The Last Gun

by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans

  84. Leland and Oboroceanu, “U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths, 1980 Through 2008, Part I, Total Military Personnel,” Table 4 in American War and Military Operations Casualties, 7.

  85. Leland and Oboroceanu, “U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths, 1980 Through 2008, Part II, Cause of Death,” 8.

  86. Anthony R. Harris et al., “Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960–1999,” Homicide Studies 6, no. 2 (May 2002): 128–66, 130.

  87. “Medical Advances Help Keep Murder Rate Down,” Dayton Daily News, Apr. 24, 2011.

  88. “Survival Soars for Victims of Violence: Rapid Transport, New Technology and Advances in Surgical Protocol Have Helped More Survive,” Birmingham News, May 25, 2008.

  89. “Survival Rate Up for Gun Victims: Doctor’s Report Is a Mixed Bag,” Boston Globe, May 18, 2006.

  90. Federico C. Vinas, “Penetrating Head Trauma,” Medscape Reference—Drugs, Diseases & Procedures, http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/247664-overview.

  91. National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, “Spinal Cord Injury Facts and Figures at a Glance, February 2011,” www.nscisc.uab.edu.

  92. For a detailed discussion of this trend, see Violence Policy Center, The Militarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market (Washington, DC: Violence Policy Center, 2011), www.vpc.org/studies/militarization.pdf

  93. “Critical Care: Shock Trauma Confuses Data on Killing Rate,” Washington Times, May 11, 2003.

  94. Harris et al., “Murder and Medicine,” 157.

  2. Supreme Nonsense and Deadly Myths

  1. The day before, Wesley Neal Higdon, a twenty-five-year-old press-machine operator at a plastics plant in Henderson, Kentucky, went on a rampage with a 45 caliber handgun, shot five co-workers to death, seriously wounded another, and then committed suicide with his gun. “Angry Worker Kills 5, Himself in Henderson,” Louisville Courier-Journal, June 26, 2008.

  2. “Radio Missing, Man Shoots into the Air,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, June 27, 2008.

  3. “2 Slain in City; Boy Killed by Car,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 28, 2008.

  4. “Violence Between Repo Men, Car Owners on the Rise,” Birmingham Times, Mar. 5, 2009; “Man Shot Dead in Fracas over Repossessed Car,” Associated Press State & Local Wire, June 27, 2008.

  5. “Police: Shootings a Result of Suicide Attempt,” Muskegon Chronicle, June 27, 2008.

  6. “Elgin Man Formally Charged in Shooting,” Chicago Daily Herald, June 29, 2008.

  7. “Teen Accidentally Shoots Friend in the Arm,” Tampa Tribune, June 27, 2008.

  8. “Daughter was Abuse Victim, Mom Says,” Harrisburg Patriot News, June 28, 2008; “Couple Found Shot, Dead Inside Apartment,” Harrisburg Patriot News, June 27, 2008.

  9. “Killer’s Brother Held in Threat; Guns Seized After Wife Goes to Police,” Hartford Courant, June 27, 2008; “A Push to Tighten Security: Lawyer Wounded in Shooting Joins Call for Increased Safety Measures in Courts,” Hartford Courant, Feb. 7, 2007.

  10. “Man Who Allegedly Killed His Wife at YMCA Was Under Court Restraint,” Newark Star-Ledger, June 28, 2008; “Woman Killed in Apparent Domestic Dispute at Y,” Bergen Record, June 27, 2008.

  11. “Woman Held for Shooting at Crowd,” Connecticut Post Online, June 27, 2008.

  12. “Broward Girl, 3, Recovering from Gun Shot to Leg,” Miami Herald, June 29, 2008; “Girl, 3, Wounded in Gunfire,” Miami Herald, June 28, 2008.

  13. “3 Teens in Jail After Shooting and Car Chase,” Rock Hill (SC) Herald, June 28, 2008.

  14. “Deputies Investigate Shooting of Girl, 5, by Younger Brother,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 1, 2008.

  15. “7 Wounded in Night’s Gunfire: Police Have Made an Arrest in One of the Three Shootings Thursday,” Omaha World-Herald, June 27, 2008.

  16. “Two City Shootings, One a Homicide: Crimes Took Place Only Minutes Apart, but Were Not Related, Police Say,” Hartford Courant, June 28, 2008.

  17. “3 Found Dead, Including Woman Who Held Police at Bay for Hours,” Arizona Daily Star, June 28, 2008.

  18. “Couple’s Death Ruled Murder-Suicide,” Hattiesburg American, July 1, 2008.

  19. See, e.g., “Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban; Antiwar MoveOn.org Ad Uses Baby,” Glenn Beck, CNN, June 26, 2008 (“In one of the most anticipated decisions in recent memory. . .”); “Gun Ruling: History at the Court,” ABC World News with Charles Gibson, June 26, 2008 (“Today, for the first time ever, the Supreme Court defined those words”); and “What’s Next After Supreme Court’s Gun Decision?” McClatchy-Tribune News Service, June 26, 2008 (“The Supreme Court’s landmark decision Thursday striking down the District of Columbia’s gun ban will have wide-ranging legal, political and public safety consequences”).

  20. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).

  21. A search of the Nexis.com news database using the words “Supreme Court” and “Heller” for the dates June 26–27, 2008, returned 501 citations. Copies of the search request and the resulting number are in the files of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, DC.

  22. Facts about the Supreme Court’s architecture in this section are from “The Court Building.” www.supremecourt.gov/about/courtbuilding.aspx.

  23. “Justices List Their Assets; Wide Range of Wealth,” New York Times, June 7, 2008; “Supreme Court Justices Report Travel, Income for 2006: Most Are Millionaires,” Associated Press Financial Wire, June 8, 2007. For more detailed information, the Justices’ annual financial reports back to 2004 can be accessed through an Opensecrets.org link to the personal financial disclosure database of the Center for Responsive Politics at www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/02/supreme-court-justices-personal-finances.html. According to this database, the net worth of each of the members of the Court reported in 2010 was as follows. Chief Justice John Roberts: $2,575,040 to $6,205,000; Justice Samuel A. Alito: $1,035,021 to $3,030,000; Justice Stephen Breyer: $3,480,058 to $8,035,000; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: $2,365,013 to $5,030,000; Justice Elena Kagan: $1,115,019 to $2,645,000; Justice Anthony Kennedy: $315,003 to $665,000; Justice Antonin Scalia: $1,380,022 to $3,210,000; Justice Sonia Sotomayor: $1,420,005 to $3,245,000; Justice Clarence Thomas: $515,003 to $1,125,000.

  24. An audio file of Scalia’s announcement and reading of a summary of the decision can be downloaded from the website of the Oyez Project at Chicago-Kent College of Law, www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2007/2007_07_290.

  25. For example, “Hartford-born scholar and dictionary-maker Noah Webster warned in 1799 that quarantine was a foolish and wrong-headed health policy. Most diseases, he believed, were of local origin, caused by filthy streets and rotting garbage that created a dangerous miasma (atmosphere) that could threaten every person. . . . In 1793, during the yellow fever epidemic, pious Philadelphians warned that epidemics came to those who had sinned or had allowed their fellow citizens to wallow in sin, and they demanded that the mayor close the city’s theaters, whose irreligious plays had created widespread moral corruption.” Yale professor Naomi Rogers, “Virulent Ideas: Fear of Epidemic Creates Ineffective Strategies, Misplaced Blame; Fear of Flu,” Hartford Courant, May 3, 2009. “Colonial America’s leaders deemed bathing impure, since it promoted nudity, which could only lead to promiscuity. Laws in Pennsylvania and Virginia either banned or limited bathing. For a time in Philadelphia, anyone who bathed more than once a month faced jail. . . . ‘People always talk about the good old days, before pesticides and pollution,’ says [epidemiology professor V.W.] Greene. ‘But in the good old days of Europe and the United States, people lived in filth, with human and animal fecal matter all around. The rivers were filthy. Clothing was infested with vermin.’ Disease ran rampant.” “Cleanliness Has Only Recently Become a Virtue,” Smithsonian, Feb. 1, 1991.

  26. “Wilkinson and Posner, “Dissenting: Two Conservative Judges Challenge Justice Scalia,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 15, 2008.

  27. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), 635.

  28. Audio file downl
oaded from the Oyez Project at Chicago-Kent College of Law, www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2007/2007_07_290.

  29. “A Santorum Barrage in the Culture Wars,” Washington Post, Feb. 27, 2012.

  30. Richard A. Posner, “In Defense of Looseness,” New Republic, Aug. 27, 2008.

  31. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), 629.

  32. “Justice Scalia was emphatic that the right to possess a gun is not absolute.” Posner, “In Defense of Looseness.” Thus, Scalia wrote in Heller, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. . . . We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive . . . we also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’. . . We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), 627–28.

  33. See: http://blackslawdictionary.org/ipse-dixit.

  34. Allen Rostron, “Protecting Gun Rights and Improving Gun Control After District of Columbia v. Heller,” Lewis & Clark Law Review 13, no. 2 (summer 2009): 383, 387–88.

  35. Adam Liptak, “In Re Scalia the Outspoken v. Scalia the Reserved,” New York Times, May 2, 2004.

  36. “Joyce Lee Malcolm, Professor of Legal History,” curriculum vitae downloaded from George Mason University School of Law website, www.law.gmu.edu/faculty/directory/fulltime/malcolm_joyce.

  37. “About Bentley University,” www.bentley.edu/about/about-bentley-university

  38. Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 136–37, nl3.

  39. Carl T. Bogus, “The History and Politics of Second Amendment Scholarship: A Primer,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 76, no. 1 (2000): 3, 11.

  40. “Justices’ Ruling on Guns Elicits Rebuke, from the Right,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2008.

  41. See “Jeffrey Toobin,” CNN, www.cnn.com/CNN/anchors_reporters/toobin.jeffrey.html.

  42. Jeffrey Toobin, “Name That Source; Why Are the Courts Leaning on Journalists?” New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2006.

  43. “In Brief,” Richmond Times Dispatch, Jan. 30, 2006.

  44. Adam J. White, “Wilkinson and Posner, Dissenting: Two Conservative Judges Challenge Justice Scalia,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 15, 2008.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Margaret Talbot, “Supreme Confidence; The Jurisprudence of Justice Antonin Scalia,” New Yorker, Mar. 28, 2005.

  47. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, “Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law,” Virginia Law Review 95, no. 2 (Apr. 2009).

  48. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

  49. Wilkinson, “Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law.”

  50. Posner, “In Defense of Looseness.”

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Damon W. Root, “Conservatives v. Libertarians: The Debate over Judicial Activism Divides Former Allies,” Reason, July 1, 2010.

  55. Scalia, Matter of interpretation, 136–37, n13 (emphasis in original).

  56. “Supreme Court Justice Champions Hunting at Wild Turkey Event,” Associated Press State & Local Wire, Feb. 26, 2006; “Scalia Champions Hunting and Conservation,” Nashville Tennessean, Feb. 26, 2006.

  57. Antonin Scalia, “Financial Disclosure Report for Calendar Year 2006,” 4.

  58. “Oral Arguments in McDonald v. Chicago Second Amendment Case Eyewitness Report,” AmmoLand.com, Mar. 3, 2010.

  59. “‘There’s a Whole Lot of Luck Involved,’” Washington Post, Apr. 10, 2008; Talbot, “Supreme Confidence.”

  60. Diana Rupp, “Dispatch from Germany,” Sports Afield (“I was fascinated to learn that this respected jurist is a die-hard turkey hunter!”). This 2006 article (which is not more specifically dated) was downloaded on June 25, 2008, from the Sports Afield website, www.sportsafield.com/DianaRupplWA.htm. That specific link no longer works at this writing; however, a hard copy of the article is in the files of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, DC.

  61. Jim Shea, “What’s Up When Scalia’s Social and Judicial Calendars Mix?” Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Mar. 5, 2004; “Buds of a Feather: By Blasting Away at Ducks, Joe Robinson Wonders, Did Cheney and Scalia also Super Glue Their Psyches into One Wild, Symbiotic Soul?” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 2, 2004; “Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases; Kansas Visit in 2001 Came Within Weeks of the Supreme Court Hearing Arguments,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 2004 (“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school’s dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney. . . . ‘When a case is on the docket before a judge, the coziness of meeting privately with a lawyer is questionable,’ said Chicago lawyer Robert P. Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. ‘It would seem the better part of judgment to avoid those situations.’ ”); “Commentary; Old MacDonald Had a Judge . . ., “Los Angeles Times, Feb. 17, 2004.

  62. See, e.g., “Supreme Court’s Credibility Problem,” Virginian-Pilot, Dec. 5, 2011 (“More recently . . . [Justice Clarence] Thomas and Scalia were featured guests at a Federalist Society dinner sponsored by, among others, the law firm that will argue against the health care law, a trade group opposed to the law and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., which has a major stake in the case. The dinner was held on the very day the Supreme Court decided to hear the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act.”); “Law Group Seeks Ethics Code for Supreme Court,” Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2011 (“Thomas and Scalia have been criticized by a public interest group for attending private political meetings sponsored in January 2007 and 2008 by David and Charles Koch, conservative billionaires who made large contributions during last year’s election and have financially backed the tea party movement”); Jonathan Turley, “The Price of Scalia’s Political Stardom,” Washington Post, Jan. 23, 2011 (“The Bachmann event takes this posturing to a new level. Scalia will be directly advising new lawmakers who came to Congress on a mission to remake government in a more conservative image. Many of them made pledges to repeal health-care reform, restrict immigration and investigate the president—pledges based on constitutional interpretations that might end up before the court. At best, Scalia‘s appearance can be viewed as a pep talk. At worst, it smacks of a political alliance.”); “The Over-the-Top Justice,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 2006 (“[S]peaking on March 8 at a university in Switzerland, he dismissed as ‘crazy’ the notion that military detainees are entitled to a ‘full jury trial,’ and the idea that the Geneva Conventions apply to those held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the process, Justice Scalia seemed to prejudge key issues in a momentous case involving the rights of Gitmo detainees. That should have caused him to recuse himself. . . .”); “Justice and Junkets,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 2006 (“Justice Scalia was apparently unchastened by the criticism of his 2004 duck-hunting excursion with Vice President Dick Cheney, one of that term’s most prominent Supreme Court litigants. Last September, he skipped the swearing-in of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. because of another ethically dubious trip, this time to the posh Ritz-Carlton at the Beaver Creek ski resort in Colorado.”); and “How Scalia Faced Ethics Issue: Though a Past Consultant, He Sat on AT&T Case,” Washington Post, June 22, 1986 (“Monroe H. Freedman, former dean of the Hofstra Law School and a longtime legal activist and commentator on legal ethics. . . called Scalia’s participation an act of ‘serious misjudgment’ ”).

  63. Liptak, “In Re Scalia the Outspoken v. Scalia the
Reserved” (“Justice Abe Fortas resigned in an ethics scandal in 1969, and Justice William O. Douglas’s unorthodox private life and public statements led Gerald R. Ford, then the House minority leader, to call for his impeachment in 1970”).

  64. Josh Sugarmann, “Gun Industry Ambassador’ Antonin Scalia to Hear Gun Law Case,” Huffington Post, Mar. 1, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-sugarmann/gun-industry-ambassador-a_b_481182.html. According to WFSA, each of its “ambassadors” is given the silver reproduction. “Torben Espensen,” www.wfsa.net/amb_01.html.

  65. “The World Forum Sport Shooting Ambassador Award,” www.wfsa.net/award.html.

  66. “Global Sport Shooting Group Honors Scalia,” New Gun Week, Apr. 10, 2007.

  67. “The Knox Update form [sic] the Firearms Coalition: The History of the Gun Rights War,” Shotgun News, June 1, 2011.

  68. “Personal Story: Interview with Alan Gottlieb and Lisa Lange,” Fox News Network, The O’ Reilly Factor, Fox News, Mar. 7, 2002.

  69. “Jolly Greed Giant,” The Oregonian, Aug. 16, 1992.

  70. “Gun Advocate Trains Sights on 1–676: Disarming Personality Conceals Steely Resolve of National Figure,” Spokesman Review, Sept. 28, 1997.

  71. “Jolly Greed Giant.”

  72. Rick Anderson, “Barack & Load; Alan Gottlieb’s Challenge to a Gun Ban in the President’s Adopted Hometown Has Made It All the Way to the Supreme Court, and Fattened the Ex-con’s Wallet in the Process,” Seattle Weekly, Nov. 11, 2009.

  73. Ibid.; Steve Bailey, “A.K.A. Gunnut,” Boston Globe, Aug. 10, 2007.

  74. See Antonin Scalia, “Financial Disclosure Report for Calendar Year 2007,” sec. V, “Gifts,” 5. It is possible that the gift was not reported because its value was inconsequential. That cannot be known without a more detailed description of the gift than is available on the public record. The average price of silver in 2007 was $13.3836 per ounce. Source: Goldmasters Gold Coins & Precious Metals, http://goldmastersusa.com/silver_historical_prices.asp.