David Erik Nelson

What’s most struck me since I started talking about guns earlier this year is the degree to which just factually stating U.S. gun injury and fatality numbers constitutes an “argument” for “gun control.” [1]

I don’t particularly feel like I’ve argued for gun control. In fact, I’ve tried to be pretty clear that I don’t think this should be an “argument” or “debate” to begin with – and that most of what people suggest when they talk about “gun control” is either unworkable or unconstitutional.

But regardless of my druthers, there is a “gun control debate” in America.

Since simply stating the fact that 30,000 people will be killed by gun-fired lead this year – almost all of them in moments of hate, sorrow, or anguish – means I’m “arguing for gun control,” then let’s take a few minutes to give full credit to the argument against. Let’s look at those numbers.

Durable Goods

I’m going to level with you: There’s nothing the government can do today that’s going to reduce gun mayhem tomorrow.

For a really quick, really elucidating read, I direct you to this paper produced for the Obama Administration by the National Institute of Justice: “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies.” This comes to us by way of the NRA, who unearthed it, highlighted the portions that caught their interest, and republished it (much to the consternation of the Executive Branch).

Here’s the short version. We have about 310 million guns spread from sea to shining sea. If not a single gun is ever sold in America again, then there will still be about 310 million guns spread from sea to shining sea. If not a single gun is ever sold again and you initiate a huge, expensive, disproportionately successful gun buyback program, there will still be about 250 million guns spread from sea to shining sea – minus those that are cheapest, crappiest, most broken, and least likely to be used to hurt someone.

Guns and their accessories are “durable goods” in the most fundamental sense: Even cheap, crappy guns – guns that can be bought for $50 in any pawn shop and are largely regarded as pieces of crap by anyone who actually cares about guns – will function just fine for decades. I inherited my grandmother’s Uncle Will’s Colt Lightning when she died; it was built around 1899, wasn’t maintained for decades, and could still shoot me as dead today as it could when Will received it as a gift from his boss.

Our guns are here, and they’ll keep being here for decades and decades and decades.

The Damn Constitution

If your inclination is to say: “To hell with it, then; let’s confiscate ‘em all!” Well, I’m afraid that’s just not on the table – and not because the damn politicians are too afraid of the NRA boogeyman. It’s not on the table because it would violate our Constitution just as fundamentally as razing every church, synagogue, and mosque.

As an Ann Arbor resident, most people I interact with daily aren’t gun owners, and many “don’t like guns.” Usually they say that without having ever handled one – which is to say they don’t like the idea of guns. (I don’t bring this up in the spirit of invalidating their position, only in accurately categorizing it). They tend to think gun sale and ownership should be much more strictly regulated, and usually carp that “The Second Amendment specifically says ‘well-regulated militia’! Where’s your Well-Regulated Militia?!” [2]

Listen, guys, I’m saying this because I love you: Over the last half-decade or so the SCotUS has gotten really clear in interpreting the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to privately own firearms. If you’re about to freak out about the Well-Regulated Militia opening clause of the amendment, please be aware that in 2007 the Court’s majority opinion was that, in light of historical documents from the same period, the intent of that clause is to say “Because it’s important a nation be able to muster well-regulated militias quickly, we want to be sure that citizens in general are able to keep operable weapons handy.”

This contrasts with the very popular lay interpretation – which tends to take the oddly worded amendment to suggest that the right that “shall not be infringed” is for the people to keep and bear arms while participating in a well-regulated militia. And when you think about it, that basically boils down to “As a government, we are not going to infringe on the right of citizens fighting on our behalf to have and use guns.” That’s sort of an “Oh, well, duh!” legal statute, isn’t it?

Anyway, it’s entirely possible that you don’t like the SCotUS 2007 finding. In your defense, it was only a 5-4 majority. It’s fine not to like it, and it’s our duty as citizens to be vocal about the things we don’t like. But until something changes – and that “something” is probably a new amendment to the Constitution – it remains the lay of the legal land, regardless of what we like.

I’ve met my fair share of Americans who don’t like the Jesus-less-ness of our public institutions. Hell, I’ve met Americans who in my presence and to my face have mused about the “unhealthiness” of raising children in a household where the mother and father are of different faiths (as is the case in mine). Nonetheless, they all ultimately dismiss their low-cognitive-dissonance dream-world with a sigh, allowing that the First Amendment is here to stay and they’ll just have to accept that.

Our likes and dislikes have no impact on what is currently constitutional, and keeping a loaded gun with no working safety stored in a shoebox precariously balanced over your baby’s crib currently is perfectly constitutional [3].

But we’re not really talking about militias anymore – we all know that. The U.S. has the most advanced army in the world; we hardly need private citizens with Saturday Night Specials staving off a French-Canadian invasion force. According to the SCotUS, today self-defense is the primary reason to make sure private citizens can arm themselves.

But does that make sense? How often do private citizens use firearms to defend themselves?

Defensive Gun Use

Let’s begin with a basic question:

How many times are guns used annually to prevent crimes?

In the literature this is called “defensive gun use” or “DGU.” It’s a slightly squishy term. DGU can be used to refer to any situation where having a gun – from actually discharging it to simply pulling up your shirt to show the grip sticking out of your waistband – prevents the commission of a crime.

• Most Accurate Answer: I dunno. A bunch?
• Most Popular Answers: Up to 2.5 million (that one comes from the NRA and other gun boosters); or as low as “a few thousand, if even” (that one comes from scoffers).

Let’s start with the highest number with an actual basis in research: 2 million DGU incidents per year. This comes from Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, who has extrapolated an annual DGU-rate of around 2 million, based on survey responses.

According to the CDC there were 1,787,007 non-fatal assaults in 2010 (that includes all means: fire, dogs, guns, piercing, suffocation, submersion – everything) and 16,065 homicides [4]. So, that’s 1,803,072 Bad Things People Might Do to You in 2010, the sorta things where even reasonable hippies like myself would probably say, “I respect your right to use a gun in your own defense in that situation.” Avid footnote-readers will realize that this 1,803,072 Bad Things includes the justifiable homicides; feel free to debate the appropriateness of that position in the comments.

Kleck would have us believe that the murder and assault rate would more than double without a well-armed citizenry DGU-ing up the wazoo. I’m sorry, but that tests credulity, doesn’t it?

And indeed it does, specifically for Harvard public health researcher David Hemenway. I was first clued into this by my college chum Michael Hoffman – who has some cred when it comes to issues of guns, patriotism, and the law – so I’ll let him take the floor:

The research was done largely by David Hemenway, who reviewed the pool of information that is also used to support the much-larger estimates provided by guys like Gary Kleck. (There’s only one pool of information for everyone to swim in, sadly, because research funding was cut off for such a long time [owing to NRA pressure in Washington – DEN].) Hemenway took the information in that pool, and eliminated a few survey outliers, such as people who said that they had more than 20 DGUs per year, but couldn’t provide details on any of them. He also tried to determine how many of the DGUs reported were illegal, or probably illegal, actions by giving case files to judges to review. Most of the DGUs were found to be probably illegal by the judges: stuff like “The drug deal went bad, and I pulled a gun to get out,” or “My wife took offense to my abusive behavior, and she took a swing, so I had to shoot her out of fear for my life.” Mostly stuff where there was already a criminal activity, but there were plenty of unjustified acts that were actually offensive gun uses.

Anyway, Hemenway nickel-and-dimed the original numbers, pointed out how small the sample sizes were, extrapolated from smaller gun-ownership percentages today, and got a number that was around 80k, I think, rather than the 50k I said [Hemenway's low-end estimate is actually 55,000-80,000 –DEN]. There are a number of big problems with the research, though, and one of the big one is the vagueness of the word “use.” Does it count when I fire my gun? Yeah. When I point it? Maybe. When I tell you I’ve got a gun? Maybe. Who knows? The notion of brandishing in DGU is really vague, and Hemenway doesn’t have any use for it, so his numbers are supposed to contain just those moments when somebody points or fires a weapon.

For me, the salient point is that many of these DGUs are not defensive, and many are criminal or in support of criminal activity. Very few of the DGUs reported were the category the NRA wants us to conjure up: the mugger who is sent packing by a good guy with a gun, the family man who takes down the murderer breaking down his door, etc. [5]

Most recently I’ve seen Hemenway’s estimate bumped to 100,000, which means that the salaried journalist’s “fair-and-balanced” (i.e., “pick-a-random-number-in-the-middle”) estimate as something like a quarter-million DGUs per year.

Interestingly, this spring the Violence Policy Center released a paper (noted here) on DGU, and found a rate of about 68,000 per year – based on recent numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s generally well-respected National Crime Victimization Survey. This is virtually unchanged from NCVS findings from twenty years ago, which Kleck has cited – although he thought they were way too low then. At the very least, we can be fairly sure that the NCBS findings constitute DGU incidents that most rational citizens would agree were legal and justified.

At any rate, when the DGU merry-go-round finally stops, it looks like our lowest responsible low-ball figure (based, admittedly, on sub-par data) is 68,000 DGU incidents per year. And it looks like only .03 percent of these actually result in a death (those few hundred ever-popular “justifiable homicides” mentioned in [4]). Frankly, that sorta seems like a bargain for averting a whole lotta mayhem.

But how do we slice it? Do you argue:

• There are 68,000 annual DGUs, compared to 2010′s 11,067 gun homicides. So: “A gun is six times more likely to be used to save an innocent than to murder one!”

But that assumes that every DGU prevented a murder. So we maybe need to step it back and say:

• Those 68,000 DGUs stopped a combined 64,805 gun-related murders and assaults in 2010. So: “Guns are used to harm folks as often as they’re used to protect them.”

That starts to seem sorta coin-tossy, doesn’t it? Besides, guns don’t just hurt folks on purpose. To be as complete as possible, it only seems fair to say:

• 68,000 annual DGUs were accompanied by 104,914 gun injuries (fatal or non) in 2010: So: “A gun is 50 percent more likely to injure someone than defend him or her.”

Good Ole Violence, Always Here To Solve Our Problems

So, if you believe there should be a “debate” about guns – instead of a conversation – then here’s the other side of that debate: You can’t “control” guns because: (1) we have a ton of them; (2) their ownership is enshrined in our secular Ten Commandments; and (3) we seem to need them to help us reign in our violent tendencies.

Except …

Except for the fact that during these last two decades DGU appears to have been stable while violent crime in the U.S. plummeted something like 70% (!) and individual gun-ownership appears to have stayed stable (ignore the breathless headline; look at the graph, which is essentially flat) or declined. It leaves one to wonder if DGU is really that societally vital. And if it isn’t, then why are we so committed to enshrining a right to personal gun ownership in our Constitution?

Again, I own guns – and not just dangerous antiques like Uncle Will’s Colt. I’ve been as bummed as anyone about the ongoing ammo shortage, and was thrilled to find boxes of .22LR out in K-Zoo so I could go shooting with my dad again.

But I look at the numbers, and look into myself, and still say “This is not as vital to our civil society as our freedom to speak, to practice our faith (or doubt), to publicly gather and petition for redress, to be secure in our homes and papers, etc.” Maybe more to the point, I can have a deep and genuine affection for guns, and still believe that maybe it’s time that we get past our core American notion – one effectively enshrined in the Second Amendment – that violence is a valid and respectable solution to our problems.

We characterize “debate” as a rational process of sorting competing ideas, but it isn’t. In America, “debate” is just another word for “brawl.” No one learns a new point of view when they are jumped in an alley or hop into the monkey knife fighting pit; you show up with what you’ve got, and pound on each other until someone flees or collapses.

If you are about to take exception to this characterization, then riddle me this: If you are “rational” and “pro-gun control,” then why the hell aren’t you already familiar with the SCotUS 2007 opinions? Isn’t an understanding of the current state of the Second Amendment sorta-kinda vital to “debating” about the Second Amendment?

And if you “rationally support gun rights” – likely because of personal safety issues – then why aren’t you already concerned that guns appear to protect people once for every two times they hurt someone? Would you take meds your physician prescribed while noting nonchalantly, “Oh, FYI, if these pills do anything at all, there’s a 64% chance they’ll hurt or kill you, and an unknown – but very high – likelihood they’ll do nothing. But they might also save your life. Maybe. We haven’t really done the research on that. Make sure to drink plenty of fluids!”

If you’re about to defend our prettified process of verbal violence as an even halfway-decent way to arrive at good public policy, then explain why our “rational debate” revolves around assault rifles (hardly ever used to hurt folks), mass shootings (which get tons of reporting, but kill fewer than three dozen people per year), and small children accidentally killing themselves and each other with poorly secured firearms (something that happens about 60 times per year).

These are all terrible, terrible things – but they are statistical blips. We obsess about 100 gun deaths per year – the sensational and heartbreaking ones that will draw the most ad revenue, to be perfectly frank. And we’ll almost completely ignore the hard-to-report and often ugly majority of the gun deaths: Our 19,000 annual suicides.

Why?

Despite being the major way that people are killed by guns – and one of the most popular ways that Americans use violence to solve all of their problems – suicide has had no place in the national “debate.” Once you’re in the debating ring slashing away at your opponent, you just aren’t receptive to the possibility that you’re fighting over matchsticks while the city burns.

Suicide-by-firearm has exceeded homicide-by-firearm annually since 1981; it dwarfed homicide by 1999, and has steadily grown since. Gun suicide is thirty-some times more common than fatal gun accidents. It’s mostly accomplished with handguns. It’s a solution mostly pursued by adult white men – and thus has the distinction of being the only problem in America that plagues white men, and yet isn’t considered super-duper-overwhelmingly important.

What’s lost in our “debate” – what makes debate itself seem so absurd in this situation – isn’t just the fact that we’re safer from violent crime every year. It’s the fact that even throughout the period when violence – and especially gun violence – was soaring, the guy most likely to use a gun against me has always been me.

Notes

[1] Gott in Himmel, this piece constitutes the last you’ll hear from me about guns (although recent news tends to auger against a compassionate and caring Gott being in Himmel, or anywhere else). If you find yourself curious about my continuing reading and thinking about guns and their control, you can track that via my Pinboard account or by following me on Twitter.

[2] Disclosure: I’ve carped this same line on more than one occasion – although I’d like to think I did so wryly, in equal parts sarcasm and earnestness. Nonetheless, I’ve heard it over and over again from my friends and family on the left, from Obama-voting gun owners, from PhDs and college profs, from all sorts of smart folks. It is appalling how uninformed we are about the state of legal thought on this.

[3] Sadly, laws requiring the use of trigger locks or storing weapons disassembled – policies I strongly favor – were deemed unconstitutional; if you go to the above link and search for the phrase “operative clause,” you’ll get to the meat of this issue quickly. Props to Ann Arbor Chronicle reader Ricebrnr for giving us the heads up and this material in the comments on my “Running Gun Numbers” column.

[4] That’s also an “all means” number; 68.6 percent of those homicides were firearm related, and likely included the 278 private-citizen justifiable homicides registered by the FBI in 2010; 232 of those were firearm related (170 handguns, 26 shotguns, and 8 rifles – which would include assault rifles, although no one can say if it did – and 28 “firearm, type not stated”). It would not include the 385 firearm related law enforcement justifiable homicides, which themselves includes the 344 “legal intervention” deaths we talked about from the CDC gun numbers we ran back in March).

[5] A salient taste of Hemenway’s research, drawn from his 2000 “Gun Use in the United States: Results from Two National Surveys” (co-authored with D. Azrael and M. Miller, and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Injury Prevention):

Results—Even after excluding many reported firearm victimizations, far more survey respondents report having been threatened or intimidated with a gun than having used a gun to protect themselves. A majority of the reported self defense gun uses were rated as probably illegal by a majority of judges. This was so even under the assumption that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly.

Conclusions—Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self defense. Most self reported self defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like David Erik Nelson. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. So if you’re already supporting us on a regular basis, please educate your friends, neighbors and colleagues about The Chronicle and encourage them to support us, too!

The resolution states that the board “supports President Barack Obama’s continued efforts to reduce gun violence through enhanced background checks, restricted sales of some types of ammunition and high capacity magazines; and … further supports the reduction of societal violence through the development of proactive programs that will educate citizens on non-violent conflict resolution and allow physicians to prevent firearm and other violence related injuries through health screening, patient counseling, and referral to mental health services for those with behavioral or emotional medical conditions.”

According to county records, applications for concealed pistol licenses in Washtenaw County have increased dramatically so far this year. There were 1,510 applications for the first four months of 2013, compared to 717 applications during the same period in 2012. For the full 12-month period in 2012, the county received 2,153 applications – compared to 546 in 2007. [.pdf of application data from 2004-2013] [.pdf of approved licenses from 2008-2013]

The June 5 resolution was brought forward by board chair Yousef Rabhi and commissioner Conan Smith – both Democrats representing districts in Ann Arbor.

This brief was filed from the boardroom of the county administration building at 220 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

David Erik Nelson

Thanks for returning for this second installment of Dave Not Really Taking a Meaningful Position on Gun Control. As you’ll recall, last month we talked about What Guns Are and Aren’t [1].

This month, we’re just going to talk numbers, because if you get your vision of the world from the daily news, then your impression is probably something like: (a) Guns kill maybe three dozen people per day, mostly in murders (many of which are committed by cops in the line of duty); (b) Lots of little kids find guns, play with them, and get killed; (c) Gun injuries aren’t that common; these things basically kill you or don’t, and most injuries are accidents [2]; and (d) NRA is a deservedly powerful voice in the national conversation about guns and gun control.

All of that is wrong.

I fully acknowledge that the fourth point has some aspects of opinion to it; the first three do not. These first three are demonstrably incorrect.

Just to get the punchline out of the way, in America: (a) Guns actually kill 86 people per day, and only about a third of those are murders; (b) A very small percentage of gun accident victims are kids; (c) Gun injuries are more than twice as frequent as deaths; and (d) NRA doesn’t have enough members to warrant the influence they wield.

Gun Numbers

Starting in December 2012 I got super cozy with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website [3].

U.S. Gun Deaths: 2010

Here is the numerical breakdown of gun-related casualties in the U.S. for 2010 (the most recent year for which complete figures are available).

In 2010 104,914 people in the United States of America were injured or killed by flying lead exiting the barrels of guns. Of these, 31,409 people died; 73,505 did not.

Of the 31,409 deaths in 2010, 19,392 were suicides. That number should sicken and sadden any reader with even just half a heart. Firearm suicide was the number one cause of violent deaths for men in 2010, putting 16,960 of them in caskets [4].

Suicide by gun is a method overwhelmingly favored by men, and at which they absolutely excel [5]. All told, we’re losing 20,000 of our brothers and sisters per year to suicides by gun. Self-destruction by firearm constitutes roughly two-thirds of total gun deaths in a given year.

Next up are homicides, which numbered 11,067 men, women, and children. This doesn’t include lawful actions taken by law enforcement during the course of enforcing the law; those are coded as “legal intervention” [6] deaths, and there were just 344 of them in the U.S. in 2010. So, regardless of how common it is on the nightly news and YouTube videos, the police account for just 1% of all firearm-related deaths and injuries in a given year.

U.S. Gun Injuries: 2010

Finally, there are gun accidents. Watch the news and you already know what these are: Junior finds an ill-secured gun in the lettuce drawer and drills a hole in Buddy. But that’s actually very rare.

There were only 606 firearm-related accidental deaths in 2010 (so called “Unintentional Firearm” injuries, in CDC lingo). Just 36 of these deaths involved children under 12. The bulk of these accidents befell folks 15 to 44 [7].

A total of 73,505 people were non-fatally injured by gun-actuated lead in 2010.

Of those 73,505 injuries, 4,643 were attempted suicides. To reiterate, firearm suicides are abnormally successful.

Of the 73,505 injuries, 14,161 were non-fatal accidents that, as was the case with the fatal accidents, disproportionately befell the adult-ish [8].

And 963 were injuries during the course of “legal intervention.” (Another lesson: the cops are pretty good at not killing people).

Finally, the lion’s share of injuries, 53,738, were part of an assault.

Interpretations

I’m nominally a “journalist,” and so I have an almost overwhelming urge to begin this section with “Now, there are two ways to see these numbers …”

But, the thing is, there aren’t. There is one way to see these numbers – as numbers.

• 73,505 people injured
• 31,409 dead
• 73% of the injuries were acts of malice
• 97% of the deaths were acts of malice

Someone with ill-intent took hold of an instrument and started singing the special little dark song that was echoing in the chambers of his or her heart; that’s how this lead got into these bodies. They did this in cold blood and sweating with the heat of the moment, they did it while mentally ill and while of sound mind, they sang their special little song to strangers and friends and family and lovers and, mostly, to themselves. These injuries weren’t mostly accidents, or mostly kids, or mostly cops. It was people setting out to hurt people, and succeeding.

There is an urge to compare these numbers, so let’s compare.

U.S. Automobile Injuries: 2010

Here’s a favorite Glib Gun Lover comparison: There are roughly as many cars in America as guns [9], and there were 2,771,497 motor vehicle occupant injuries in 2010, and 33,687 deaths for a total of 2,805,184 American motor vehicle casualties. Cars are 27 times more dangerous than guns!

But, the thing is, of those 2,771,497 automotive injuries, only 8,954 were acts of malice or sorrow, and only 1,789 were attempts at suicide [10].

Check the pie charts: Orange represents blameless accidents; red and blue (and green) represent active human efforts to inflict pain or suffering. We’d have included a pie chart of Automobile Deaths, but it would have just been an orange circle.

In other words, those 2.8 million car accidents were basically just that: accidents. Those 33,000 corpses on the highway were largely the result of bad decision-making and bad weather, bad maintenance and bad luck. Meanwhile, our 30,000 gun deaths weren’t accidents – sorry, 4% were accidents. The rest were acts. They were deliberate expressions of hate and sorrow and frustration and desperation. That should mean something to us as human beings.

And, pardon me for saying so, it should mean something to the people who profit from selling the products without which these injuries could not have occurred. I note that the auto industry is constantly working to make sure there is less blood on the road. Car companies build safer cars, more numerous air bags, better seat belts; they support MADD and SADD and ever tougher laws against drunk driving; they support harsher punishments for bad actors at every level – those who behave recklessly and cause death and chaos on our highways and byways.

Now, then, when it comes to the gun industry …

NRA Numbers

Personally, I believe the NRA is terribly distorting the “gun control debate” in this country. I believe the NRA has made a concerted effort to drive gun and ammo sales over the last five years by conjuring the specter of a sinister Negro President hell-bent on confiscating legally owned guns – even as that same president, in his first month in office, overturned a decades-old ban on carrying firearms in National Parks. (That was just the first move amid so much notable inaction that his policies amounted to a loosening of gun control.)

Personally, I find statements and publications from the NRA to be twisted and loathsome in the extreme, often amounting to little more than borderline-racist dog-whistling. Personally, I think the NRA is nothing more than an extremely wily PR firm that doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about human blood and suffering as long as there is still more money to be made encouraging ever fewer Americans to stockpile ever more guns and ammo.

But I don’t object to their participation in the national gun “debate” because I believe them to be detestable hate-mongers and heartless death profiteers. I object because they don’t represent the actual interests of a meaningful portion of our citizenry.

The NRA has fewer than 4 million members [11]. That’s not a lot of citizens. They are dwarfed by such notable voting blocks as: illegal drug users (of which we have almost 23 million in the U.S.); Michiganders (9.9 million voters no-one in DC seems to care about); and dogs (there are 78 million belovéd mutts in this great nation).

Fact: No politician in American history has ever said: “I’m sorry; I would love to support stricter drug laws, but the illegal drug user lobby is a powerful group, and I can’t afford to lose their votes” – even though there are at least five times as many pill-popping daddies and paisley-clad Mary Janes in this country than there are NRA Freedom Fighters.

Since the Newtown Mass Murder Using Guns, I’ve spoken to several traditionally staunch NRA supporters who’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with lending their support. On the one hand, they feel that the NRA is the only group out there defending “gun rights” (whatever that’s supposed to mean, in a nation where there are clearly plenty of guns to go around and no way to even track them down, let alone take them away). On the other hand, these same NRA supporters find their once-beloved NRA to increasingly sound like “a sack of dicks” – an assessment already shared by the vast number of Americans (maybe around 130 million?) who own guns, yet would never consider sending a penny to the NRA.

A lobby should be powerful because it represents a lot of votes, not because it represents a lot of dollars.

And there’s the point: Not only is the NRA a minuscule sub-portion of the population, the organization doesn’t even represent more than 3% of the nation’s gun owners. NRA members are nothing more than a splinter of a minority of the nation, and they presume to speak for all of us – and we, for unknowable reasons, just let them.

As an aside to my gun-owning co-citizens: The NRA may constitute the loudest assholes in the room, but we quiet assholes – who keep our guns under lock and key and teach our children well – are kinda-sorta the biggest assholes. We’re the biggest assholes because we’re not speaking up on our own behalf on the side of honesty and rationality and fair-play in political discourse. Just sayin’ …

In the end, this isn’t about guns or “gun control,” this is about numbers: The NRA has worked for almost two decades to make it as hard as possible for you and your elected representatives to see these numbers in an organized, meaningful way. They’ve poured countless millions of dollars into making it as hard as possible for you to make your own decisions about what gun policy might make sense.

Twenty mostly pink-colored children were murdered-via-firearm in December in Connecticut, and the NRA said “Let’s put more guns in schools.” Last year in Chicago, 440 mostly dark-skinned children were gunned down, and the NRA decried closing the gun show loophole [12]. That loophole has been instrumental in illegally moving handguns into a city with some of the toughest legal gun restrictions in the nation. Something on the order of 30,000 of our friends, neighbors, and family members will kill themselves or one another with guns this year, but the NRA wants you to worry that my dad and I had to fill out a one page application and a couple little cards so he could give me his Browning pistol as a gift.

I’m sorry, NRA, but maybe we’ve got slightly bigger problems. We’ve got some numbers to discuss, and it’s kinda hard to do that with your hysterical bullshit drowning out the conversation.

Notes
 
[1] tl;dr: They aren’t tools for solving problems; they are instruments of self-expression, for better or worse.
 
[2] I put this in there because I feel that a lack of reporting on the large number of gun injuries in the U.S. buttresses the erroneous belief that guns are problem-solving tools requiring little training or practice to be effective. Lots of folks try to kill each other with bullets and succeed only in maiming each other, because Guns Aren’t Tools.

[3] Specifically Leading Causes of Death Reports and Nonfatal Injury Reports. These sections of the CDC website are ugly as hell and a total pain in the ass to use – especially in contrast to the slick and informative main page. If you do a little searching on that page, you’ll find something really interesting: the words “gun” and “firearm” appear zero times, even as we are in the midst of a news-gobbling national debate on just how dangerous guns are in America. Meanwhile, this report about a multi-state outbreak of hedgehog-linked salmonella infections is linked from the front page – OMG MICHIGAN! Three of those infections have happened here! Wash your hands, people!

Kidding aside, it’s actually a really good report: Lots of info, links to practical advice to parents and pet-owners. It’s basically exactly what you went from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their site is packed with such handy info on everything from seasonal flu to water-related injuries.

Are you wondering why the hell the CDC has a section dedicated to fires, but nothing on firearms? Are you wondering why “guns” and “firearms” aren’t even listed in the alphabetical breakdown of site content? Have you noticed that the section on indoor firing ranges focuses on the dangers of high noise levels and lead exposure? Do you wonder why, if you search “guns” on the CDC site almost all of the returns are for nail gun injuries? It’s as though the CDC exists in an alternate America where Samuel Colt was a championship knitter. I recommend you and Google spend some quality time together. SPOILER ALERT: The NRA bullied the CDC away from researching gun violence.
 
[4] Wanna get super-depressed? The next runner-up for violent deaths for men was firearm homicide: 9,328 lives lost. The top three violent deaths for women in 2010 were suicide (by poisoning, firearm, and suffocation in that order), with homicide by firearm coming in as a distant third at 1,734 deaths.
 
[5] I’m told that conventional wisdom is that most suicides fail; only about 8% resulted in death in 2010. This is not the case with armed young men: Of the 24,035 Americans who tried to kill themselves with guns on 2010 (86% of whom were men), 19,392 – or roughly 80% – succeeded.
 
[6] From the CDC: “Legal Intervention – injuries inflicted by the police or other law-enforcing agents, including military on duty, in the course of arresting or attempting to arrest lawbreakers, suppressing disturbances, maintaining order, and other legal actions. Excludes injuries caused by civil insurrections.”
 
[7] With a telling breakdown: 15–24-years-olds accounted for 145 deaths, 25–34-years-olds for 107 deaths, 35–44-years-olds for 91 deaths (the next ten-year chunk gives you another 89 accidental deaths, then after that it drops off to something like 60 for folks between 55 and retirement, and another 50 or 60 for the elderly). All told, in 2010 62 people under the age of 14 were fatally wounded in gun accidents, while 544 were nominal “adults” – which is a very different picture than what we assume. The numbers tend to indicate that we do a decent job of keeping our guns out of the hands of our little ones; it’s ourselves we have to worry about.
 
[8] Only 595 of the injuries were children under 14, and most of those (523) were kids age 10-14. The distribution of accidental injuries is otherwise very similar to that of accidental deaths – which stands to reason; these were, after all, accidents.
 
[9] Yes, that’s an estimate – and a crummy one at that. Remember, gun sales and ownership are not meaningfully tracked in the U.S. Experts tend to base their estimate of the number of firearms floating around in the U.S. on the number of guns annually manufactured and imported. The latest reliable estimate is 310 million guns in the U.S.: 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles of all sorts, and 86 million shotguns. I got those numbers from page 8 of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service’s 2012 report on Gun Control Legislation, although that’s just an analysis from the ATF’s Firearms Commerce in the United States 2011 report.

As for the current number of cars in the U.S., dammit, that’s an estimate, too, even though we do register cars in this country! Anyway, the most recent figure from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics is for 2009, when there were 254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles in the U.S.
 
[10] The CDC doesn’t offer us information on the intent (i.e., “act of violence” vs. “accident”) for motor-vehicle related deaths, so there’s a slight macintosh-to-gala comparison here; all apologies. We do know that there were 114 suicides and 39 homicides associated with “All Transport” in 2010, but those end up broken out under “Other Transport” rather than “Motor Vehicle Traffic,” so who knows; maybe it was all jumping in front of trains? (see Table 18 at that last link, if you wanna ponder this).
 
[11] Unsurprisingly, this is another gun number that’s shockingly hard to pin down. The current best-guess is four-million-ish, of which only two million may actually be living, breathing human beings who are aware that they support the NRA. According to folks active in the NRA only about 7% of the membership actual bother to vote in NRA board elections – which makes it sound like a pretty disconnected group, regardless of how many millions of living humans may actually be paying dues.
 
[12] Check the date on that article: 2010! It isn’t like this is a new problem.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like David Erik Nelson. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. So if you’re already supporting us on a regular basis, please educate your friends, neighbors and colleagues about The Chronicle and encourage them to support us, too!

David Erik Nelson

This is not a column about “gun control” [1]; it’s a column about guns, and it’s a column about control, and it’s ultimately a column about the quick and the dead.

But it’s not about gun control. As of this moment, I have no stable opinion about gun control; I’m not conflicted, but I’m still doing the math. My next column will be closer to being about “gun control” – and you can expect some math then.

But today, let’s just talk about guns.

I own two functional guns. One is a Beretta AL 391 Teknys, which is a semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun. I’m told the AL 391 family is popular with bird hunters, although I use it for shooting clays – a hobby I was introduced to by my father. I also own a Browning Challenger .22 target pistol.

As Americans, we take it for granted that guns are tools for solving problems. I thought that too, back before I’d ever actually shot a gun. But I don’t think that anymore.

In this column I want to talk mostly about the pistol.

Intro To Guns

The Browning Challenger is a semi-automatic pistol (which means that it will fire each time you pull the trigger, with no additional action on the part of the shooter). The Challenger has a standard 10-round magazine. It’s designed as a target pistol, and is thus chambered for .22LR (“long rifle”) ammunition. This ammunition has a relatively short effective range, but can be fairly accurate over that distance. It’s well suited to indoor ranges.

A fish-oil supplement compared to a .22 cartridge.

Most folks learn to shoot a gun firing .22LR; it is the most common ammunition in the world. These rounds are quiet (relative to everything else on a shooting range), with virtually no kick (relative to everything else on a shooting range), and small. The entire cartridge [2] isn’t even as long as the last knuckle of my pinky finger, nor as thick as a pencil. It’s actually smaller than the fish-oil supplement I take daily. I could dry-swallow a .22LR [3].

Also – most importantly, in terms of popularity and education – .22LR ammo is cheap. Most folks buy them in “bricks” of 500 rounds. That sounds like a lot, but a pair of shooters – one teaching the other how to do it – can go through a brick surprisingly quickly.

I’m telling you all of this because this is the Ann Arbor Chronicle, and not the Dexter Chronicle, or the Holland Chronicle, or the Houghton Chronicle. And it’s likely that many of you, Gentle Readers, have limited exposure to guns. I grant that it’s possible that the preceding sentence struck some of you as patronizing and condescending.

But still, I think it’s equally possible that you read “semi-automatic” and thought “scary.” Or maybe you thought something totally erroneous like “that sprays out bullets for as long as you hold down the trigger” or “Dave is going to kill me.” It’s likely that if you read a media description like “… the suspect had a hoard of thousands of rounds of ammunition” you’d think “deranged,” not “That guy probably bought a few bricks; he might have come across a good deal.”

I’m being tedious because right now we’re having a gun debate in this country that’s fantastically devoid of simple physical facts. I’m thinking that maybe we need to start out slow and have ourselves a gun conversation.

Happy Holidays

My Browning was a gift from my father, the gun he used to teach himself to shoot, and on which he subsequently taught me to shoot. He was the original owner. He bought it in the mid-1960s, back when these pistols were still hand-machined from a single block of steel by an actual Belgian.

Browning Challenger semi-automatic pistol.

Over the recent Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday I brought this pistol to my in-laws’ place, which is on several fallow acres outside of Holland, in West Michigan. My father-in-law had recently purchased a Browning Buck Mark (which is the mass-produced, CNC-routed aluminum descendant of the Challenger), and he was curious to compare the two guns.

But also my son was along. He’s in first grade, and had taken an interest in the war games my nephews play on Xbox.  His cousins are older – middle school and high school boys. He had been regaling me daily with accounts of the “HALO” games he and his friends re-enact on the school playground.

If he wanted to talk about guns, to imagine guns, to play at what guns are and do, then I wanted him to shoot a gun. He’d seen me shoot plenty of times – my shotgun, which is heavy and loud and leaves smudgy bruises on my right shoulder – but had never pulled a trigger himself.

Learning About Guns

As it turned out, this foray was wonderfully instructive. We went out into the overgrown fields, where my father- and brother-in-law have built their shooting range. The day was bitter cold. I hadn’t shot my .22 in several years, and it kept misfeeding, only squeezing off three rounds successfully. I later discovered that the barrel screw was a touch loose and the barrel block subtly fouled with the wax that coats .22LRs. These guns are accurate because they are built to tight tolerances, so even a little shifting and gunk will muck things up badly.

The Buck Mark similarly misfed and misfired (although at a lower rate) – this, I think, because of the lighter aluminum unevenly contracting as it made the shift from a warm house to a cold field. But my boy still got to shoot (with my father-in-law guiding his hand).

And what he found was this: Shooting can be stressful. A gun – even a plinky little .22 – is loud, and it jumps in your hand like something live and nervous. It’s hard to use; most of his shots sailed into the dirt two yards in front of the target, even with an adult steadying his hand. And guns are unpredictable: Many shells turned out to be bad (my father-in-law had split a cheap gun-show brick with his brother-in-law), or were crimped useless when they were slammed crookedly by the misfeeding slide.

And even though we were shooting at a steel target made for .45s, I broke the damn thing with a “lucky” shot that was a little high and happened to catch the ironwork at its seam, sending the heavy target sailing away. Even this little gun was fearsome. And even a bullet smaller than an M&M snapped steel. It brought a touch of dread to the boy.

The gun taught him a lesson.

A Gun Is Not A Tool

A gun isn’t a tool – it’s not a hammer or a drill that you can pick up, use to solve a problem, and put away until you have the next problem you want to solve. It’s an instrument, like a guitar or piano. It requires constant care, it requires checking and tuning before each use, it requires an intimate relationship with its mechanisms, with its parameters, with what it can do and what it should do and what it is meant for. It requires care and feeding. And it requires practice, near constant practice for you to be any good at doing anything with it.

But most of all, it requires attention – all of your attention. You are exquisitely focused when you are holding a gun – and not just because the gun can hurt or kill anyone nearby, including you. (Our cars are far more likely to hurt and kill anyone nearby, and we zone out behind the wheel all the time.)

There is an essential quality to this instrument compared with others; its nature is to make us aware of how vital and powerful our attention is, in and of itself. I don’t look at my father when I’m holding my loaded shotgun. I don’t look at my son when I’m holding my loaded pistol. I look at the target – only at the target, because whatever I’m looking at is the target.

David Erik Nelson shooting skeet.

The gun is not a tool, and it doesn’t solve problems; it is an instrument, and it expresses feelings. When I’m shooting skeet, I have to feel that clay in my heart before I can smash it; I have to feel how it soars. The hard part isn’t the shooting – that’s just a swing of the arm and twitch of the finger; I never even think about it.

The hard part is the seeing, really seeing the orange disk, not just assuming I see it, or thinking I see it, or seeing my idea of the disk and its location. It’s harder than you think, because most of us go most of our days without beginning to appreciate how little we see the world, and how completely we rely on our ideas about the world without checking them against what our senses are actually reporting. [4]

When you pick up a gun – just like when you pick up a ukulele or a violin – even if you are “just practicing,” you are saying something about yourself, about the world and your place in it, about the connectedness of things, about our human tendency to build devices beautiful and destructive.

Learning To Shoot

So shooting with my wife and son and father-in-law – out in the cold, with real guns that were loud and destructive and erratic – was stressful for my son, and reminded me of the first time I’d gone shooting with my dad, when I was in my 20s.

I’d never touched a gun – although he’d always kept them in the house – but I’d grown up an American, and so I had ideas about guns. And the gun I used that day was his preferred gun at the time, a Beretta 9mm pistol. I couldn’t hit a thing with it – literally. As I recall, the paper target was entirely unscathed. And I’d had to force my finger to curl around the trigger each time, because each explosion was tremendous. Each one felt like the Worst Thing I’d Ever Done, and with each shot I couldn’t help but imagine that bullet tearing into me, piercing my chest, breaking my bones.

But having taken up the gun, I could not put it back down, just as I can’t put down the ukulele – regardless of how abysmal a musician I’ve made – just as I’m helpless to drop this pencil, to keep my hands off the keyboard. So we went back with the .22. This is an impractical gun in many regards – low-caliber, too bulky to conceal, with its barrel long for accuracy, the grip thick for comfort and steadiness, the sights absurdly pronounced for a pistol in America.

But it fit my hand like no other object I’d ever touched, and every shot went exactly where I wanted it, where my eye placed it. I never thought about my hand or my chest or my heart or my bones, just my eye and the sights and the target.

Just the world that I saw.

This will sound insane to all of you who don’t both shoot and make art, but shooting felt just exactly like writing. These were fundamentally the same activities.

HALO

After my son and I were back inside and warmed up, I asked my little boy what he’d thought of the shooting, expecting he’d repeat what he’d said when he was three and watched me shooting skeet with my dad – “Too loud!” That was despite my big blue ear protectors clutching his head.

But he didn’t. He was thoughtful, and he smiled, and he said, “It was good.” And since we’ve been back home it doesn’t seem like he’s been playing “HALO” at school. He spent some of his Holiday money on a NERF gun.

He doesn’t need to be told not to point it at people or pets.

The War On Gun Violence

Since the Newtown tragedy I’ve been having a lot of conversations about guns – in person, on Twitter, on Facebook. And I’ve begun to suspect that the most fundamental flaw in our national “debate” about guns is that so many of us think of them as tools that we can (or should, or might, or must) use to solve problems, instead of seeing them for what they are: Instruments through which we express ourselves, for better or worse.

I’m telling you all this because I don’t want to have a “debate” about “gun control.” First and foremost, I’m tired of “debates.” When we couch everything in the language of force and violence and coerced control – a war on poverty, a fight to end homelessness, stamping out childhood obesity – it becomes increasingly seductive to see violence as the go-to solution.

But more importantly, every indication is that we’re pretty good at controlling our guns: We set out to hurt ourselves and each other, and achieve that goal. About 100,000 Americans can expect to have high-velocity lead enter their bodies this year. Almost all of those will be fired in a conscious attempt to cause harm. About a third of these lead recipients will die from their lead. Almost all of those will be in acts of intentional violence, mostly acts of self-harm.

Guns are a problem, but I don’t think they’re The Problem.

The Problem is: There is so much we feel we can say only in lead.

Notes
 
[1] I’m making an assumption about you, Dear Reader, and it’s this: I assume that you, like me, want to minimize the amount of lead that goes into human bodies. You don’t want fast-moving lead entering your body or that of a loved one – or even a stranger. You don’t want to put lead into the body of another human being. You want to stay unleaded. If we can all agree on that, then we can move forward together.
 
[2] Just to clear up something that often confuses folks: A “cartridge” or “round” is the whole package. It comprises the bullet (i.e., the little hunk of lead that flies out of the gun and hurts things), the casing (in this case a brass tube), and the propellent inside the casing (gunpowder that’s ignited by a primer – usually a dab of pressure-sensitive chemicals not so different from a strike-anywhere match head).
 
[3] I’m not suggesting you do so! Remember, our overarching goal, for the next several columns, is keeping lead out of human bodies.
 
[4] In light of this, it should come as no surprise that the most natural shots I’ve ever met have all been artists, ’cause that’s the only other human endeavor that’s so much about perceiving the world as it is, rather than as we’d have it be.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like David Erik Nelson. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. So if you’re already supporting us on a regular basis, please educate your friends, neighbors and colleagues about The Chronicle and encourage them to support us, too!