The NRA responds to Sandy Hook

I had a similar reaction to the mention of American Psycho. It would make more sense if we had a series of school killings utilizing nail guns, chainsaws, and axes.

As long as they're not listening to "Sussudio."

I eagerly await Huckabee's shrill cries of how God couldn't intervene in that church shooting because. . . well, you know.

Someone else has better PR.

Meet the Press this Sunday should be, uh, something.

I dub the The Grownup Gun Thread! Wherein Grownups (or at least pretend Grownsups) come to discuss firearms issues without the usual nonsense.

I'm a wannabe economist, so it's probably no surprise that I'm kind of enamored of this approach to the subject. Levying a largish bond against gun owners that's permanently confiscated in the event the weapon is used in a violent crime seems to be a pretty good way to let market forces take care of the problem!

That link leads to this, which says we should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of guns.

Well, that's one way to cure paranoia.

David Frum spent the day on twitter posting every other place we need an armed Federal agent, with links to each shooting.

Here's the link to his feed. There were a lot of them. Here are the last few.

davidfrum ‏@davidfrum
Last one, can't do more: we need a federal agent to protect every little girl with a stupid relative. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/22/relative-shoots-costumed-girl-after-mistaking-her-for-a-skunk/…

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3h

davidfrum ‏@davidfrum
We need a federal agent at every cancer hospital http://www.wlwt.com/Cancer-Patient-Shot-On-University-Hospital-Campus/-/9838586/10427550/-/t6q0ep/-/index.html…

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davidfrum ‏@davidfrum
We need a federal agent at every marriage proposalhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/22/robert-allen-kleman-fired_n_906873.html…

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davidfrum ‏@davidfrum
We need a federal agent at every gun range. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vPnMbLr5nc…

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davidfrum ‏@davidfrum
We need a federal agent at every teen birthday partyhttp://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/Shooting-At-Texas-Teens-Birthday-Party-Leaves-One-Dead-182667771.html…

At this point I'm waiting for Frum to register as a a Democrat.

I was watching Morning Joe this morning (I'm curled up sick on the couch, don't judge me) and Scarborough was saying that some Republican congressional leaders have told him they wouldn't say anything about guns until after the NRA press conference.

And then this twat Huelscamp was on (gun talk starts at 10:24). It sounds like he had an early copy of the NRA talking points:

That wouldn't do anything against the mass shooting people, who go in expecting to die. Unless the point of the bond is a backdoor effective ban that prevents anybody but the mega rich from owning a gun? That's what the article suggests.

Also, I can't take any article seriously which says there's only 3 purposes to own a gun (two of which are illegal).

Brooks and Frum will be carrying Republican water for years to come. They'll spin rhetorical wheels and pointedly notice their own side's policy holes, but in the end the column always swoops back to making false equivalences with alleged Democratic shortcomings and concludes that the solution America needs is going to come from (mythical) moderate wing of the GOP.

Well that's f-d up, what about the "Freedom of Information" act?
I knew the NRA was powerful, but dayum!

Can't FoIA something they're not legally allowed to create. That's the whole CDC issue. The report wasn't suppressed, the report in progress was banned from ever being completed. The NIH took up the rest of the work and also got a ban as a rider to a budget.

edit: this is to say that the language prevents both the CDC and the NIH from ever producing any report that can be perceived as anti firearm ownership. Seriously, the guys in charge of crunching numbers on safety and health issues are banned from ever saying anything negative about one specific subject. It would only be more amusing if a lobby got large enough to ban them from ever being allowed to talk about cancer just to prove a point.

Here is an overview regarding the degree to which government agencies are prevented from studying firearm violence.

Broad strokes time: if your social movement depends on using the legal system to prevent academic inquiry, you lose all credibility in my book.

There are raw numbers available in the annual CDC national death reports, although they are a couple years out of date (2011 is still preliminary).

These numbers are reported by each state's Vital Statistics office via death certificates, and are broken down by International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes used in medical reporting. They are broken into age groups but (as far as I see) not by other demographic info.

National Vital Statistics Report, "Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2011."http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf

I posted summary info here: http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...s-a-good-idea-finally.4409/page-6#post-377188

Table 2, pages 39-42 "Deaths, death rates, and age-adjusted death rates for 113 selected causes, Injury by firearms, Drug-induced deaths, Alcohol-induced deaths, Injury at work, and Enterocolitis
due to Clostridium difficile : United States, final 2010 and preliminary 2011"

TL:DR version

In 2011 we had

• 606 accidental discharge deaths
• 19,392 suicides by firearm (a bit more than half of all suicides)
• 11,078 homicides (vs 5181 by other means)
• 412 "legal intervention" (death during arrest, etc--not necessarily by firearms) (apparently includes executions, also security guards as well as government law enforcement)
• 252 discharge of firearms of unknown intent

I'm not sure how these tie in with the inability to do studies or create aggregate statistics, or how they would compare with the aggregate data the BATF would be able to supply, but it's something.

There's a lot of good info in that article. My favorite part highlights why we should gun injuries and deaths as a public health issue:

(emph. mine)

edits: formatting.

Fun bit I dug up from the other form:

If you assume zero of the US handgun homicides would happen with another weapon, the US homicide rate would still be higher than any other developed country.

US is 4.2.
Canada is 1.6
UK is 1.2.
France is 1.1.
Australia is 1.2.
Germany is 0.8.
Japan is 0.3.

Guns are used in about 67% of US homicide deaths.

At least 75% of all firearm homicides are with handguns.

Hypothetically if all handguns vaporized overnight, and the homicides just disappeared and were not committed with any other weapon, which is a fairly ludicrous hypothetical, the US homicide rate would be 4.2 * (100% - 67% * 75%) = 2.1, which is still 25% higher than Canada's.

South Korea's a real wtf outlier though; their homicide rate has doubled in the last twenty years from 1.3 to 2.6, which is higher than any other developed country but the US. What's that about?

John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research summary of "Evidence-Based Law Enforcement and Community Strategies to Reduce Gun Violence." Brief summaries and citations to published studies on actual projects to reduce gun violence.

http://www.jhsph.edu/research/cente.../publications/CGPR_LawCommunityStrategies.pdf

There is precedent for this. When Reagan was governor of California, the Original Black Panthers marched in a parade openly carrying their firearms. Reagan quickly signed gun control legislation.

Yes. Obviously the Black Panthers weren't doing it to achieve gun control, but that's definitely one way to get things done. More strategically, the state government was filled with people trying to shut down the Black Panther patrol patrols that followed police and the like, which apparently worked really well to undermine police authority in both good and bad ways.

Here is a good post on Wonkblog about this paper, which attempts to quantify the external cost of firearm ownership and comes up with a range of $100-$1,800 per firearm.

The paper has some methodological issues, mainly in that it uses gun suicide rates as a proxy for gun ownership rates (it turns out the latter is surprisingly hard to come by; thanks NRA!). It also leaves suicide out of the cost equation. Their findings are pretty stark: gun ownership leads to an increase in the murder rate, but not the overall violent crime rate. Which is sort of a no-duh thing; the presence of guns makes violence escalate into shootings.

But but but jeff if everyone had guns nobody would use them! Mutually assured destruction!

Hehe, there's a reason I posted that in this thread. Most gun threads degenerate into that kind of derpery; while this thread is obviously less active my hope is that we can at least have something approaching an adult conversation on the topic. :)

Hard to say, but one possible reason is Korea's drinking culture. It's not merely accepted but actually kind of socially obligatory to go out with your work colleagues every weekend and get absolutely blind drunk. There's strong social pressure to participate and they drink a *lot*. Drunkenness and violent crime, like peaches and cream?

I was going to say that Japan has a similar drinking culture but little of the violence, but I see that South Korea actually has significantly higher alcohol consumption. And yes, alcohol consumption variation over time in a country often correlates with violent crime, but level of drinking in itself does not correlate between countries (that is, you can't tell by the level of alcohol consumption how much violent crime there will be, but if the alcohol consumption rises, violence is expected to rise with it).

Looking at that again my guess it that it might be the aftermath of the 1990 financial crisis. SK was hit really hard.

My personal favourite explanation for varying homicide rates across countries is economic inequality (viz. societies with greater economic inequality see more violent crime, so the US's relatively high rate relative to other industrialised countries with similar rates of gun ownership would be partially due to the failures of its welfare state); studies are available in support of such a notion, although I am in no way qualified to assess their quality.

A big part of the reason I like the argument so much is the way in makes conservatives heads implode when you propose it, though: "Okay, so you don't want gun control? Well, studies show that inequality correlates with homicide, so how about more progressive taxation instead...."

Not on the weekend so much. The weekend is for family. They go out drinking with work colleagues during the work week. Sometimes twice or more in one week.

Ouch. Well, if it were me being pressured to do that, It'd end in violence, no question. Not while I was drunk but going to work with a hangover - several times a week - would turn me into a psychopath in a month, if that.

So, being one of the more prolific tweeters (is that a word? jeez social media) to http://twitter.com/gundeaths, I just got a call from Martin Bashir's (MSNBC) producer about it. Weird.I forwarded him the JAMA link above on NRA lobbying to suppress gun research just in case he didn't have that info (he seemed vaguely familiar with the issue).

Actually, it's a good question: we haven't banned cigarettes, but we do tax the heck out of them, in part to use the tax revenues to defray the cost of the harms they cause. Why isn't there more public discussion of doing this for firearms? It seems like it would both help address some of the problems, while not causing second amendment issues.

Because the usual suspects would shit themselves. Also: taxes bad!

a tax or fee CAN under SOME circumstances be held to be an unconstitutional imposition on a constitutional right. (I know there have been fusses about permit fees for demonstrations, for instance, but I'm not sure if there's a brightline answer as to when or how they can be imposed.)

Edit: Oh, hey, Volokh has a 2010 article on this.
http://www.volokh.com/2010/07/03/gu...right-to-keep-and-bear-arms-for-self-defense/

Jesus Christ. Korean men must be *exhausted* all the time.

They do start training for it young though. They see how dad does it, they drink heavily in college and during the mandatory military service. Example: your professor in graduate school can call you and the rest of the class up and just say "come out drinking tonight" and everyone pretty much HAS to go.