by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Even before the numbers of dead and injured are confirmed, the media scramble for “color” in column inches and broadcast time through interviews of neighbors, survivors, and random acquaintances of the shooter or his victims. This reportage invariably includes statements of surprise that a mass shooting could happen in the community involved. “Well, we of course all see things happen on the news and think that we live in a safe and quiet community and nothing like that certainly would ever happen here,” a witness to a shooting in Binghamton, New York, told CNN after thirteen people were shot to death and four others wounded in a community center. “So everyone is shocked and amazed and still trying to grasp the whole import of it.”24
There are also frequent observations that the shooter never seemed dangerous. “Mike was strange,” a neighbor told a reporter about Hance, but added, “I wouldn’t think he’d go to this extreme.”25 Judy Gren, described as a “longtime friend” of another mass shooter, Carey Hal Dyess, said he was “a very nice man, very kind. He loved animals. He helped you with anything you needed. We used to go horseback riding together.” This “nice man” Dyess shot to death his ex-wife, her lawyer, and three of her friends, wounded another of her friends, and then shot himself to death.26
The next ritual station is a ponderous exploration of “why?” This inquiry typically ignores almost entirely the looming significance of the single objective fact that is common to all “shooting sprees”—the use of an easily available and almost always legally obtained gun, usually a handgun. Rather, the media pick speculatively through the mysterious lint of the shooter’s alleged, possible, potential “motivation” or likely mental illness. “Fighter Pilot Murder Mystery; Did Elite Navy Pilot Snap?” ABC’s Good Morning America asked after a navy pilot shot to death his roommate, the roommate’s sister, and an acquaintance of the two, then shot himself to death.27 What neither ABC in this case, nor other media in other cases, seriously address is whether the ubiquitous presence of guns makes a crucial difference in the outcome when someone like a highly trained, elite “Top Gun” pilot “snaps”—in this case, in a jealous rage.
In fact, much of this speculative reporting looks more like a puppet show than a newscast: badly informed television personalities voicing idiosyncratic theories through compliant talking-head guest experts. CNN network host Jane Velez-Mitchell, for example, just before pronouncing that guns are “a minuscule part of the problem,” purportedly probed the cause of a mass shooting in Orlando with this fatuous question to an “expert” guest, “OK. I want to go right now to Alex Katehakis. She is an addiction specialist. She’s also a sex specialist. Let’s face it: a gun is a phallic symbol, Alex. What do you make about the fact that it’s males primarily committing these kinds of, basically, revenge fantasies come to life with a squeeze of a trigger?”28 According to the website of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, of which Katehakis is the founder and clinical director, she “has extensive experience in working with a full spectrum of sexuality from sexual addiction to sex therapy, and problems of sexual desire and sexual dysfunction for individuals and couples. Alex has successfully facilitated the recovery of many sexually addicted individuals and assisted couples in revitalizing their sex lives.”29 There is no evidence that Katehakis has any expertise at all in the study of violence generally, much less gun violence. Notwithstanding Velez-Mitchell’s peremptory assertion that “a gun is a phallic symbol,” there is no reason to believe that she brings an informed view to the subject of mass shootings or gun violence prevention.
On the same CNN segment, former FBI agent Don Clark ventured to say cautiously, “I know some of my friends are going to beat me up about this, but I’ve been in law enforcement and the military. And I’m just tired of these guns.” Velez-Mitchell firmly brushed Clark back in this exchange, which would be amusing if it were not so insidious:
VELEZ-MITCHELL: And let me tell you something. I agree with you 100 percent. From a psychological perspective, I’m not talking gun control. I’m talking psychology.
CLARK: No, neither am I.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: It takes an entire complicated situation, and it boils it down to one action. It takes a revenge fantasy in your head, and it makes it real.30
This exchange was not the first time former FBI agent Clark—who appears often in the CNN lineup as a utility expert on a range of subjects, including the custody of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s body, hate crimes, and the proper investigation of repeat sex offenders31—had mentioned guns on CNN as a factor that just might possibly be relevant to mass shootings. The result of his earlier assertion (during an interview to discuss the Virginia Tech massacre) was strikingly similar in outcome. The flow of the dialogue—expert guest’s tentative assertion, host’s firm brush-back, subject dropped—provides telling insight into the self-censorship of the news media about the “hornet’s nest” of gun control:
CLARK: And Tony, let’s just go back even to the gun purchases. You know? And I don’t want to get on that political hot potato about the guns . . .
[CNN host Tony] HARRIS: It is, you are right. It is.
CLARK: . . . but I want to say that there has to be a little bit more strenuous background investigations into people picking them up. Perhaps if there had been some opportunity to talk about the mental attitude of this—to search about the mental attitude of this person, maybe this person would not have been sold a weapon.
HARRIS: Yes. Boy, you’ve just stepped on the hornet’s nest, and there they go.
CLARK: Yes.32
The exchange ended there, without further discussion of Clark’s timidly advanced point.
In later stages of the ritual, 911 tapes are released and broadcast. It’s possible that these grisly moments are broadcast not simply for their shock value. But one is then left with the curious proposition that the media’s producers must think that the answer to the “puzzle” of why mass shootings happen might be found in the sound of terrified, frantic, and sometimes dying voices pleading for help.33
The sad final act of the mass shooting ritual is a public event or makeshift memorial involving candles and teddy bears, to show “support” for the victims and help “bring closure” to the survivors.34 When CNN anchor Roland Martin asked Mayor Matthew Ryan of Binghamton, New York, to “give us a sense of the healing process in Binghamton tonight,” the mayor’s reply was typical. “Already churches around our city are having vigils. Tomorrow we’re going to plan a big vigil for our city. This is a city that really comes together in time of crisis.”35
Determinedly clutched throughout this ritual is the studied premise that the latest “gun rampage” is an aberration, something akin to the sudden appearance of a spaceship that spews death randomly for ten or fifteen minutes, and then just as suddenly disappears. But the cold fact is that mass shootings can no longer accurately be called aberrations in the United States. They are here, now, and everywhere—in our homes,36 our schools,37 our churches,38 our places of work,39 our shopping malls,40 and even our military bases.41
This ritual of studied avoidance of this product of the gun industry and the so-called “gun culture” inspired the writer Dahlia Lithwick to pen this scathing paragraph for Slate magazine:
It says so much about this country that we respond to Bernard Madoff with outrage and to mass shootings with teddy bears and candles. Frustrated columns are written and written and written and written. But we collectively refuse to connect one killing spree to the next or to accept that these events aren’t random; like falling meteors from the sky. These events are the outgrowth of legal and policy choices we make every single day and the choices we avoid making year after year. We’re willing to roll the dice with our children and our neighbors—because we want to think it only happens to other people’s children and other people’s neighbors—on the principle that guns have nothing to do with gun deaths. The American debate about gun regulation begins and ends with a tacit agreement that the occasional massacre is the price we pay for freedom. N
o wonder teddy bears and candles are the only national gun policy we have.42
Unfortunately, even if mass shootings were aberrations, even if they suddenly stopped happening entirely, the toll of ordinary Americans killed and injured by guns every single day would remain staggering, a bloodletting inconceivable in any other developed country in the world. Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages fifteen to twenty-four. Since 1960, more than 1.3 million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries.43
More than 90 percent of American households own a car.44 Fewer than a third of American households contain a gun.45 Yet as motor vehicle-related deaths have gone down, firearm deaths have not. Gun fatalities exceeded motor vehicle fatalities in ten states in 2009.46 And, as is explained in more detail in chapter 9, the nationwide trends of these two forms of death are on a track to intersect.
This gory march of our daily gun dead, however, is virtually invisible. It is invisible because it is grossly underreported in the news media, suppressed and distorted by the gun lobby, and poorly documented by the federal government and most state governments. The news media glide around the elephant-in-the-room of guns as the common denominator of mass shootings. But they flat-out ignore tens of thousands of other, more “routine” gun deaths and injuries every year in the shooting gallery that America has become.
As part of the research for this book, the author tracked shootings in the United States that were reported in the news media for the week of Monday, August 1, through Sunday, August 7, 2011. Two sources of comprehensive data were used: a Google alert for news stories that mentioned “shootings,” and a similar alert through the commercial database Nexis.com. Several supplemental searches were made to track down shootings that were mentioned in stories originally captured, and to update the shootings that were found. The result was a list of fifty-two shooting incidents reported during that week. Appendix A contains a description of each of these shootings and the sources from which they were obtained. Figure 2 summarizes by category the seventy gun deaths and twenty-two nonfatal gun injuries that were reported in news media during this period.
This survey is by no means a complete inventory of shootings in the United States during the week in question. On the contrary, quite clearly it is not complete. It is offered only as a good-faith search effort, as exhaustive as possible, to document what Americans could have seen or heard about gun death and injury in the news media during that week. Many of these incidents were reported only in local media, so even the most assiduous newshound in any given place would not in the ordinary course of events have seen or heard about all of the shootings listed in appendix A.
That being said, how does this list compare to comprehensive national data collected by public health authorities documenting the level of gun violence in America? Figure 3 shows the number of gun deaths, gun injuries, and total people shot for the first nine years of the current century in the United States. (These are the latest years for which comprehensive national data on gun deaths and injuries was available at time of analysis. There is no realtime database of gun death and injury.)
Figure 2. Summary of Deaths and Injuries in Shooting Incidents in the United States, August 1–7, 2011
See appendix A for sources.
What emerges from this data is that the number of human beings killed and injured by guns in the United States during an average week is much greater than the number that an extraordinarily curious person could possibly find by diligently combing the news media. A total of 272,590 people were killed by guns between 2000 and 2008 inclusive. This is an average of 30,288 a year, for an average of 582 gun deaths a week in the United States. This is more than eight times the number of deaths that the survey found to have been reported in the news media during the first week of August 2011. An estimated total of 617,488 were injured by guns in the nine years but did not die, for an average of 1,319 gun injuries per week. This is just shy of sixty times as many gun injuries as were reported in the media during the week in question.
Clearly Americans live in a bubble, an information vacuum, unwittingly ignorant of the reality of the carnage howling around them. This virtual invisibility of firearms death and injury goes a long way toward explaining why Americans appear to be so complacent about gun violence. It sheds light on why the gun lobby can thumb its nose at gun violence, twist gun violence to its own ends by mischaracterizing its nature, and fob off folksy pabulum about guns on both the public and uninformed policy makers. It helps explain why politicians get away with avoiding the perceived “third rail” of gun control at the same time that their constituents are dying.
Figure 3. Gun Deaths, Injuries, and Total Shot in the United States, 2000–2008
Data on gun deaths and injuries is from the WISQARS database of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, both of whom have devoted much of their professional lives to studying gun violence, have zeroed in on the fault line of fact-free policy making—the history of public health shows that people do indeed change their minds and move away from culturally taught beliefs when they learn key facts. Cook and Ludwig have explained that “we know that people’s attitudes and behaviors about smoking and unprotected sex have changed dramatically over time. The changes have occurred, in part, in response to a growing body of epidemiological research about the health risks associated with each of these activities.”47
The history of public health abounds with similar examples of factual investigations and resulting fact-based policies saving millions of human lives, flying in the face of what everybody thought they knew. In 1900, the Washington Post dismissed the idea that mosquitoes carried yellow fever—one of the most dreaded diseases of the era—as “silly and nonsensical rigmarole.”48 In 1900, the “culturally grounded understanding” of even the educated elite, including many in the medical professions, was that yellow fever was caused by dirt and filth. “I’m your friend, Gorgas, and I’m trying to set you right,” Major General George W. Davis, governor of the Panama Canal Zone, advised Dr. William C. Gorgas, the surgeon general of the army whose eventually successful campaigns to control mosquitoes in Florida, Cuba, and Panama dramatically reduced malaria and yellow fever infections. “On the mosquito you are simply wild. All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head. Yellow fever, as we all know, is caused by filth.”49
The news vacuum about the facts of gun death and injury is a boon for the gun lobby. The absence of facts is precisely what makes it possible for many patently foolish perspectives on guns and gun control to survive in the United States. Among these perspectives, the most insidious is the one relentlessly promoted by the gun lobby, which not only deliberately exploits ignorance about the nature and extent of gun violence in America but also works vigorously to keep the facts about it sealed from view. At the other end of the spectrum, some “commonsense” solutions advanced by well-meaning advocates rest on the sands of an equal absence of relevant facts. The gun lobby, its facilitators, and their misguided “commonsense” ideas will be examined in detail in later chapters, but a brief overview of the gun lobby’s propagandistic approach here may help put the problem of understanding gun violence in perspective.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is “the trade association for the firearms industry.” It sponsors the annual industry trade event, the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show, popularly known as the SHOT Show. NSSF defines its mission as “to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports.”50 Blending a down-home style with corporate PR sensibilities, NSSF works hard at making guns seem a lot like bowling balls—harmless objects the whole family can enjoy in an atmosphere of glowing happy faces. In fact, the NSSF has made the claim that hunting is safer than bowling, a laughable proposition ea
sily eviscerated:
The NSSF makes no effort to evaluate the lethality or seriousness of different types of injuries in each activity it claims is less safe than hunting with firearms. A bullet to the chest and a sprained ankle are both counted as one injury in their statistics, and that’s the basis of their claim that hunting with guns is safer than all but the least strenuous activities. According to a 2004 Good Morning America report, the International Hunter Education Association (IHEA) estimated that hunters were accidentally shooting more than 1,000 people a year in the United States and Canada.51
Gun deaths and debilitating lifelong injuries simply don’t exist in NSSF’s glossy world, where assault rifles designed for war are transmogrified into “modern sporting rifles,”52 poisonous environment-degrading lead ammunition becomes harmless “traditional ammunition,”53 and shooting ranges are family-values venues—places where terrorists,54 mass shooters, and assassins55 never hone their shooting skills, but frolicking sport shooters have a “memorable and fun experience.”56
When NSSF talks about guns killing and injuring people, it sticks to a script promoting the rosy view that “the firearms accident rate among all groups has dropped more than 60 percent during the last twenty-five years to a century-long low, with such accidents now comprising less than 1 percent of all fatal accidents nationwide.”57 But as Figure 4 graphically demonstrates about gun deaths in America, accidents are not the problem. Unintentional shootings have always comprised a tiny part of gun death and injury. The problem is people deliberately shooting other people and themselves.