School Daze

News this past weekend of a school shooting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, served to remind me of a couple of misconceptions about the nature of gun violence in our nation’s school systems.

As I travel around the country, I often hear people say that our nation’s schools are inherently dangerous because of gun violence. The truth is that our schools are far safer than the world outside. The most recent data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) shows that youth are over 50 times more likely to be murdered—and over 150 times more likely to commit suicide—when they are away from school than at school. Another DOJ study found that 93% of violent crimes that victimize college students occur off campus.

Secondly, I hear the belief expressed that school gun violence is confined to schools in large inner cities. The sheer lunacy of this line of argument always makes me think of the Columbine High School shooting, which took place in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Two white students from this suburban school killed 15 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves.

This past year there have been major school shootings in Blacksburg, Virginia; Opelousas, Louisiana; Willoughby, Ohio; Phoenix , Arizona; Boca Raton, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; Mobile, Alabama; and DeKalb, Illinois. A more complete listing of school shootings by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence illustrates the fact that the problem is not confined to major urban areas.

Despite that fact that our schools are some of the safest places in the country, we must continue to endeavor to keep them that way and improve existing security procedures. We must also be wary of a hard push by the gun lobby to put concealed handguns in our children’s classrooms. This disturbing development threatens to put our kids at greater risk and take the focus off the real problem—the incredibly easy access that children and the mentally unbalanced have to guns in our society.

The Last Thing They Want

Sometimes it's easy to forget that the gun control debate is not restricted to the United States. I would like to share with you in its entirety a recent article written by Ralph Ahren from Israel's oldest daily newspaper, Haaretz:

Founder of Israeli NRA Seeks to Import American Gun Culture

While the gun lobby in the United States took a setback last week with the election of Barack Obama, who supports the ban of assault weapons, a group of Israeli-Americans are now trying to ease restrictions on gun ownership here in Israel. Modeled and named after the powerful but controversial Virginia-based National Rifle Association, it is unclear whether the Israeli NRA will be able to gather enough support to be in any way influential. Several experts have already voiced criticism of the group's agenda.

"You hear about mob shootings in Netanya, where innocent people get killed, you hear about people being attacked with knives, with guns, with bulldozers," said Joshua Moesch, who founded the group last week. "I think that having more responsible citizens out there with weapons is very important. The police can be the greatest in the world, but they can't be everywhere at the same time."

Under the banner of self defense, the Israeli NRA advocates "the right to carry a firearm for all law abiding, military-serving Israeli citizens," as well as the expansion of what is known as the Shai Dromi law, which allows anyone who kills or injures an intruder on his or her property to be absolved of criminal responsibility. Other group goals include gun safety, self-defense courses, promoting shooting as a sport and creating police athletic leagues.

Moesch's first step was to create a Facebook group and a Web site. The 29-year-old Beit Shemesh resident told Anglo File he wants to first see how much support he can expect from the Israeli public before taking further action. If his group sees "a reasonable showing," the next move would be to register as a nonprofit organization and lobby to members of Knesset, he said.

Moesch, who immigrated to Israel from Vermont about six years ago, rejects the anti-gun lobby argument that more weapons would lead to greater violence. He counters by saying that compulsory army service makes Israeli society well acquainted with firearms, giving most people "a certain respect for guns." He adds, "People know in most cases when to use and when not to use them. We don't see many cases of off-duty soldiers getting into a fight in a club or something, using their guns to sort it out."

Yet it remains doubtful whether pro-gun advocacy will become as important in Israel as it is in the U.S. "The general trend to transplant American ideas to other countries is often not successful or very useful," said Gerald Steinberg, chairman of political studies at Bar Ilan University and an expert on American culture. The arguments put forward by the Israeli NRA are not convincing, he told Anglo File.

"We don't need a situation where hundreds of people shoot in all kinds of different directions in the case of a terror attack. That's the job of the police or the army," Steinberg said. He said that if more people carried guns the chances of more people getting hurt would be greater than the chance of neutralizing an attacker more quickly. "The last thing we want in Israel is an American gun culture," he added. "Israel has enough dangers, and making it easier for people on the street to carry guns is not what we need."

The Latest Charade

It seems that every election cycle there is an elaborate and almost comical charade that takes place. It goes something like this:

1) The National Rifle Association (NRA) alerts the media of a massive war chest to be spent to elect or defeat candidates based on their position on gun control.

2) Very small amounts of NRA monies are doled out to candidates in extremely safe seats.

3) Late in the election cycle, massive NRA funding is spent to defeat designated "gun grabbers." Wild and outrageous charges are hurled at these candidates.

4) Immediately after the election is concluded, the NRA claims a great victory, citing the percentage of winning candidates it has supported. This is duly reported in the press and touted in all the pro-gun publications. The elective power of the NRA becomes part of the “conventional wisdom.”

5) Later, careful analysis of the election results reveals that the majority of NRA-supported candidates would have won without the NRA. More importantly, in races where the NRA concentrates its attacks, their tactics are shown to have had no significant impact on the results. Unfortunately for the purveyors of conventional wisdom, the NRA claims of great victory have already been set in concrete. Future candidates are warned of the fearsome power of the big bad NRA.

Last Tuesday’s election once again followed the first half of the traditional pattern. During the summer, the NRA announced that it intended to spend $40 million in the elections—including an eye-popping $15 million campaign intended to defeat Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. The NRA backed some ‘A’-rated supporters in safe seats and launched outrageous attacks on other politicians, with Senator Obama their primary target.

But after Senator Obama’s landslide victory in the presidential election—and Democrats’ significant gains in both the House and Senate—the national media finally called attention to the NRA’s sleight of hand.

NBC’s Carrie Dann reported: “As the vote margins of the presidential race rolled in, the one-time wedge issue of the Second Amendment did not seem to pack the national-stage punch for which the influential gun lobby had aimed. Nationally, gun owners broke for McCain by almost the identical margin that they broke for Bush in 2004. But in the states where the NRA Political Victory Fund's toughest efforts against Obama were concentrated—gun-rich regions in states like Colorado, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico—Obama’s victory was decisive. The Democratic nominee won those states by eight, 11, and 15 points, respectively. Of the 11 states where the NRA's anti-Obama ads were reportedly aired, McCain won only one: Texas. Down the ballot, the NRA backed all six of the Republican Senate candidates who lost to Democratic challengers. And in several high-profile House contests, NRA-backed candidates like Ed Tinsley, Bill Sali, Steve Chabot, and Phil English came up short … The influence of the once-dominant gun lobby appears to be up for debate...”

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence pointed out some other salient facts about the election in a new report, noting that “The NRA spent over thirty-one times more money against Obama than it spent in its negative efforts in 2000 against Al Gore” and “The NRA spent over 90% of its independent expenditures on losing candidates.”

Only time will tell if the purveyors of common wisdom will finally absorb the truth of the effect of the NRA on national elections (or lack thereof). We should remain cognizant, however, that the NRA had $15 million to waste on this election. Pro-gun control forces did not. Now is the time for those who support sensible gun laws to put some of their money where their heart is—there is still important work to be done to reduce the 30,000 lives lost annually to gun violence in our country.

Beyond the Inner City

There has always been one argument for not getting involved in the gun control issue that has confused and frustrated me. As I travel around the country, I often hear people say that gun violence is primarily an, “inner city, gang-related” problem.

This argument is deeply flawed on multiple fronts. First, it is factually incorrect. The FBI reported 14,860 total murders in 2005, only 850 of which were gang killings. That year, the ten states with the highest rates of gun death per capita in the U.S. were Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, Tennessee, Alabama, Nevada, Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi, and West Virginia—all predominantly rural states.

Secondly, there is a racial bias that is inherently embedded in the argument—suggesting that black Americans are the main victims and perpetrators of gun violence—therefore whites need not take the issue seriously. Out of the 31,446 gun deaths that occurred in America in 2005, 21,958 of the victims were whites. In terms of gun homicide, 5,266 of 12,352 victims in 2005 were white. The Department of Justice reports that from 1976 to 2005, 86% of white murder victims were killed by whites. Finally, there were more than 17,000 gun suicides in the U.S. in 2005, and 15,681 of these victims were whites. That’s a great deal of white on white gun violence that some would like to sweep under the carpet.

The sheer lunacy of the “inner city argument” was highlighted for me last week with news of yet another heinous shooting. I was aghast when I learned that eight-year-old Christopher Bizilj had died while shooting a fully automatic Uzi at a gun show in Westfield, Massachusetts. Westfield has been described as “a small city with the close-knit feel of a rural New England town” with a population of approximately 40,000.

I still remember, too, a seminal event that pushed me to become involved in gun violence prevention. On August 1, 1966, a white student at the University of Texas at Austin shot and killed 14 people and wounded 31 others from the observation deck of the University's 32-story administrative building. The gunman went on this rampage shortly after murdering his wife and mother as they lay sleeping.

Such shootings are just one small indicator of the inclusive nature of gun violence in America. These deaths, injuries, physical and psychic trauma affect all of us—regardless of age, race, class or geography.

A Constitutional Right to Bully Women?

There is a legislative battle going on in the state of Maryland which focuses on an aspect of gun violence which gets far too little attention: the use of firearms in domestic violence.

According to the Washington Post, the Governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, recently indicated his interest in sponsoring two bills that failed by lopsided votes in a House committee during the previous legislative session. The effect of this legislative package would be to require individuals who are the subject of final protective orders limiting contact with an abused spouse or partner to surrender their firearms to local law enforcement.

Currently, judges are given the discretion to determine whether an individual should surrender his firearms or not—and these orders apply only to handguns.

Maryland gun rights advocates were successful in stalling the legislation earlier this year. Some of the explanations provided by members of Maryland’s House Judiciary Committee who voted against the bills were less than convincing. House Minority Whip Christopher B. Shank (R-Washington) “said he and other judiciary members were sensitive to concerns involving the constitutional rights to bear arms, as well as questions about how the legislation would affect police officers who carry guns on the job.”

Maryland legislators are concerned about the “constitutional rights” of men who bully and beat women in their communities? And Shank's latter point is equally odd given that the Maryland State Police support the legislation. Apparently, shame doesn’t come into play when the National Rifle Association is handing out ‘A’ grades.

The Violence Policy Center recently published a national report on domestic violence which found that 1,836 women were murdered by men in single victim/single offender incidents in 2006—five a day, every day. More than 12 times as many females were murdered by a man they knew than were killed by male strangers.

And it’s not just homicide. The Harvard School of Public Health has found that “hostile gun displays against family members may be more common than gun use in self-defense, and that hostile gun displays are often acts of domestic violence directed against women.”

Perhaps Gov. O’Malley’s intervention will spark greater consideration of this critical issue. Do you know what the laws of your state are regarding domestic violence and firearms? Have you ever discussed the issue with your state legislator(s)? Now would be a great time to start a dialogue with your elected representatives. They are asking for your vote; shouldn’t you ask them a couple of questions in return?

The Banality of Opposing Views

Over the years I have been struck by how many times I have come to like and appreciate many of the most ardent opponents of sensible gun control. Despite our differences of opinion, our goals are the same—a safer and more decent nation. We simply disagree on how to reach those goals.

I remember one occasion when I was being interviewed on television in Chiloquin, Oregon, and a man rose up from the audience to rail at the moderator. He was upset that he had been prohibited from bringing his guns into the studio. When asked why he needed to have them there, the man replied: “So I can shoot that lying [expletive] Mike Beard.” Naturally, I talked with him after the show and got to speak with him on other occasions during my stay in Oregon. I came to really enjoy this feisty pro-gunner who used inflammatory rhetoric to make his point.

One of my favorite people in the pro-gun movement has always been Neal Knox, former executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. Neal is an unrepentant hard-liner on the gun issue. His website, “The Hard Corps,” expresses his positions clearly and with great bravado. When asked about Neal by a reporter on one occasion, I truthfully replied, “In political matters he is a mean S.O.B., but personally he is the kind of man you would like to have as a grandfather.” For several years after that remark I received a nice card from Neal on Father’s Day signed simply, “Your Grandfather.”

I was reminded of these past encounters by a great blog that appears elsewhere on this website this week by Ladd Everitt. Ladd wrote about a day he recently spent with Brian Borgelt, the former owner of Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Washington. Bull’s Eye has been the source of many guns found on crime scenes in America—including the rifle that was used in the famous Beltway murder spree in 2002.

In Ladd’s blog, Borgelt comes across as someone with whom you could be friends in spite of his shady business practices. That human element—which is present even between individuals with huge divisions in ideology and philosophy—has been one of the pleasant surprises of my lifelong journey through this movement, and something I still cherish.

Hard Times, Hard Deaths

Over the years, numerous rigorous academic studies have pointed out the relationship between household firearms ownership and the rate of suicide. According to a recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health: "Deciding whether to own a gun entails balancing potential benefits and risks. One of the risks for which the empirical evidence is strongest, and the risk whose death toll is greatest, is that of completed suicide."

As the current economic crisis deepens, Americans across the country will find themselves struggling with stress and depression. The media has yet to address how this situation will affect the suicide rate in America, and how guns will factor into that equation.

We should fear the spread of horrific events like the one that occurred last week in California. An unemployed financial advisor, distraught over money worries, killed himself and five family members at their upscale Los Angeles home with a handgun he had recently purchased.

Simultaneously, we are seeing alarming stories of an increase in sales of guns as a result of the economic downturn. If this is true, how much more tragedy will result? How many more lives will be lost due to the combination of impulsive behavior and the ready availability of firearms?

The NRA Cries Wolf...Again

Over the years I have observed the underhanded and sleazy political campaign tactics of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). It has been my experience that their practices hew to a familiar pattern—wait until near the end of an election cycle, then attack those who support common sense gun laws with a series of unsubstantiated and false claims.

This election cycle, the NRA-ILA has announced that it will spend $40 million on campaign activities. $15 million of that amount will be used to portray Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama as a threat to individual gun ownership in the United States. The NRA-ILA is circulating fliers and mailers that claim to expose "Barack Obama's 10-Point Plan to Change the Second Amendment." This bogus "plan" is really an NRA invention that purposely distorts the Senator's voting record and public statements.

In addition, the NRA is running TV and radio ads that claim that Obama plans to "ban use of firearms for home self-defense," "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns," and "close 90% of gun shops and ban hunting ammunition" if elected. These accusations are a familiar mixture of misrepresentations, twisted language, fabrications, unsubstantiated conjecture and outright lies. To any informed voter, the NRA’s tactics are pure political satire worthy of Saturday Night Live. The ads themselves are so ridiculous that they would be funny were they not so dangerous.

You can check out the accuracy of the NRA’s claims about Senator Obama at the nonpartisan Annenberg Political Fact Check website. A recent editorial by American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA) President Ray Schoenke also refutes the NRA’s Confiscation Myth.

Let us remember that just two election cycles ago it was Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain who was in the NRA’s crosshairs. In 2001, the NRA lambasted McCain as one of the premier flag carriers for the enemies of the Second Amendment. Now, NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox brags about “over 20 years of high-profile agreements” with the Senator.

Like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” the NRA will continue to raise their confiscation fears as long as there is money to be raised and politicians to intimidate. The moral of that famous story is "Nobody believes a liar...even when he is telling the truth.” At least Wayne LaPierre & Co. will never find themselves in that situation...

Viva El Sentido Común

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence was a founding member of the vibrant and creative International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). IANSA is a global movement against gun violence—a network of 800 civil society organizations working in 120 countries to stop the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons. IANSA seeks to make people safer from gun violence by securing stronger regulation on guns in society and better controls on arms exports. It represents the voice of civil society on the international stage (i.e., by participating in the current United Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms) and draws on the practical experience of its members to campaign for policies that will protect human security.

Another member of IANSA is an exciting group in Brazil called Viva Rio. The country of Brazil has experienced debilitating levels of gun violence. In recent years, more than 100 Brazilians have died daily from gunfire, many of them young men from poor urban communities. Young men are more likely to be killed by firearms than all other external causes of death combined, including traffic accidents, illness, and other kinds of injuries.

In part due to the leadership of Viva Rio, in 2003 the government of Brazil enacted strong gun control measures. I was excited to read in the August 23-29, 2008 issue of The Economist an article reporting on the falling murder rate in Brazil—particularly in the country's largest city, Sao Paulo. The article cited gun control reform as one of the main reasons for the decline. A 2003 law restricted the right to carry guns. A subsequent amnesty and gun buyback program took half a million weapons off the streets.

Brazil is yet another example of a democracy that refuses to put up with the scourge of gun violence that is endemic to the United States. Many nations have found creative and effective ways to deal with the problem that we have chosen to ignore. Perhaps it is time to once again pull our heads out of the sand, look around at other nation's "best practices," and take some coordinated national action to Stop Gun Violence.

Beyond Right and Wrong

This past weekend, I had the privilege of participating in the annual "9/11 Unity Walk." As the event’s website describes it: "Jolted by horrific acts of 9/11, discouraged by religious intolerance, yet inspired by the movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, religious leaders and lay people alike have embraced their differences in a dramatic display of unity, the Unity Walk. Since 2005, in Washington, DC, and, now, New York City, every church, synagogue, mosque and temple on Embassy Row and near Ground Zero opens their doors to each other, and symbolically, the world. The Unity Walk seeks to build bridges of understanding and respect in a post September 11th world.

The poet Rumi once said: "Out beyond right and wrong there is a field. I'll meet you there." It was very exciting to be among a throng of people of all different faiths and beliefs who were able to meet on that field and put aside our differences and walk hand in hand. As we concluded the walk at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, we were reminded by Arun Gandhi of his grandfather's plea: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

These are good lessons for us in the gun violence prevention movement. Once in a while, we should lay aside our minor differences of approach and come together for our common overall goal—to make this a safer country for all our people.