by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community lead to more homicide. Studies also indicate that a gun in the home increases the risk of murder for family members. Since a gun in the home tends to also increase the risk of suicide and unintentional firearm injury, many public health practitioners emphasize the dangers of bringing a gun into the home, particularly if children are present.124
This is the core of the public health and safety approach to guns—an approach of which the eighteenth century was ignorant. It has saved millions of lives in other contexts, such as motor vehicle safety, disease, and consumer products. In this context, it is worth noting that a reviewer of one of Scalia’s books observed that although in his opinion Scalia is brilliant, “he seems unaware of, or indifferent to, the real-world consequences of what he proposes.”125
In contrast, the key question the public health and safety approach asks of any consumer product is all about real world consequences—what are the product’s relative risks and benefits? If a product inflicts unreasonable harm, the inquiry then is whether the cause of harm is a defect in design or some factor inherent in the nature of the product. If the source of harm is a design defect, like a motor vehicle with a tendency to roll over on curves, it may be possible to correct the design. Some products, however, like highly toxic pesticides, are so inherently dangerous that no amount of design modification can make them reasonably safe. In such cases, the product may either be restricted to specific persons or banned outright.126
Unlike traditional “gun control” advocates who focus on criminal use of firearms, public health and safety experts look at physical causes of death and injury and seek ways to reduce the effects by modifying the physical causes. Thus, when people being hurled out of or through the windshields of cars was demonstrated to be a factor in motor-vehicle deaths and injuries, these experts advocated seatbelts and other restraints as effective means to reduce harm.
To such experts, the fact that an implement as lethal as a handgun has become ubiquitous and can be concealed and carried around becomes a significant risk factor. It plainly makes it much more likely that a human being will be killed or seriously injured in circumstances where, without the presence of a handgun, only bruised egos or minor injuries would occur. “A lighted match can certainly start a fire, but the potential for serious injury or death is much greater if you toss in a bucket of gasoline,” wrote public health expert Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann. “Likewise, violence can certainly cause harm, but the potential for serious injury or death is increased when a firearm is involved.”127
The public health and safety approach has become a well-established and highly effective way to reduce deaths and injuries from virtually every consumer product other than guns, including motor vehicles, toys, and power tools (among thousands of other products). But because the firearms industry is specifically exempted from the federal Consumer Product Safety Act, handguns have escaped the sort of close scrutiny to which every other consumer product in America is subject.
So what about Justice Scalia’s homage to the handgun? In the absence of any citation, it is hard to know exactly whence he divined his statement that “the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon.” Surveys over time of households in five counties around Atlanta, Georgia, found that “a majority of respondents to all three surveys (55%) agreed with the statement A home with a gun is less secure than a home without a gun, because a gun can be involved in an accidental shooting, suicide or family homicide.’ Among five home security measures, respondents rated a burglar alarm most effective and keeping a gun in the home least effective.”128
The great majority of Americans do not own even a single gun, much less rely upon a handgun for “personal defense.” An ongoing, long-term survey of gun ownership in America has found a “clear pattern” over the past several decades of a “persistent decline in household gun ownership.”129 From 1977 to 2010, the percentage of American households that reported having any guns in the home dropped more than 40 percent. In 2010, less than a third of American households reported having a gun in the home. In 2010, slightly more than one out of five Americans reported personally owning a gun.130 Guns are “most likely to be owned by white men who live in a [sic] rural areas, those who are middle-aged or older, with a middle to higher income, who grew up with guns in the home and who live in the southern or mid-western regions of the country.”131 Moreover, fewer and fewer people are owning more and more guns. Gun owners reported an average of 6.9 guns per owner compared with 4.1 reported in 1994.132 SAF’s Alan Gottlieb—who used a loophole in federal law to restore his gun rights as a convicted felon—owns at least sixty guns.133 In other words, the vast majority of Americans, who do not own or want guns, are put at risk every day so that a shrinking minority of “enthusiasts” can indulge their fascination with little killing machines. Quite literally, gun ownership is an aberration.
Moreover—putting aside the self-interested marketing hype of the gun industry—there is far from universal agreement, even among pro-gun experts, that the handgun is the “quintessential self-defense weapon” that Scalia imagined in his opinion would be used against a bogeyman burglar.
Duane Thomas, for example, wrote in his pro-handgun book that “the only thing handguns really have going for them as weapons is their small size.”134 Another pro-gun expert and author, Chris Bird, wrote in a manual intended for people who wish to carry a concealed handgun that the handgun “is the least-effective firearm for self defense.” Unless one is at arm’s length, he opined, “shotguns and rifles are much more effective.” He also noted that the “handgun is the hardest firearm to shoot accurately.”135
What is more likely than Justice Scalia’s ipse dixit—and Robert Levy’s kingly decree from a gated community in Florida to the citizenry of the District of Columbia—is that the American people understand quite well that a gun in the home increases the risk of homicide, suicide, and unintentional (accidental) injury.
The next chapter shows how the brunt of the gun industry’s marketing falls particularly hard on women and children.
3
WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST
James Ian Sherrill, thirty-five, stood weeping before Judge James M. Graves Jr. on August 16, 2010.
“If I could go back and redo it, I would take the beating,” he sobbed.1
A resident of Fruitport Township, Michigan, Sherrill pleaded “no contest” a month earlier to a felony charge of assault with a dangerous weapon.2 Now he stood at the court’s bar, awaiting the judge’s sentence. Sherrill plainly regretted his moment of reckless anger. That furious instant arrived on May 15, 2010, when he jerked his concealed 9mm handgun out of its holster, pointed the loaded gun at another soccer dad, and said, “If you don’t back off, I’m gonna shoot you.”3 The threat in the parking lot of Fruitport’s Pine Park—still crowded with children and other parents—was the climax of a series of verbal exchanges between the two men that began during a league match among six- to eight-year-old children.4
“I’ve been suicidal because of this,” Sherrill said, making his tearful plea for leniency. He said he was on medication for panic attacks, and claimed that he had been scared ever since the incident, afraid to enter stores and restaurants.5 Indeed, a single moment of armed anger had changed Sherrill’s life forever.
Fruitport is yet another of the archetypical American small towns that clutter the map of gun violence in the United States. It lies on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, about a third of the way up the western coast of Michigan, across the lake from Milwaukee. The vast Manistee National Forest sprawls off to the northeast, within which members of the West Michigan Volunteer Militia flop around and shoot guns in the brush from time to time, training for Armageddon “because a well-armed citizenry is the best Homeland Security and can better deter crime, invasion, terrorism or tyranny.”6 In 2000 the township had a population of about 12,500, 97 percent of wh
om are white, and a median family income of $54,634. Only 6.6 percent of the population were below the poverty line.7 It was within this Michigan idyll that Sherrill built a solidly bourgeois life as a licensed counselor, a stay-at-home father with three young children, and a Cub Scout leader.8 By his sentencing day, however, Sherrill’s state counselor’s license had been suspended.9 His concealed-carry permit also would be permanently revoked the day after his sentencing.10
Amazing as it may seem to most Americans, Sherrill violated no law by simply bringing his hidden gun to a children’s soccer match. He had a concealed-weapons permit for the handgun he had on his person that day, and the park was not posted as a “no carry” zone.11 But after his arrest, he must certainly have pondered the same question that another family man, James Humphrey, forty-five, asked himself time and again after he shot a man to death in a moment of road rage following a night of drinking at bars. How does one go so quickly from “beloved family man with no criminal record” to violent criminal? “I’ve thought about it every day for the last 11 months,” Humphrey said. “There is no answer for how you go from there to here.”12
Actually, there is an answer. The presence of a gun in the midst of anger or other strong human emotion is a one-way ticket “from there to here.”
Take Sherrill’s case. Judge Graves concluded that he was “a basically decent person who overreacted” that day. “It’s just very sad that human emotions get out of control in this way . . . from a children’s game,” he said. Sherrill’s pulling his gun out was “greatly escalating the risk of potential harm and danger” with children nearby. He sentenced Sherrill to thirty days in the Muskegon County Jail, less two days already served, and eighteen months of probation, plus costs and fees.13 Putting aside his ruined life, Sherrill got off relatively easy. No one died or was injured.
But his intemperate act is a chilling example of what Brooke de Lench called “an endless series” of tales of angry parents out of control at youth events, of which “most go undocumented.”14 De Lench, the founder of MomsTeam.com, a website for parents, and a youth sports expert, cites a survey that “supports the view that the reports of misbehaving parents in the media are not isolated events.”15 Add a gun to the mix, and an argument goes from angry to deadly in seconds. A sports official in Lubbock, Texas—where angry parents had pulled guns at youth events three times within a decade—said, “It seems to be getting worse every year. Parents have become more and more abusive.”16
In Roanoke, Virginia, Charles David Akers, thirty-six, was convicted of brandishing an AR-15 assault rifle at a girls’ soccer match. According to witnesses, when his daughter did not make the soccer team, Akers became angry and made threatening remarks to the coach. He drove off, returned, pulled the assault rifle from his trunk, and made a sweeping motion around the field with the gun for several moments.17 In Lubbock, Texas, Tye Burke, twenty-five, a concealed-carry weapons (CCW) permit holder, pulled his gun at a soccer game for seven- to eight-year-old girls. According to witnesses in news reports, Burke was yelling at the girls’ team coach. The coach’s husband confronted Burke, the two started arguing, and the husband shoved Burke. Burke then pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the husband’s head. An off-duty prison guard tackled Burke and disarmed him.18 A Lubbock grand jury declined to indict Burke.19
In Philadelphia, Wayne Derkotch, forty, also a CCW permit holder, got into a fistfight with his son’s coach at a five- to six-year-olds football game. Witnesses said the fight started after Derkotch complained about his son not getting enough playing time. Derkotch pulled out his .357 Magnum revolver after the coach apparently got the better of him in the fight—he lost a tooth and his eye was swollen. A judge later acquitted him of criminal charges, ruling that he acted in self-defense.20 In Memphis, Tennessee, yet another CCW permit holder, Nicholis Williams, twenty-nine, was accused of pointing his handgun at his ten-year-old son’s baseball coach. Williams was reportedly annoyed because his son did not get as many times at bat as other children. After the game, the coach approached Williams in the parking lot and asked him not to curse in front of the kids. Williams told the coach to “shut the fuck up,” pulled his gun out from under a car mat, loaded it, and pointed it at the coach. The coach disarmed Williams, who left the scene. Williams was later arrested and charged with aggravated assault. His CCW permit was suspended after the incident and had not been restored as of March 2012.21
The prospect of perturbed parents packing pistols at children’s sports events understandably frightens other parents. “Everybody is worried about the safety of children,” a Salem, Virginia, detective said after the Akers assault rifle incident. “If I were a parent, I’d be nervous.”22 The Memphis Commercial Appeal called the Williams incident “an alarming wake-up call about what can happen when emotions explode and a handgun is handy.”23
In North Carolina, Carol Coulter, a member of the Ashe County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, pointed out a classic problem with CCW vigilantism. “I’ve had ample opportunity to observe people in the stands at sporting events and it never ceases to amaze me how adults can act in such childish ways,” she said. “I fear that by having access to a concealed weapon, in a thoughtless moment of rage a gun will be pulled and in response to that, others with concealed weapons will also pull their guns and perhaps if someone didn’t see who pulled the gun first then you’ve got people pointing guns and they don’t even know who they should be pointing at.”24 Coulter’s concern is far from academic. On Long Island, New York, a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent was unintentionally killed by a retired police officer who rushed up to the scene as the agent struggled with a robber outside a pharmacy. The retired officer shot the wrong man.25 A related danger is stray shots hitting innocent bystanders. In May 2012 in Houston, Texas, a store customer and CCW holder pulled out his gun and exchanged gunfire with two armed robbers. The would-be defender accidentally shot and killed a twenty-six-year-old store clerk.26
But not everyone agrees that kids and guns don’t mix. “Gun rights” activists—with the help of the NRA, the gun lobby, and blinkered judges—have relentlessly pushed back the boundaries of common sense to ensure their “right” to bring their guns to their children’s Pee Wee Football, Little League baseball, and soccer—not to mention public parks, bars, churches, and schools. “The speed at which guns laws are being relaxed is increasing,” said John Pierce, a co-founder of OpenCarry.org. “We’re very happy about it.”27 An example of the kind of counterfactual wisdom propelling these victories can be found in the following harangue that enthusiasts of mixing guns, kids, and parks in Forsyth County, North Carolina, asked their supporters to send to officials who opposed lax gun-carry rules:
Free Americans have the God-given right to bear arms EVERYWHERE.
The evidence is clear: where these rights are restricted are [sic] dangerous.
Where have mass-murders occurred? Where have child abductions, rapes and murders most often occurred? Claiming no reason for citizens to be lawfully armed in parks is wrong. Every American has personal responsibility for self-defense and the defense of family.
Do you expect a 120 lb mother to defend herself and children against 250 lb criminals unarmed? If you believe that Forsyth County parks are immune to abductions/ rapes/murders you are mistaken. It is not a matter of if, but when.28
To the denizens of this dark universe, a gun is an amulet that magically transforms the bearer into a righteous and invulnerable defender of all that is good, right, and holy, not a human being carrying a lethal weapon who is full of the emotions and chemicals that drive rage, fright, depression, anger, revenge, and jealousy. In the real world, that “120 lb mother” is much more likely to be shot and killed by her “250 lb” husband or boyfriend than ever to use a gun to defend herself from a criminal stranger.29 Guns easily turn domestic violence into domestic homicide. A federal study on homicide among intimate partners found that female intimate partners are more likely to be
murdered with a firearm than all other means combined, concluding that “the figures demonstrate the importance of reducing access to firearms in households affected by IPV [intimate partner violence]. ”30
The fact that a gun will more likely be used wrongly in a moment of rage, jealousy, depression, or mistaken perception than for some righteous purpose has been demonstrated from analysis of real-world data, collected decade after decade from the grim records of death and injury in America. Firearms are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes. Instead, they are all too often used to inflict harm on the very people they were intended to protect. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, in 2009 there were only 261 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens. Of these, only 21 involved women killing men. Of those, only 13 involved firearms, with 10 of the 13 involving handguns.31
It is easier, and frankly more effective, for gun enthusiasts to spin fictional Fright Night tales than integrate such facts into their thinking. Supreme Court Justice Scalia pinned his statement on the utility of handguns in Heller largely to a familiar gun rights canard: “What if a burglar breaks into your home?” What Scalia did not write, and perhaps did not know, is that most household burglaries occur when no household member is in the home. A Justice Department study of household burglaries between 2003 and 2007 found that no one was home in 72.4 percent of household burglaries.32 What’s more, even when someone was at home and was a victim of violent crime, almost two thirds (65.1 percent) of the offenders were not strangers. Of those violent burglars who were not strangers, 31.1 percent were intimates or former intimates (girlfriends, boyfriends, or spouses), while 34 percent were either relatives or acquaintances of the victim.33