civilian gun violence in the United States. Why?
And finally, why has the subject of gun control become, even among influential “moderate” Democrats, the “third rail” of politics?
This book examines and answers those questions. It documents in detail each of the following factors that contribute to the unique position of the United States as the world’s dark archetype of gun violence:
•Levels of gun death and injury that mark the United States as a frightening aberration among industrialized nations.
•Deliberate suppression of data regarding criminal use of firearms, gun trafficking, and the public health consequences of firearms in the United States.
•The almost universal failure of the American news media to report on, even to understand, the continuing hurricane of gun violence in America.
•Aggressive “hypermarketing” of increasingly lethal weapons by a faltering industry.
•Militarization of the civilian gun market as the driving force in that marketing.
•Indifference by policy makers who might be expected to lead on gun control, and widespread acquiescence by elected officials to the gun lobby’s unrelenting legislative campaigns.
The intricate interweaving of these factors is aptly illustrated by an incident that occurred on Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado on November 21, 2011. On that date, at about ten o’clock in the morning, Airman First Class Nico Cruz Santos barricaded himself in a building, armed with his personal handgun.15 The base, located near Colorado Springs, is home to the Fiftieth Space Wing, responsible for operating U.S. Department of Defense space satellites.16
Santos was serving in a squadron that “provides physical security, force protections measures and law enforcement services” to the wing.17 He appears to have been a troubled person, reacting to his imminent discharge from the air force and possible imprisonment after having pleaded guilty in a civilian court to a charge of attempted sexual exploitation of a child.18 Airman Santos surrendered without violence at about eight P.M.
The building in which Santos barricaded himself was a personnel processing center, a facility in which airmen are prepared for deployment. That fact brought immediately to mind the events of November 5, 2009, when U.S. Army Major Nidal M. Hasan is alleged to have gone on a rampage with his personal handgun in a similar deployment center at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan left a total of thirteen dead and thirty-two wounded.19 Major Hasan was subdued only after he was shot several times by police.
In the interval between the two events, and as a direct consequence of the Pentagon’s reaction to Major Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood, Congress imposed a significant restriction on the Department of Defense. Sandwiched between two sections of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year (FY) 2011, mandating public access to Pentagon reports and establishing criteria for determining the safety of nuclear weapons, was a new provision, Section 1062, “Prohibition on infringing on the individual right to lawfully acquire, possess, own, carry, and otherwise use privately owned firearms, ammunition, and other weapons.”20 As a result of that change in law, General Peter Chiarelli, the army’s second-in-command, told the Christian Science Monitor in November 2011, “I am not allowed to ask a soldier who lives off post whether that soldier has a privately owned weapon.”21 The prohibition covers both members of the military and civilian employees of the Defense Department.
The massacre of which Major Nidal Hasan is accused generated a great deal of attention from the news media, policy makers, and politicians. However, most of this attention focused on two points: whether the mass shooting should be classified as a terrorist attack by “violent Islamist extremism,”22 and where blame should be assigned within the nation’s military and intelligence apparatuses for failure to anticipate and head off the rampage.23
Little media reporting and virtually no official scrutiny has been devoted to the singular implement with which Major Hasan is accused of mowing down forty-five of his comrades-in-arms within ten minutes. This was an FN Five-seveN, a 5.7mm high-capacity semiautomatic pistol manufactured by the Belgian armaments maker FN Herstal (FN).24
In one significant example, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a report purporting to address the “counterterrorism lessons” to be drawn from the Fort Hood matter. But the committee’s report emphasized that it had not “examined . . . the facts of what happened during the attack.”25 The word gun or firearm appears nowhere in the committee’s report, much less the make, model, and caliber of the efficient killing machine Major Hasan is accused of using. The committee described the incident itself in two sentences, as a “lone attacker” striding into the center, and “moments later,” thirteen “employees” of the Defense Department “were dead and another 32 were wounded,” all by some unnamed cause.26 This is the remarkable equivalent of issuing a “lessons learned” report on the notorious 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City without mentioning the truck bomb by which its principal perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, carried out his attack, or presenting a lecture on the implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, without addressing the use of commandeered jetliners as flying bombs. The omission is all the more remarkable because the committee chairman and co-author of the report, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, had stated in a May 2010 hearing on terrorists and guns that “the only two terrorist attacks on America since 9/11 that have been carried out and taken American lives were with firearms.”27 he cited the Fort Hood shooting and the 2009 murder of an army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the two attacks.
But according to testimony at a pretrial hearing, Major Hasan himself paid keen attention to selecting the weapon he used. He chose the FN Five-seveN pistol, and the accessories of laser aiming devices and high-capacity ammunition magazines, precisely because they suited his purpose of efficiently attacking a large number of people.28 Thus, before buying the handgun on August 1, 2009, Hasan asked a salesman at the Guns Galore gun dealer in Killeen, Texas, for “the most high-tech gun” available. Another witness, Specialist William Gilbert, a soldier and self-described “gun aficionado” who was in the store when Major Hasan made his inquiry, testified that the accused also sought maximum ammunition magazine capacity. Specialist Gilbert further testified that he owned an FN Five-seveN himself, and that he had recommended that model to Major Hasan because it met the officer’s stated specifications. �
�It’s extremely lightweight and very, very, very accurate,” said Specialist Gilbert. “It’s easy to fire and has minimum recoil.”29 The soldier testified that he gave Major Hasan a forty-five-minute “full tactical demonstration” of the handgun’s capabilities.30 According to the manufacturer, those capabilities are considerable. “Five-seveN Tactical handguns and SS190 ball ammunition team up to defeat the enemy in all close combat situations in urban areas, jungle conditions, night missions, etc. and for any self-defense action.”31
Specialist Gilbert and the salesman both noted that Major Hasan seemed to know nothing about handguns. The accused officer videotaped on his cell phone the salesman’s demonstration of how to load and clean the weapon so that he could review these procedures later.
In the several months between his purchase of the handgun and the shootings at Fort Hood, Major Hasan also bought several extra ammunition magazines and magazine extenders that increased to thirty the number of rounds available to be fired in each loading of the gun, from the usual twenty.32 He bought two expensive laser aiming devices, a green one for use in daylight and a red one for use at night. The major also bought hundreds of rounds of the 5.7x28mm ammunition the gun fires, including boxes of a variant specifically designed to penetrate body armor. According to testimony at the hearing, the line of ammunition in question had been ordered off the U.S. civilian market, but dealers were allowed to sell their existing stocks.33
Major Hasan was a frequent visitor to Stan’s Outdoor Shooting Range, near Fort Hood, where he took a course to qualify for a concealed-carry permit. Witnesses said Major Hasan practiced at the range repeatedly. He specifically sought training in shooting at human targets from as far away as a hundred yards. Instructor John Coats testified that after one afternoon’s tutelage, Major Hasan progressed from being an erratic shot to routinely hitting each target’s head and chest. This is consistent with FN’s boast that “the flat trajectory of the 5.7x28mm ammunition guarantees a high hit probability up to 200 m. Extremely low recoil results in quick and accurate firing.”34