The Last Gun (14 page)

Sadly, these few anecdotes from a single state reflect the national data. A 2002 study at the Harvard School of Public Health found that “children 5–14 years old were more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries, suicides and homicides if they lived in states (or regions) with more rather than fewer guns.” Other types of violence against children—specifically nonfirearm homicides and nonfirearm suicides—were “not significantly associated with the availability of guns.”
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The relationship between more guns and shattered children's lives was true regardless of state-level poverty, education, and urbanization. The study's authors concluded that “where there are more guns children are not protected from becoming, but are rather much more likely to become, victims of lethal violence.”
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The gun lobby does not let the lives of children get in the way of its resolute opposition to even the most tepid laws or regulations restricting access to guns. In Washington, State Senator Adam Kline sponsored legislation to simply require owners to have trigger locks and safes for their guns. “The NRA gets up in arms and says, ‘Oh my God, this is the end of the Second Amendment. This is total violation of everything that Western civilization stands for.' The fact is it would've saved this girl's health and it would save the lives of kids,” Kline said, referring to the shooting of Amina Kocer-Bowman.
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It may be that gun enthusiasts believe, as the gun industry and its front groups cynically pretend, that by mixing kids and guns they are continuing a historical ethic of self-reliance and promoting traditional values. If that is so, they are blind to the consequences, which are thrown into high relief by looking at the rest of the world.

In contrast, children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns. Compared with children 5–14 years old in other industrialized nations, the firearm-related homicide rate in the United States is 17 times higher, the firearm related suicide rate 10 times higher, and the unintentional firearm-related death rate 9 times higher. Overall, before a child in the United States reaches 15 years of age, he or she is 5 times more likely than a child in the rest of the industrialized world to be murdered, 2 times as likely to commit suicide and 12 times more likely to die a firearm-related death.
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The obvious question is, why is the gun industry doing this to America, and especially to its women and children? The next section answers that question, going beyond the motivation of mere greed to explain the method behind the industry's dark madness.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee—another all-American town—lies 745 miles southwest of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where gun rights activist Meleanie Hain was shot to death.
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The seat of Rutherford County, Murfreesboro is in the exact center of Tennessee,
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about 30 miles from Nashville. A comparison of the lives of two of Murfreesboro's famous sons casts into relief the choice America faces. Save lives by using proven public health and safety methods? Or knuckle under to the gun industry's aggressive marketing of militarized death under the false flags of Constitutional “right” and faux patriotism? The choice is no less stark than that.

Rutherford County, like Lebanon County, has its share of routine gun violence inflicted by otherwise law-abiding citizens on themselves and each other. The day-to-day shooting is pretty much like the shooting elsewhere in America.
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As in other places, suicide and murder-suicide are prominent. A recent cross-state study—controlled for poverty, unemployment, urbanization, mental illness, and drug and alcohol dependence—found that “in states with more guns there were substantially more suicides because there were more firearms suicides.”
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About 63 percent of the suicide deaths reported in Tennessee in 2010 involved firearms.
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The overall suicide rate in the state has increased significantly in recent years. In 2008, the rate rose by 14.6 percent.
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As tragic as the needless deaths in Rutherford County are, they are not extraordinary. Identical stories occur every day, all over America. But in recent years, Murfreesboro and Rutherford
County have grappled with another species of gun violence, fed by the deliberate design and marketing decisions that the magnates of the gun business have made—and continue to make—to keep their industry alive.

In 2012, this plague touched the upscale community of Amber Glen, described by a local real estate broker as a long established Murfreesboro neighborhood “of beautiful manicured lawns and well-maintained homes.” Prices asked for homes listed on another broker's website in March 2012 ranged from $ 129,900 to $250,000.
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The ethnicity of the neighborhood elementary school's children is 66 percent white, 21 percent black, 9 percent Asian-Pacific Islander, and 5 percent Hispanic.
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At about five ten
P
.
M
. on Presidents' Day, February 20, 2012, gunfire broke out on the elementary school's basketball court. Fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz fell, shot twice in the leg. As many as a dozen children were playing on the school grounds at the time. Schulz required multiple surgeries. Two fifteen-year-old boys were arrested and charged with the shooting. Three other youths and one adult were charged with conspiracy.
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The accounts of witnesses and the accused youths agree that the conflict involved rivalry over a girl. The conspirators allegedly arrived at the school armed with two pistols taken from a parent's gun cabinet. The cabinet was locked, according to police, but the youths knew where the keys were. Rude gestures and words were exchanged. Shots were fired.
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What made this shooting stand out was that even in quiet, upscale Amber Glen the gunfire ignited alarm about criminal gangs.
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It now appears that there was no gang connection. But fear and concern that the shooting might be related to gangs was not fanciful; Murfreesboro and Rutherford County have both suffered a burst of gang-related gun violence in recent years. Perspective about its causes and the choices America faces can be found in the contrast between the lives and work of two of Murfreesboro's honored sons.

The first, Dr. Robert Sanders, “Dr. Seat Belt,” devoted his
life to protecting children. When Dr. Sanders died in 2006, the
Nashville Tennessean
praised his life and accomplishments. “He fought . . . for Tennessee citizens, particularly Tennessee's children,” the paper's editors eulogized. “This state is deeply in his debt.”
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Dr. Sanders's life is a model of the comprehensive, fact-based public health and safety approach that could dramatically reduce gun death and injury in the United States.

Dr. Sanders was born in Tennessee. After completing his medical education, he went to work in 1966 as the Rutherford County Health Department's chief physician, in 1969 became its chief health official, and in 1983 took on the additional job of county medical examiner.
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Rutherford County had a strong public health tradition going back to a decade before the Great Depression of the 1930s, when “Murfreesboro and its rural surroundings were the beneficiaries of an amazing infusion of finances and training” for public health.
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Dr. Sanders brought two elements to this public health-conscious environment. The first was the compassion of a gifted man who had seen and “detested the horribleness of car crashes and what they did to unrestrained babies and young children.”
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The second was that during his postgraduate study in Sweden, he saw seat belts that a safety-conscious doctor had designed and installed by himself in his car. “Dr. Sanders was impressed with this doctor's innovative idea, and that's when his interest in seat belts and safety devices began.”
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In October 1974 Dr. Sanders was impressed by a speech about hazards to children by the public safety advocate Ralph Nader at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in San Francisco.
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At the time, only a few countries had any laws requiring seat belts in motor vehicles. There were no laws anywhere in the world mandating restraints for children, even though unsuccessful attempts to pass such laws had been made in at least thirty states. Dr. Sanders took on the issue of protecting children in motor vehicle crashes.
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He and a handful of allies promoted a bill in the Tennessee
legislature requiring use of child restraints. One of the early surprises was how many people—even within the medical community—opposed the legislation. The arguments against child safety restraints were remarkably similar to those stubbornly clung to by gun enthusiasts today. The strongest opposition was that requiring seat belts invaded individual liberties. Some parents with bigger families objected to the cost of car seats.
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The bill did not reach the floor of the legislature in 1976, the first year it was introduced.
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Dr. Sanders did not give up. He and his wife enlisted an “army of pediatricians” for a grassroots lobbying effort. In 1977, the bill was passed into law. It became effective in January 1978. Tennessee was the first state in the union to require children under four years of age to ride in a car seat. By 1985, every state and the District of Columbia had similar laws.
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Those who sought passage of child safety laws in other states had to overcome the same ill-informed polemics that Dr. Sanders had faced in Tennessee. The
New York Times
, for example, quoted State Representative James S. ("Trooper Jim”) Foster of Florida arguing in 1982 against a proposed child seat law. “We've got people out there with three or four young 'uns,” Foster said. “You're going to hear them squalling and carrying on something terrible. You don't do that to a biddy young 'uns.”
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Foster, who ironically was formerly a public relations safety officer with the Florida Highway Patrol, and a country singer,
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also argued the same year against a proposed seventy-two-hour “cooling-off” period on handgun sales.
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The Tennessee child-restraint law had dramatic results. A study published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
in 1984 found that the law had been “a remarkable success.”
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Six years after it went into effect, motor vehicle fatalities among children younger than four years had been cut in half. The children who died were “almost exclusively . . . transported without benefit of child restraint devices.” Not a single child younger than four years old traveling in a child-restraint device died in a motor
vehicle accident in Tennessee during 1982 and 1983. In contrast, seventeen such children who were not restrained died.
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Researchers, however, noted a tragic problem stemming from the conventional wisdom that inspired what was known as the “babes in arms” exemption in the original bill. They noted, “A particularly troublesome aspect of the child restraint question is the sentiment that the best place for a baby to travel is in its mother's arms. Proponents of this view have not been easily swayed by studies that have shown that no human can successfully hold on to even a 4.5-kg [9.92-pound] child under the stress of the decelerative forces involved in a 30-mph crash, and that the adult holding the child usually becomes a huge blunt object that crushes the baby against the dashboard.”
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One article reported that children who were in their mothers' arms in vehicle accidents in 1982 and 1983 “suffered injuries and death at a rate approaching that of entirely unrestrained children.”
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In short, parents who were either ignorant of the facts or thought they knew better than the experts were killing their own children. The exemption, which came to be known as the child-crusher exemption, was removed from the law in 1981.

This sad waste of young life is the precise analog of the gun enthusiasts' devotion to the myth that a gun in the home protects the family, in the face of study after study showing otherwise. A recent cross-state study, for one example, found that “compared to children in states with low gun ownership, children in states with high gun ownership were more than twice as likely to be murdered with a gun, fourteen times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and ten times more likely to die in an unintentional shooting.”
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The child-restraint law not only saved the lives of children; it saved Tennessee taxpayers money that would have been spent on medical care. According to researchers, “the use of child restraint devices saved $2 million in Tennessee in 1982 and 1983 alone.” The savings in these direct costs of medical care would have been $8.4 million if all children who traveled in the state had
been in child-restraint devices. “Many of these costs are borne directly by the taxpayers through Medicaid and other government-supported health care programs; another portion is paid indirectly by the public through higher insurance premiums.”
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The same medical cost shifting occurs with gun injuries. The cost of medical care for gun violence victims in the United States is about $4 billion per year. National data reported in 2001 show that government programs pay for about 49 percent of this amount, 18 percent is covered by private insurance, and 33 percent is paid by all other sources.
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It should be noted that direct medical costs are only part of the burden America bears because of guns. The overall economic cost—including health care, disability, unemployment, and other intangibles—is about $ 100 billion per year.
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