by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Figure 4. Gun Fatalities in the United States, 1981–2010
The NRA—the gun industry’s political front—takes a harder line. Its style combines a vehement “patriotic” meanness with a ruthless willingness to say or do anything to defeat even the most modest proposal to regulate guns. According to a well-informed former insider, this is largely cynical play-acting to whip up gun owners and raise funds by “the senior leadership and consultants of the NRA [who] have morphed the organization into this grand fundraising operation for the power and glory primarily of themselves.”58 The NRA’s chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, reportedly “is making around a million dollars a year.”59 The NRA’s specialty is “argument by assertion,” an endless emission of statements it cannot prove and quite likely knows are false. LaPierre is often the orifice through which these assertions are vented. For example, the St. Petersburg Times in its PolitiFact fact-checking series found to be false LaPierre’s assertion at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 that “across the board, violent crime in jurisdictions that recognize the Right to Carry is lower than in areas that prevent it.”60
One of the more spectacular examples of LaPierre’s assertions is his claim that the Obama administration has a “secret plan” to “destroy the Second Amendment by 2016.” In an article published in January 2012 in the Web edition of America’s 1st Freedom—which the NRA calls its “pure news magazine”—LaPierre lets gun enthusiasts in on the conspiracy. Before getting into the thoroughly undocumented details, LaPierre makes a blatant fund-raising pitch by telling his readers that the best way that they can fight the evil Obama plan “is by carrying your new 2012 membership card . . . in your wallet as a symbol of your commitment—and by renewing or upgrading your NRA membership or making a contribution to defending freedom today.” LaPierre then pulls out the stops on the NRA propaganda organ:
Think about it: Before moving into the White House, Barack Obama spent his entire career proudly, publicly advancing the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. . . . So what happened after they won the White House? Did Obama, Biden and the anti-gun extremists who soon filled the West Wing suddenly completely reverse their positions? No! In an act of pure political calculation, they plotted to keep their gun-ban objectives concealed.61
Get it? By not doing what the NRA spent millions of dollars during the 2008 campaign promising they would do if they won the election,62 the Machiavellian geniuses in the Obama White House set up the American pro-gun voter for a cunning takedown of the Constitution in a second administration.
LaPierre cynically ignores the role of the NRA itself in suppressing any action on gun control. “With annual revenue of about $250 million,” according to the Washington Post, “the group has for four decades been the strongest force shaping the nation’s gun laws.”63 Had he cared to do so, LaPierre might have gotten a reality check from his co-worker, Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist. Cox bragged in an NRA political report—published both online and in print in parallel with LaPierre’s screed—that, thanks to a “great deal of effort” by the NRA, “the most recent spending bill to pass the Congress and be signed by the president contained a dozen policy victories for gun owners.”64
The NRA never lets the facts get in the way of its fund-raising stories. It ignores the truth of gun violence in America, spinning gun death and injury as a problem of criminal control, not gun control. It frames gun death and injury as the result of (too often coddled) rampaging violent criminals and not ordinary people owning guns. “When it comes to violent crime, NRA’s 4 million members and America’s 90 million gun owners stand for what works,” LaPierre recently wrote, conveniently inflating his voice to speak for every gun owner in America. “Strong interdiction, swift arrest, tough prosecution and certain incarceration to remove violent criminals from our society.”65 If ever there were occasion to recall the injunction of the biblical metaphor about focusing on a speck in another’s eye while ignoring the beam in one’s own, it may be found in the NRA’s and the NSSF’s hypocritical propaganda about gun death and injury66
But, as John Adams wrote, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”67 And no matter what may be the greedy passions and self-interested wishes of the gun industry and its highly paid mouthpieces, one stubborn, bloody fact looms above all of their false assertions, impossible to avoid or erase: the United States stands alone in its high level of gun violence, a shocking contrast to other developed nations.
Two detailed cross-national comparisons of firearms deaths among comparable nations of the world—published in 1998 and 2011—arrived at similar conclusions. The 1998 study found that “the US is unique in several aspects. It has the highest overall firearm mortality rate, a high proportion of homicides that are the result of a firearm injury, and the highest proportion of suicides that are the result of a firearm injury.”68 The 2011 study reported that “the United States has a large relative firearm problem; firearm death rates in the US are more than seven times higher than they are in the other high-income countries. Firearm homicide rates are 19 times higher in the US compared with the other 22 countries in this analysis, firearm suicide rates, and unintentional firearm death rates are over five times higher. Of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the United States.”69 This gun carnage is so, even though “our rates of crime and nonlethal violence are not exceptional.”70 In sum, a mugging or argument that goes wrong in Hamburg ends up with a few bruises. In Baltimore or a Denver suburb, it may likely end up with someone being shot.
As a consequence of all this, the United States also stands far and away above other developed nations in its homicide rate, as illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5. World Homicide Rates
How can this be? A closer look at the week of gun violence documented in figure 2 and appendix A provides some powerful clues. The first six deaths—in fact, the only gun deaths reported on the first two days—were suicides and murder-suicides.
On Monday, August 1, 2011, in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a U.S. Army sergeant was found dead in his quarters of a gunshot wound. Base officials would not say whether he committed suicide. However, he had been arrested and escorted back to his quarters by military police the same day for bringing his personal handgun to the base’s headquarters.71
The following day, Tuesday, August 2, in Lee, New Hampshire, Andrew Hubbard, twenty-seven, killed himself with a shotgun after being involved in a car crash. Neither driver was seriously injured in the head-on collision, but Hubbard grabbed a shotgun out of the back seat of his car, then fatally shot himself behind the premises of a nearby business.72 In Hillsboro, Wisconsin, Joseph C. Satterlee, fifty-five, rammed his wife’s car on a street with his own vehicle, climbed into her car, and shot her to death with his .357 Magnum revolver. He then shot himself to death. Satterlee fired a total of eight rounds from his six-shot revolver, pausing to reload it once. His wife, Anita K. Satterlee, had filed for divorce on June 20, 2011.73 And in Kensington, Maryland, a quiet, upscale suburb of Washington, D.C., police officers found the bodies of Margaret F. Jensvold, fifty-four, and her son Ben Barnhard, thirteen, in their residence. Investigators concluded that Jensvold, a psychiatrist, had shot her son to death and then killed herself. The son had a number of special needs, and Jensvold was reportedly distressed that the local public school system would not pay for his attendance at a private school.74
These deaths aptly illustrate a fact that most Americans are surprised to learn. Most gun deaths are not homicides, but preventable suicides. Even in the case of homicide, the most common scenario is not—as the NRA prefers to imagine—a rampaging criminal, but an argument between two people who know each other.75
In this context, the human cost of the gun lobby’s meddling in public policy becomes clear. For example, as is explained in the introduction, the NRA convinced Congr
ess to forbid the armed services from collecting any information about personally owned guns among members of the military and its civilian employees. This law has had tragic yet entirely foreseeable effects. Between 2001 and 2008, 1,531 active-duty members of the military died from self-inflicted wounds.76 (This number does not include suicides among former members of the military, which are also known to be numerous.) The military has not escaped the infection of suicide that accompanies the widespread availability of guns. But the new law has cut off an important avenue of suicide prevention among both active-duty and former military personnel.77
In the civilian context, “the empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling.”78 The link is no less compelling among the military, serving and former alike. According to Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, who recently retired as a high-ranking army psychiatrist directly involved in the issue, “approximately 70 percent of Army and Pentagon suicides are by guns.”79 According to a study released in October 2011—ominously titled Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide—48 percent of military suicides in 2010 were accomplished with privately owned weapons.80 In spite of this, Dr. Ritchie noted, although the army is “committed to lowering the rate of suicide . . . there’s a curious third rail that is seldom publicly discussed: the risks of suicide by firearm.” She also notes that Army Post Exchanges—“basically government-owned Walmarts on major posts”—are increasingly selling guns and asks whether this is “sending the troops the right message.”81
The media’s reporting vacuum and the gun lobby’s distortions have obscured another fact: the number of shootings in the United States is going up, not down.
The number of Americans killed by guns has remained fairly constant in the nine years for which complete data is available in the twenty-first century82 But the common focus on gun deaths as a marker to illustrate America’s gun problem obscures an alarming trend. The number of persons who suffer nonfatal gunshot injuries—that is, who are shot but do not die—has risen over the same period. As graphically demonstrated by figure 6, this means that more people are being shot by guns every year in the United States. In other words, America’s gun problem is getting worse, not better. More guns means more shootings.
Figure 6. Total Shootings Rising in the United States
Figure 6 shows that between 2000 and 2008 a total of 617,488 people suffered nonfatal gunshot injuries in the United States. This averages about 68,610 persons per year. In 2008, however—a year in which gun deaths totaled 31,593, only slightly above the period’s average—another 78,622 were shot but did not die, a figure markedly above the period’s average. Most striking, the total number of people shot in 2008 totaled 110,215—the highest total recorded during the nine-year period.83
These civilian deaths and injuries may be put into further perspective by comparing them to the experience of the U.S. armed services during the same period. The total of U.S. active-duty military deaths, from all causes, in the years 2001 through 2008 was 12,390.84 The total deaths caused by hostile action during the same eight years was 3,811, while the number of deaths from self-inflicted wounds among active duty military personnel was 1,531.85
Why have gun deaths remained fairly constant even though the total number of people shot is increasing? The answer is that improved emergency services and better medical care are saving lives that would otherwise be lost to guns.
The authors of a landmark study in 2002 on the relationship between murder and medicine concluded that advances in emergency services—including the 911 system and establishment of trauma centers—as well as better surgical techniques have suppressed the homicide rate. They concluded that “without these developments in medical technology there would have been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually the past 5 years instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000.”86
That finding is confirmed by anecdotal observations from law enforcement officials and the medical community. “It would be fair to say gunshot wound victims, if they suffered the same injury 25 years earlier, their chances of survival would be much less,” Major Pat Welsh of the Dayton, Ohio, police said in April 2011. “It’s a credit to the advances in medical technology and procedures.”87 In Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Loring Rue, chief of trauma care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Trauma Center, said in commenting on the fact that while the number of violent crimes was increasing in Birmingham, the number of resulting deaths was falling, “I am convinced that not just our hospital, but all those who provide trauma care in Birmingham, make a distinct contribution to keeping the murder rate lower.”88
The bad news is that even nonfatal gunshot wounds often leave victims chronically damaged. “There have definitely been improvements in trauma care, and a remarkable job is being done in getting victims through life-threatening injuries, but we are still being left with injuries that drastically alter lives,” according to Dr. Selwyn Rogers, director of a trauma center in Boston.89
The January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was gravely injured, is a well-known, if not singular, example. Fifty percent of all trauma deaths are secondary to traumatic brain injury such as Representative Giffords suffered, and gunshot wounds to the head caused 35 percent of these.90 Gunshot wounds also account for about 15 percent of all spinal cord injuries in the United States.91
One question that remains unanswered is whether advances in care will outpace advances in gun lethality as the gun industry continues to militarize the civilian market with high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, and high-caliber sniper rifles.92 “Many of the victims now have multiple gunshot wounds,” then District of Columbia police chief Charles H. Ramsey observed in 2003. “The criminals also use high-caliber, high-powered weapons.”93 As the authors of the 2002 study trenchantly observed, “At some point in contesting the outcome of criminal assault to the body, weaponry may yet trump medicine.”94
2
SUPREME NONSENSE AND DEADLY MYTHS
With the exception of one historic and widely reported event, Thursday, June 26, 2008, was a routine day in the universe of gun death and injury in the United States.1
The gunfire started well before sunrise.
At about one A.M., in Corpus Christi, Texas, a man angry about a stolen radio fired at least four shots into the air in front of a residence where he thought the culprit lived.2 Around two A.M., twenty-five-year-old Manuel Davis was shot to death on a street corner in Cleveland, Ohio.3 Half an hour later, at two thirty A.M. in Halsell, Alabama, Jimmy Tanks, a sixty-seven-year-old railroad retiree, heard noises outside his trailer home and grabbed his gun. The noise was a “repo man” in the process of repossessing Tanks’s car.4 Shots were fired and Tanks was killed. At just about the same time, in Muskegon, Michigan, a twenty-three-year-old woman and her boyfriend were wounded in what police described as a suicide attempt.5 Less than an hour later, twenty-year-old Bernardino Hernandez allegedly opened fire on his ex-girlfriend in Elgin, Illinois, shooting her three times in the back—the two were reported to be in a dispute over custody of their baby.6
The shooting did not slack off with the sunrise. At about nine thirty A.M., a fourteen-year-old-boy in Gulfport, Florida, accidentally shot his friend in the arm with a .357 Magnum revolver, one of two handguns he had brought to the friend’s home to show off.7 Later in the morning, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Raymond Zegowitz, forty-three, shot to death his girlfriend, Khrystina Bixa, twenty-three, then committed suicide with the gun. Neither of Bixa’s children—three-year-old Christian and twenty-month-old David—were injured, although police could not say whether the children had seen the shootings.8
In Litchfield, Connecticut, Bruce Bochicchio, forty-three, was arrested and charged with threatening his wife and failing to surrender his guns after a restraining order had been issued against him for fighting with his son. Police seized eleven guns, including a rifle and two fully automatic submachine g
uns, from the family’s home. In 2005, Bochicchio’s brother, Michael, a retired state trooper, had shot his wife to death and wounded her lawyer in front of a courthouse, then killed himself. At the time of his arrest, Bruce Bochicchio and his wife, Christine, were caring for the orphaned children of his brother.9 Later in the evening, Kenneth Anton Duckett, thirty-seven, walked into the observation area of the indoor pool at the Montclair, New Jersey, YMCA. He shot to death Monica Paul, thirty-one, in front of her eleven-year-old daughter, while her four-year-old son was swimming. Duckett, who was under a restraining order forbidding him from contact with Paul, fled the scene.10
Shortly after five thirty P.M. in Bridgeport, Connecticut, twenty-two-year-old Tamboria Raiford opened fire with a handgun from her front porch into a crowd of adults and children. April Barron, forty, was hit in the head by one of the bullets, but apparently survived her injury.11 In Deerfield Beach, Florida, a bullet fired through the door hit three-year-old Salayah Buie in the leg while she was watching television with her family. Members of the family suspected that the shooting was in retaliation for an incident earlier in the day. They had notified the county sheriff’s office that a pit bull had come into their yard and killed their cat.12 Police arrested three teenagers in Rock Hill, South Carolina, after shots were fired from their car around six thirty P.M. The teens were chasing another car.13
The macabre dance continued into the night. In Hampton, Arkansas, a four-year-old boy found a loaded handgun in a living room cabinet at about eight thirty P.M. He shot his five-year-old sister in the head, killing her.14 In Omaha, Nebraska, three separate shootings left seven people injured,15 while in Hartford, Connecticut, a young man was shot and killed in a parking lot, and a teenage girl was shot in the face and seriously wounded in a separate incident.16 Around eleven P.M., an armed standoff began in a trailer park in Tucson, Arizona, after police responded to a report of shots being fired and found one man dead outside a trailer. A SWAT team eventually entered the trailer and found two other people dead, one an apparent suicide.17