by Dan Baum
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: HOGZILLA
The term “Hogzilla” refers to a giant pig that may or may not have been a hoax. Certain subjects are perfect for research on Wikipedia, and this seems one of them. This is what Wikipedia says:
Hogzilla is the name given to a male hybrid of wild hog and domestic pig that was shot and killed in Alapaha, Georgia, United States, on June 17, 2004 by Dr. Eliahu Katz on Ken Holyoak’s fish farm and hunting reserve. It was alleged to be 12 feet (3.7 m) long and weighed over 1,000 pounds (450 kg). It was originally considered a hoax.
The animal’s remains were exhumed in early 2005 and studied by Dr. Oz Katz and his father, Dr. Eliahu Katz for a documentary and a book they wrote together. In March 2005, these scientists confirmed that Hogzilla actually weighed 800 pounds (360 kg) and was between 6.9 feet (2.1 m) and 8.6 feet (2.6 m) long, diminishing the previous claim. DNA testing was performed, revealing that Hogzilla was a hybrid of wild boar and domestic pig (Hampshire breed). However, compared to most wild boars and domestics, Hogzilla is still quite a large and extraordinary specimen.
Hogzilla’s tusks measured nearly 28 inches (71 cm) and 19 inches (48 cm).
A story about the question of whether to allow hunters to cull the elk herd in Rocky Mountain National Park or to have rangers do the job ran on ABCNews.com as “Officials Consider Ways to Cull Wildlife,” by Jim Avila, August 26, 2006.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE ARMED BONEHEAD
The data on children shooting themselves and each other, the rising rate of teenage suicide, and the methods by which teenagers attempted suicide all come from charts generated on the CDC’s WISQARS website and also from Protect Children, Not Guns 2010, published by the Children’s Defense Fund.
In their article “Prevalence of Household Firearms and Firearm-Storage Practice in the 50 States and the District of Columbia: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2002,” in Pediatrics, vol. 116, no. 3 (2005): e370–e376, Catherine A. Okoro et al. wrote that two million American homes have loaded guns lying around unlocked. Similarly, a group of CDC researchers found in 1996 that about one in ten Oregon adults lived in a home that always or sometimes contained a loaded and unsecured gun (“Population Estimates of Household Firearm Storage Practices and Firearm Carrying in Oregon,” by David Nelson, Joyce A. Grant-Worley, Kenneth Powell, James Mercy, and Deborah Holtzman of the CDC, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 275, no. 22, June 12, 1996).
Even the Department of Homeland Security can’t keep track of its guns. Washington Post reporter Spencer S. Hsu wrote on February 18, 2010, in “Report Tracks Lost Firearms at DHS,” that DHS agents had lost 289 handguns, shotguns, and automatic rifles between 2005 and 2008. Some were left on car trunks, others in restaurant or bowling alley restrooms and in clothing-store fitting rooms.
The study of felons and their firearms was published in 1986 as Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms, by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi. It makes terrific reading. The half a million annual missing guns comes from a fact sheet issued by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, undated.
The story about the Pennsylvania legislature on this page was reported in “Municipalities May Be Forced to Rescind ‘Missing Gun’ Reporting Laws,” by Linda Finarelli in Montgomery News, February 24, 2012. The seven states that required gun owners to report stolen guns to police were Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island, according to Regulating Guns in America: An Evaluation and Comparative Analysis of Federal, State, and Selected Local Gun Laws (Legal Community Against Violence, February 2008).
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DEAD AGAIN
That twenty-three states had some form of “stand your ground” law comes from a ProPublica article, “The 23 States That Have Sweeping Self-Defense Laws Just Like Florida’s,” by Cara Currier, published on March 22, 2012. Those states were Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia.
A gunfight is an imprecise enterprise. As reported in “A Hail of Bullets, a Heap of Uncertainty,” by Al Baker, in The New York Times, December 9, 2007, New York City Police who fired at a person in the line of duty in 2006 hit their target only 28.4 percent of the time. But that was an improvement over 2005, when their hit rate was 17.4 percent. Los Angeles Police officers hit their targets 40 percent of the time, “which, while better than New York’s, still shows that they miss targets more often than they hit them.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: TRIBES
According to the Legal Community Against Violence, which advocates for tougher gun laws, state and local governments from New York to Hawaii, in addition to Chicago and Washington, D.C., were, as of April 2, 2012, facing forty-four “significant” lawsuits challenging gun laws after Heller and McDonald. Readers are directed to LCAV’s Post-Heller Litigation Summary.
Guncite.com is a website devoted to constitutional rights, particularly the Second Amendment. Its home page states, “Until the Second Amendment is treated as normal constitutional law, this web site will always be under construction …” So as a gun-guy ally, it is to Guncite’s credit that it maintains a page devoted to “Bogus Quotes Attributed to the Founders,” usually bogus quotes that would support the gun-guy position. The bogus quotes on pages 256 and 257 come from Guncite.
That the NRA is not a particularly big lobby comes from “What Sort of Lobby Is the NRA?” by Timothy P. Carney in the January 13, 2011, edition of The Washington Examiner. The statement on this page that support for gun control had fallen below 50 percent comes from a Gallup report on November 26, 2010, “In U.S., Continuing Record-Low Support for Stricter Gun Control.”
My assertion on this page that it was almost impossible to prove that the measures we thought of as “gun control” saved any lives is obviously a contested issue. In addition to the “Firearms Laws” article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, I relied upon First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws, published by the CDC in October 2003. The CDC evaluated fifty-one studies on everything from the effectiveness of gun bans to laws requiring gun locks. On banning types of guns or ammunition: “Certain studies indicated decreases in violence associated with bans, and others indicated increases.” On laws restricting who can get a gun: “some studies indicated decreases in violence associated with restrictions, and others indicated increases.” On waiting periods: “some indicated a decrease in violent outcome associated with the delay and others indicated an increase.” On registration, shall-issue concealed-carry, child-access-prevention laws, and zero-tolerance gun policies in schools, the studies were either too few or poorly designed, so no conclusions could be reached.
That researchers kept finding that studies were inadequate for evaluating the effectiveness of firearms laws may not have been entirely the blame of those who conducted the studies. Michael Luo of The New York Times made a compelling case that the NRA unduly influences how research on gun violence is conducted and funded, in “N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say,” January 25, 2011.
And some studies have indeed shown links between guns and violence. Handguns bigger than .32 caliber seemed to be associated with higher homicide rates in Dallas from 1980 to 1992, for example, but whether those weapons were semiautomatic or not seemed to make no difference, according to Christopher Koper of the Crime Control Institute, who published the study “Gun Density Versus Gun Type: Did the Availability of More Lethal Guns Drive Up the Dallas Homicide Rate 1980–1992?” (final revised report submitted to the Firearms and Violence Program, National Institute of Justice, 1997).
The Canadian Parliament’s canceling of the country’s long-gun registry was reported as “Long-Gun Registry Scrapped,” by CTV.ca, on October 25, 2011.
When I wri
te on this page that crime fell after the Brady Law but it was already falling before, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports make that clear. Two of my favorite gun-crime researchers drilled more deeply into the question, though, in 2000. Jens Ludwig of Georgetown and Philip J. Cook of Duke, whom I’ve never met, are among the very few researchers on the gun/crime nexus who don’t seem to come at the question with preconceived ideas, and are equally willing to gore oxen on both sides. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s August 2, 2000, issue, they examined data from the National Center for Health Statistics and concluded that the Brady Act seemed to be associated with a reduction in suicide among people fifty-five or older, but that it had no effect on homicide rates. That their article appeared in JAMA is significant. Many people have attempted to discuss guns as a public health issue, as Arthur Kellerman did in the New England Journal of Medicine article described in the notes to chapter two. But Abigail Kohn, in her terrific book Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures, makes a strong argument that the public health approach when it comes to guns is suspect. I quote her here at length because the gun-control argument so often relies on the rhetoric of public health.
Public health rhetoric provides the aura of scientific fact to the political agenda of gun control. It avoids the more obvious and politically fraught good guy/bad guy dichotomies, rests moral authority on medical science, presents antigun ideology as logical reasoning and empirical fact. Within the public health paradigm, there are no overt bad guys, only average people who engage in risky, dangerous behavior. [page 134]
The public-health approach to gun violence is particularly toxic, she writes, because it both blinds the anti-gun camp and needlessly inflames gun guys.
Having these beliefs legitimized by public health advocacy also provides liberal supporters of gun control with certain material benefits. They don’t need to pay more taxes or radically rework operational social welfare programs to help reduce gun violence. All they need to do is vote for tighter gun restrictions or bans on certain kinds of guns. [pages 134–35]
As far as shooters are concerned, this kind of gun-control advocacy exists not only to inform them of their own ignorance and naiveté but also to convince them that owning a gun will transform them into murderers or suicide victims. These messages run so contrary to what shooters know about guns, and what shooters know about themselves, that they reject these messages outright as ludicrous and insulting.… When control advocates promote the ubiquitous dangerousness of guns, gun enthusiasts hear ad hominem attacks. [page 135]
The Warren Cassidy quote on this page appeared in Under Fire, by Richard Lacayo, in Time, June 24, 2001.
More about the deadliness of the assault rifle: In 2010, the Brady Center published a list: “Examples of Assault Weapon Violence Reported Since Ban Expired in 2004.” The list included 410 incidents, some of which—like the September 15, 2007, birthday party in New Orleans, where twenty-eight bullets were fired from an AK-47, killing one man and wounding three children—were horrifying. But a closer examination of the list showed that several of the incidents were accidents; several more were suicides; and twenty-five involved the popular Chinese military rifle called the SKS, which held only ten rounds, had no pistol grip, barrel shroud, or collapsible stock, and was an “assault rifle” under the law only because it had a bayonet—not a widely used murder weapon. Of the 410 incidents, only thirty-nine involved more than ten bullets being fired. Ten was the maximum size of a gun’s magazine under the Clinton-era assault-rifle ban. Even if one adds in the seven others that mentioned “spraying” bullets, in only forty-six of the incidents that “involved” assault rifles was the fact that the weapon involved was an assault rifle relevant. The rest of the shootings could have been done with any gun. Forty-six incidents in five years and three months is, undeniably, forty-six tragedies. But nobody at Brady seemed to be asking whether it was worth cleaving the country down the middle yet again to prevent them.
For an example of what drives gun-rights activists around the bend, get ahold of the conclusion of Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, published by the Violence Policy Center. “The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” In other words, never mind that these weapons aren’t much of a public-safety threat; the guns are scary-looking enough to fool people into supporting a ban. And the report’s last words are positively ghoulish in their palpable desire for political victory. “Recognizing the country’s fascination for exotic weaponry and the popular images and myths associated with guns, it may require a crisis of a far greater proportion before any action is taken.”
Another useful document is Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994–2003, published by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department in July 2004, when Congress was considering renewing the ban. It makes the point that it wasn’t so much the weapons but the large-capacity magazines that mattered in gun crime—though not very much, since so many were grandfathered in under the ban that the ban itself did little to reduce their prevalence on the street. Overall, the report concluded, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
The lack of support for a handgun ban referenced on this page comes from “Record-Low 26% in U.S. Favor Handgun Ban,” by Gallup, published October 26, 2011. That was down from 60 percent in 1959.
The role of the American Civil Liberties Union in the gun debate has always been a puzzler. To gun guys, it has always seemed crazy that an organization that stood up for the rights of Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois, wouldn’t stand up for citizens’ Second Amendment rights. On March 4, 2002, the ACLU published a bulletin disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Heller, which wasn’t unexpected. “The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right,” the online bulletin said. “As always, we welcome your comments.”
Hoo boy, did it get them. The vitriol went on for months, some of it typical bashing from the right but most from people identifying themselves as longtime ACLU members. “I don’t know why this is the only constitutional right the ACLU doesn’t defend,” wrote TexasCivilLibertarian. “The Bill of Rights protects the rights of INDIVIDUALS, so the idea that the Bill of Rights protects a ‘collective right’ is absolutely preposterous.” SuperNaut wrote, “I just took the money I had slated to re-up my lapsed ACLU membership and used it to re-up my NRA membership. Sorry ACLU you lost me.” A lot were like those of MadRocketScientist: “I’ve often found myself defending the ACLU to other conservatives and have supported many of your legal actions, but this I can not abide. You need to explain why you continue to refuse to defend the 2nd amendment as you do the others.” I counted about thirteen hundred comments, mostly from people who claimed to be members or supporters of the ACLU, and didn’t find one of them in favor of the organization’s interpretation.
I phoned Frank Askin, the ACLU’s general counsel, who had served on the ACLU’s national board for almost thirty years, from 1969 to 2007. “There’s been almost no support in the national board that I recall for an individual right to own a gun,” he said. “The major debate has always been over whether we should assert what is not a civil liberty. The ACLU has never taken a crime-control position. You could say that freedom from crime is a civil liberty but the ACLU hasn’t gotten into that.” He called “absurd” Scalia’s reasoning that the Second Amendment protects citizens’ right to violent revolution, and said conservatives usually make the opposite argument, when fighting regulations, that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” “The other amendments say very clearly there should be no laws abridging free speech, and that we have a right to be free of unreasonable search an
d seizures. In the Second Amendment it’s all backwards, with the well-regulated militia coming first.” Even as we spoke, though, the South Dakota chapter of the ACLU was fighting to win Second Amendment rights for legal U.S. residents, as reported in “ACLU Challenges Citizenship Requirement for Concealed Weapons,” by Nick Penzenstadler, Rapid City Journal, January 3, 2011.
On the Fourth of July, the left-leaning online publication The Daily Kos published an impassioned argument, “Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment,” by Kalili Joy Gray. “This is an appeal to liberals, not merely to tolerate the Second Amendment, but to embrace it. To love it and defend it and guard it as carefully as you do all the others. Because we are liberals. And fighting for our rights—for all of our rights, for all people—is what we do. Because we are revolutionaries.”
When presented with, say, the reality that President Obama had done nothing about guns in his first term except allow people to wear them concealed in national parks, gun-rights activists often fell back on what he, and other liberals, “really wanted” to do. They pointed to quotes like this one, from Sarah Brady in The New York Times, on August 13, 1993, in an article called “A Little Gun Control, a Lot of Guns,” by Erik Eckholm, on the struggle to get the Brady Law passed: “ ‘Once we get this,’ she said, ‘I think it will become easier and easier to get the laws we need passed.’ ” Gun guys argued that Mrs. Brady had tipped her hand that she wanted to put gun policy on the “slippery slope” toward a total ban.