The Last Gun (27 page)

Violence Policy Center, “The Glock Pistol: A Favorite of Mass Shooters,” July 2011,
www.vpc.org/fact_sht/GlockBackgrounderJuly2011.pdf

The examples in
figure 10
were extracted by VPC from news reports. Flawed and incomplete as media reports may be, they are often the only available source about the details of gun violence in America.

Given the pestilential effect guns have on America, it is little short of incredible that the gun industry and its relentless lobby have succeeded in preventing the federal government from collecting, organizing, analyzing, and—most of all—releasing detailed data about guns and gun death, injury, and crime in America. What data exists is scattered over several different federal agencies in collections that are more often than not inconsistent, incomplete, and incompatible with each other. Information that might shed light on, for example, what makes and models of guns are used in crimes, and how frequently, is locked up tight. Laws slipped through Congress by lawmakers friendly to the gun industry's agenda bar the release of data—even to members of Congress—that was once freely available and routinely released to the public.

The sluggish bureaucracy at ATF takes the laws a step further by spinning timid rationales to avoid releasing information. No wonder. ATF's executive ranks have been brazenly infiltrated by the gun industry. In 2006,
Shooting Industry
gleefully reported—under the headline “Our Man at ATF”—that “John Badowski, a five-plus-year veteran of the National Shooting Sports Foundation staff, is now the Firearms Industry Technical Adviser at ATF”
⁷
During his tenure at NSSF, Badowski helped start the National Association of Firearm Retailers to “provide federal firearms licensees with a unified voice in regulatory and legislative affairs.”
⁸
He also promoted the NSSF's “Retailer University,” which offered gun dealers such courses as Developing a Place to Shoot, and Winning Sales Techniques for Your Staff.”
⁹
In 2003 the “university” announced a course titled Dealing with the Media. Badowski described the curriculum to
Shooting Industry
. “Let's say a firearm has been used inappropriately and the retailer gets a phone call from a news director who says, ‘Hey, we're on
the way over with a news crew for an interview. What do you do? This is high-powered training about how to deal with the media in an adverse situation.”
¹⁰

The gun industry may have learned how to “deal with the media,” but it nevertheless keeps its business as secret as possible. The greater part of the industry is privately held, foreign based, or both. The few public companies—Ruger and Smith & Wesson—stick to what they are required to file by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public trading in stocks. The rest of what is known about the business of guns in America must be meticulously panned out of a steady stream of hyperbolic promotional releases, the occasional memoir by an insider,
¹¹
and intra-industry business publications. Is the gun industry booming or failing? Are women buying more or fewer guns? The industry can—and does—put the rosiest public spin on such questions to conceal its declining fortunes and validate in the American psyche the goodness of guns.

This desert of information is no accident. By choking off detailed data about the effects of its products, the gun industry can promote its fantasy world of good gun owners and bad criminals, a world in which the social utility of guns outweighs the harm they do.

Take Glock, for but one example among many. According to Paul Barrett, “Glock . . . is not a particular villain within the fraternity of firearms.”
¹²
Perhaps, perhaps not. Given the information lockdown, it is impossible to quantify the comparative villainy of Glock handguns and any other make. The comparison would, in any case, miss the point. Whether Glock or Taurus or Ruger or Smith & Wesson is the most evil is irrelevant. The point is that their products do tremendous, unnecessary harm to tens of thousands of innocent Americans every year.

Figure 10
illustrates the use of Glock guns in mass shootings in the United States. But what about Glock's role in the everyday carnage documented throughout this book? How often are Glocks—or any other manufacturer's guns—used in the crimes,
murders, domestic suicides, shooting rampages, rage shootings, and other instances of violence that take so many lives and inflict so many injuries in the United States every year? These are questions the answers to which the gun industry very much does not want you to know.

One might think that ATF would be the logical place to go for an answer about the use of guns in crime (putting aside the typical delay of a year or two from collection to release of government data on any subject). After all, one of ATF's principal law enforcement support functions is tracing the origin of guns recovered at crime scenes and matching guns with the ballistic traces left on fired bullets and casings. The ATF says its National Tracing Center (NTC) is the nation's only crime-gun tracing facility. “As such, the NTC provides critical information that helps domestic and international law enforcement agencies solve firearms crimes, detect firearms trafficking and identify trends with respect to intrastate, interstate and international movement of crime guns.”
¹³
Here is how ATF recently described the process:

Firearms tracing is the systematic tracking of the movement of a firearm from its first sale by a manufacturer or importer through the distribution chain in an attempt to identify the first retail purchaser in order to provide investigative leads for criminal investigations. After the firearm is recovered and the identifiers are forwarded to the NTC, ATF contacts the manufacturer or importer to ascertain the sale or transfer of the firearm. ATF will attempt to contact all ensuing Federal firearms licensees (wholesale/ retail) in the distribution chain until a purchaser is identified or the trace process cannot continue due to a lack of accurate or incomplete information on the trace request or in the Federal firearms licensee's records.
¹⁴

There is no question that ATF has an enormous database documenting in detail—by make, model, caliber, origin, etc.—these
“crime guns.” The NTC traced over 295,000 guns in calendar year 2007; in 2008, over 288,000 guns; in 2009, over 354,000 guns; in 2010, over 285,000 guns; and in 2011, over 319,000 guns.
¹⁵
That's a million and a half crime-gun traces in just five years.

One might think that the massive cost of gun crimes would inspire the release of this entire valuable database, rather than the sparse summary data ATF releases from time to time. According to a 2012 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research organization,
¹⁶
in 2010 alone the cost of gun crime in America—gun murder, armed robbery, and aggravated assault—was almost $58 billion: $57,926,815,000 to be exact (using the most conservative of the three most recent studies of such costs).
¹⁷

One would, however, be mistaken in that thought.

There is no chance under present law—known as the Tiahrt Amendment—and federal government policy that the ATF data will be released in any form that is of serious use to the general public, public policy analysts, or much of anybody else, for that matter. Combined with a federal law barring most civil lawsuits against the gun industry, the dearth of information is an essential part of the industry's strategy to insulate itself from liability for the consequences of its products, a civil liability that almost every other consumer product in America bears.

In addition to protecting itself from lawsuits, the gun industry and its advocates are also aware that when the broader public debate about guns and gun violence is fact based, they lose. When Americans get a glimpse of the truth, they are appalled. For example, the VPC's continuing research on fatal, nondefensive shootings involving private persons legally allowed to carry concealed handguns in public revealed in May 2012 that within a single state, Michigan, over a single year (July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011), permit holders took thirty-eight lives, by either killing others or committing suicide.
¹⁸
“Michigan is one of the few states that releases any data about non-self-defense deaths associated with concealed handgun permit holders,” VPC's legislative
director Kristen Rand noted in releasing the data. “If we could obtain similar data for every state that issues concealed handgun permits, the numbers would be staggering. The public deserves to know the truth.”
¹⁹

Congress has even required ATF to state—in the few reports that it does release from its gun-trace data—that the traces are not a “random sample” and “are not chosen for purposes of determining which types, makes or models of firearms are used for illicit purposes.”
²⁰
What Congress does not acknowledge and does not require ATF to state is that there is no other source of data, random or not, that comes near to matching the value of the millions of crime-gun histories in the ATF trace data. Only ATF has such extensive records of traces of guns associated with crimes in the United States. And in any case, ATF does not “choose” the guns it traces—the trace requests come to ATF from law enforcement agencies.

As one commentator has noted, “a flawed representation is better than no representation at all.”
²¹
If Congress truly wanted better sources of analytical data than ATF crime-gun trace data, it would take a different tack. It would mandate the creation and funding of a comprehensive data gathering and analysis system that would provide a complete, detailed, and freely accessible national picture of guns and gun violence, integrating law enforcement and public health data sources. Such a fact-based resource—with great granularity at national and local levels of experience—would provide such information as: the number and rate of murder-suicides, the characteristics of the perpetrators and their victims, and the kinds (type, model, caliber, and manufacturer) of guns they use; the number and kind of gun crimes committed by concealed-carry-permit holders and other private persons legally allowed to carry concealed guns, as well as the kind of guns they used; the number and types of gun crimes by type, model, caliber, and manufacturer (and importer, in the case of imported guns); the use of high-capacity magazines in
gun crimes; and the means by which persons using guns in crime obtained their guns.

The collection and analysis of data about the public health factors in gun death and injury have also been suppressed by the gun industry and the NRA. For ten years—from 1986 to 1996—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsored groundbreaking peer-reviewed studies of the public health effects of guns in the United States.
²²
The agency's gun violence research agenda was a relatively small part of its overall program of research into the causes of deaths and injuries and ways to reduce them. The NRA, however, launched an aggressive program—aided by a small group of conservative doctors—to shut down the CDC's research effort.
²³
The NRA's objective was initially to eliminate entirely the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, thus intending to sacrifice all injury prevention research on the altar of “gun rights.” When they were unable to wipe out the agency, the gun lobby enlisted a Republican U.S. representative from Arkansas, Jay Dickey, to help it push through Congress an amendment that cut $2.6 million from the injury prevention center's budget. That was roughly the same amount that had been spent the year before on its gun research programs.
²⁴
“It's really simple with me,” Dickey told the
New York Times
in 2011. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.” The NRA's success not only cut off funding. It cast a deep chill over the CDC's willingness to sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the best ways to prevent it. “We've been stopped from answering the basic questions,” Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the injury prevention center, told the
Times
for the same 2011 article.
²⁵

But following the 2012 Aurora massacre, former representative Dickey and Rosenberg joined forces to argue in favor of resuming the kind of government research that Dickey had helped cut off. “Now a body of knowledge makes it clear that an event
such as the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., was not a ‘senseless' occurrence as random as a hurricane or earthquake but, rather, has underlying causes that can be understood and used to prevent similar mass shootings,” the two wrote in an opinion piece published by the
Washington Post
. “Firearm injuries will continue to claim far too many lives at home, at school, at work and at the movies until we start asking and answering the hard questions,” they observed.
²⁶

Media reports provide a glimpse of the gun violence that Congress has chosen to hide from the American people.
Appendix B
, for example, is a compilation of incidents involving Glock handguns that were reported in the media between May 1, 2011, and April 30, 2012, extracted from searches of the
Nexis.com
commercial database. Glock seemed a fair choice for this snapshot, given its iconic nature. “It's not the romantic idea of a gun,” according to Paul Barrett, the Glock chronicler. “It's the essence of a gun.”
²⁷

As shown in
chapter 1
, the news media underreport gun incidents in general. In addition, media reports of gun incidents often do not specify the make or model of the gun used. For these reasons, this compilation without a doubt understates reality. Nevertheless,
appendix B
illustrates the magnitude of the harm that Glock's handguns routinely inflict on ordinary Americans. The reported incidents include the familiar categories of gun violence: murder-suicides, rage killings, criminal trafficking, children killing themselves or killing other children, unintentional mayhem, and so on. A few incidents deserve a closer look because they illustrate how ATF collects gun crime data and how much that data could contribute to an informed public.