The Last Gun (5 page)

Figure 2. Summary of Deaths and Injuries in Shooting Incidents in the United States, August 1–7, 2011

See
appendix A
for sources.

What emerges from this data is that the number of human beings killed and injured by guns in the United States during an average week is much greater than the number that an extraordinarily curious person could possibly find by diligently combing the news media. A total of 272,590 people were killed by guns between 2000 and 2008 inclusive. This is an average of 30,288 a year, for an average of 582 gun deaths a week in the United States. This is more than eight times the number of deaths that the survey found to have been reported in the news media during the first week of August 2011. An estimated total of 617,488 were injured by guns in the nine years but did not die, for an average of 1,319 gun injuries per week. This is just shy of sixty times as many gun injuries as were reported in the media during the week in question.

Clearly Americans live in a bubble, an information vacuum, unwittingly ignorant of the reality of the carnage howling around them. This virtual invisibility of firearms death and injury goes a long way toward explaining why Americans appear to be so complacent about gun violence. It sheds light on why the gun lobby can thumb its nose at gun violence, twist gun violence to its own ends by mischaracterizing its nature, and fob off folksy pabulum about guns on both the public and uninformed policy makers. It helps explain why politicians get away with avoiding the perceived “third rail” of gun control at the same time that their constituents are dying.

Figure 3. Gun Deaths, Injuries, and Total Shot in the United States, 2000–2008

Data on gun deaths and injuries is from the WISQARS database of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, both of whom have devoted much of their professional lives to studying gun violence, have zeroed in on the fault line of fact-free policy making—the history of public health shows that people do indeed change their minds and move away from culturally taught beliefs when they learn key facts. Cook and Ludwig have explained that “we know that people's attitudes and behaviors about smoking and unprotected sex have changed dramatically over time. The changes have occurred, in part, in response to a growing body of epidemiological research about the health risks associated with each of these activities.”
⁴⁷

The history of public health abounds with similar examples of factual investigations and resulting fact-based policies saving millions of human lives, flying in the face of what everybody thought they knew. In 1900, the
Washington Post
dismissed the idea that mosquitoes carried yellow fever—one of the most dreaded diseases of the era—as “silly and nonsensical rigmarole.”
⁴⁸
In 1900, the “culturally grounded understanding” of even the educated elite, including many in the medical professions, was that yellow fever was caused by dirt and filth. “I'm your friend, Gorgas, and I'm trying to set you right,” Major General George W. Davis, governor of the Panama Canal Zone, advised Dr. William C. Gorgas, the surgeon general of the army whose eventually successful campaigns to control mosquitoes in Florida, Cuba, and Panama dramatically reduced malaria and yellow fever infections. “On the mosquito you are simply wild. All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head. Yellow fever, as we all know, is caused by filth.”
⁴⁹

The news vacuum about the facts of gun death and injury is
a boon for the gun lobby. The absence of facts is precisely what makes it possible for many patently foolish perspectives on guns and gun control to survive in the United States. Among these perspectives, the most insidious is the one relentlessly promoted by the gun lobby, which not only deliberately exploits ignorance about the nature and extent of gun violence in America but also works vigorously to keep the facts about it sealed from view. At the other end of the spectrum, some “commonsense” solutions advanced by well-meaning advocates rest on the sands of an equal absence of relevant facts. The gun lobby, its facilitators, and their misguided “commonsense” ideas will be examined in detail in later chapters, but a brief overview of the gun lobby's propagandistic approach here may help put the problem of understanding gun violence in perspective.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is “the trade association for the firearms industry.” It sponsors the annual industry trade event, the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show, popularly known as the SHOT Show. NSSF defines its mission as “to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports.”
⁵⁰
Blending a down-home style with corporate PR sensibilities, NSSF works hard at making guns seem a lot like bowling balls—harmless objects the whole family can enjoy in an atmosphere of glowing happy faces. In fact, the NSSF has made the claim that hunting is safer than bowling, a laughable proposition easily eviscerated:

The NSSF makes no effort to evaluate the lethality or seriousness of different types of injuries in each activity it claims is less safe than hunting with firearms. A bullet to the chest and a sprained ankle are both counted as one injury in their statistics, and that's the basis of their claim that hunting with guns is safer than all but the least strenuous activities. According to a 2004
Good Morning America
report, the International Hunter Education Association (IHEA) estimated that hunters were accidentally shooting
more than 1,000 people a year in the United States and Canada.
⁵¹

Gun deaths and debilitating lifelong injuries simply don't exist in NSSF's glossy world, where assault rifles designed for war are transmogrified into “modern sporting rifles,”
⁵²
poisonous environment-degrading lead ammunition becomes harmless “traditional ammunition,”
⁵³
and shooting ranges are family-values venues—places where terrorists,
⁵⁴
mass shooters, and assassins
⁵⁵
never hone their shooting skills, but frolicking sport shooters have a “memorable and fun experience.”
⁵⁶

When NSSF talks about guns killing and injuring people, it sticks to a script promoting the rosy view that “the firearms accident rate among all groups has dropped more than 60 percent during the last twenty-five years to a century-long low, with such accidents now comprising less than 1 percent of all fatal accidents nationwide.”
⁵⁷
But as
Figure 4
graphically demonstrates about gun deaths in America, accidents are not the problem.
Unintentional shootings have always comprised a tiny part of gun death and injury. The problem is people deliberately shooting other people and themselves.

Figure 4. Gun Fatalities in the United States, 1981–2010

The NRA—the gun industry's political front—takes a harder line. Its style combines a vehement “patriotic” meanness with a ruthless willingness to say or do anything to defeat even the most modest proposal to regulate guns. According to a well-informed former insider, this is largely cynical play-acting to whip up gun owners and raise funds by “the senior leadership and consultants of the NRA [who] have morphed the organization into this grand fundraising operation for the power and glory primarily of themselves.”
⁵⁸
The NRA's chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, reportedly “is making around a million dollars a year.”
⁵⁹
The NRA's specialty is “argument by assertion,” an endless emission of statements it cannot prove and quite likely knows are false. LaPierre is often the orifice through which these assertions are vented. For example, the
St. Petersburg Times
in its
PolitiFact
fact-checking series found to be false LaPierre's assertion at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 that “across the board, violent crime in jurisdictions that recognize the Right to Carry is lower than in areas that prevent it.”
⁶⁰

One of the more spectacular examples of LaPierre's assertions is his claim that the Obama administration has a “secret plan” to “destroy the Second Amendment by 2016.” In an article published in January 2012 in the Web edition of
America's 1st Freedom
—which the NRA calls its “pure news magazine”—LaPierre lets gun enthusiasts in on the conspiracy. Before getting into the thoroughly undocumented details, LaPierre makes a blatant fund-raising pitch by telling his readers that the best way that they can fight the evil Obama plan “is by carrying your new 2012 membership card . . . in your wallet as a symbol of your commitment—and by renewing or upgrading your NRA membership or making a contribution to defending freedom today.” LaPierre then pulls out the stops on the NRA propaganda organ:

Think about it: Before moving into the White House, Barack Obama spent his
entire career
proudly, publicly advancing the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. . . . So what happened after they won the White House? Did Obama, Biden and the anti-gun extremists who soon filled the West Wing suddenly completely reverse their positions? No! In an act of pure political calculation, they plotted to keep their gun-ban objectives
concealed
.
⁶¹

Get it? By not doing what the NRA spent millions of dollars during the 2008 campaign promising they would do if they won the election,
⁶²
the Machiavellian geniuses in the Obama White House set up the American pro-gun voter for a cunning takedown of the Constitution in a second administration.

LaPierre cynically ignores the role of the NRA itself in suppressing any action on gun control. “With annual revenue of about $250 million,” according to the
Washington Post
, “the group has for four decades been the strongest force shaping the nation's gun laws.”
⁶³
Had he cared to do so, LaPierre might have gotten a reality check from his co-worker, Chris W. Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist. Cox bragged in an NRA political report—published both online and in print in parallel with LaPierre's screed—that, thanks to a “great deal of effort” by the NRA, “the most recent spending bill to pass the Congress and be signed by the president contained a dozen policy victories for gun owners.”
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The NRA never lets the facts get in the way of its fund-raising stories. It ignores the truth of gun violence in America, spinning gun death and injury as a problem of criminal control, not gun control. It frames gun death and injury as the result of (too often coddled) rampaging violent criminals and not ordinary people owning guns. “When it comes to violent crime, NRA's 4 million members and America's 90 million gun owners stand for what works,” LaPierre recently wrote, conveniently inflating his voice to speak for every gun owner in America. “Strong interdiction,
swift arrest, tough prosecution and certain incarceration to remove violent criminals from our society.”
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If ever there were occasion to recall the injunction of the biblical metaphor about focusing on a speck in another's eye while ignoring the beam in one's own, it may be found in the NRA's and the NSSF's hypocritical propaganda about gun death and injury
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