Long Overdue Reform of Gun Control (Do Something!)
by Roger Ray
“The difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything" -Daniel Berrigan
https://onbeing.org/blog/the-saint-i-never-met-daniel-berrigan/
In this chapter, we are talking about guns, which generates more irrational and heated controversy than almost any other topic in America.
“The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime. And that the sea of guns in which we live causes exponentially more danger and harm than good. It's long past time to start emphasizing the ‘well-regulated’ phrase in the 2nd Amendment.”[3]
Avoiding the Issue
I want to have a very sober and factual conversation about gun control, beginning with the observation that mass murder accounts for only a tiny fraction of the casualties from gun violence in our country every year. Mass murders get into the news. Mass murders get people interested in the topic and, for a little while, the enraged public calls for action. But we know the steps to this public dance. We all lived through Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Dallas, Orlando, and Las Vegas, El Paseo, Dayton, and we have a fairly clear idea how the news cycle will go the next time.[4]
At first, the NRA will be silent. Some politicians will insist that we not talk about it right now, that we need to show respect to the grieving and not try to turn a horrible incident into a political opportunity. Someone will sincerely offer suggestions, like having a moment of silence or donating blood. A few will even try to nibble at the heels of the gun industry, suggesting that we outlaw the types of firearms used in these mass shootings.
Most people are good and want to be helpful. And so there will be an immediate response of hundreds of volunteers coming forward to donate blood. After the Las Vegas shooting, the blood center had to announce that they had more than they needed, and no one needed to donate anymore. Whole blood has a shelf life, and they had more than they could possibly use.[5]
Ironically, it was Congressman Steve Scalise who stepped up and asked for volunteers to donate blood. Scalise had only just returned to the Congress after having barely survived an assassination attempt in June of that year in which he was shot while playing baseball.[6]He is really lucky to be alive. As a victim of gun violence, he still provided cover for the gun lobby by offering this suggestion that people donate blood when he had to have known that the hospitals in Las Vegas were crying “no mas!”
That is the strength of the gun lobby in Washington. Even if you have been shot, you still will tell public lies to cover for them, because without the NRA’s “A” rating for members of Congress and their political donations, most of them could not keep their jobs.[7]Sadly, after telling the public that they didn’t need more blood donors, when Scalise and others were still calling for blood donations, the hospitals backtracked and played along. But it was a ruse that was only intended to trick the gullible.
Donating blood is usually a good thing to do. If you are medically able to donate, you should try to donate every eight weeks. But we should not give people the false sense that they have done something meaningful about gun violence, especially when doing so is used as a cover by us, as a society, to avoid changing gun laws. It is like telling someone that they are in your thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers have not worked. It is time for something more serious.
There are 4 common lines of defense intended to shut down any meaningful response to gun violence. Someone will say:
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. A corollary of this one claims that we do not have a gun problem, we have a mental health problem.
The only way to stop a bad person with a gun is for a good person to have a gun.
Gun laws don’t work, if they did, Chicago and Washington, D.C. would not have such a high murder rate.
“Gun Ownership Is a Right”
The second amendment, which appears in our Bill of Rights, guarantees to our citizens the right to bear arms because that is crucial to maintain a citizen army, a well-regulated militia. It was not spelled out in the constitution but this conscession was added as an amendment to gain the support for the constitution from slave holding states where large plantation owners feared a slave revolt and they wanted to maintain enough guns to keep their African slaves, who greatly outnumbered the white family on the plantation, in bondage.
Even though the 2ndAmendment had this embarrassing and ignoble beginning, still, it was not interpreted to mean that every citizen has a right to own guns for the first 200 years of our nation’s history. This interpretation was not established until the famous Supreme Court decision in the Heller case literally changed a “well-regulated militia” into an individual’s right to own a gun.[8]It was an example of an extreme judicial over-reach, but it is now the law of the land. But even this horribly misguided Supreme Court decision, the Heller decision, did not grant citizens the right to own a tank, or a bazooka. The government retains the right to regulate and restrict, within reason, who can own particular kinds of guns.[9]
For example, after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929, congress outlawed machine guns. They did not institute a buyback program, but they heavily taxed the existing machine guns and they have rusted out existence without further use in mass murders. A part of the argument for this measure was that the guns were attractive to organized crime but were useless in hunting. See? America can be smart.
Most people don’t remember that the NRA was vocally supportive of gun control measures throughout the 1960s, as
“part of an effort to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans as racial tensions in the nation grew. The NRA felt especially threatened by the Black Panthers, whose well-photographed carrying of weapons in public spaces was entirely legal in the state of California, where they were based.”[10]
Even in 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Gun Control Act into law, the president of the NRA could concede that, paraphrasing, “We’re not thrilled with this, but we can live with it. I think it’s reasonable.”[11]
But not everyone felt the same way, and a growing number of gun owners began to panic in fear that the government would take all of their guns. A real shift began in 1971, when an NRA member with a cache of illegal weapons was killed by federal agents. The NRA responded, in part, by creating their first lobbying group, the Institute for Legislative Action. By 1977, the hard-liners had assumed leadership positions.[12]At that point, the NRA started their irrational fear campaign, saying that, if they ever give an inch, the government might take a mile.
The resistance to the restriction of bump stocks is a case in point. In several mass shootings, a domestic terrorist has used one to convert a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle. Clearly, if automatic rifles are not legal to own, the ability to buy an inexpensive upgrade that turns your semi-automatic rifle into the equivalent of an automatic rifle shouldn’t be legal. But, for the NRA, saying “no” to anything is just the camel’s nose under the tent, so they will defend the most indefensible hardware.[13]And they usually lead a paranoid charge against the imaginary day when Johnson, or Carter, or Clinton, or Obama will come for your guns. If they chose to do so, Congress could make a rational case to limit gun ownership to weapons appropriate to home defense or hunting. They did finally outlaw those ridiculous bump stocks. The NRA won’t like it, but the 2ndAmendment does not guarantee anyone a military style weapon, armor-piercing ammunition, or high capacity ammunition drums or clips.
“People Kill People”
The second argument we often hear against gun control is that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” It is true that a gun, on its own, is unlikely to kill anyone. But we have not approached the problem with North Korea telling ourselves that nuclear bombs don’t kill people, people kill people. We have a reasonable fear that a rogue state with nuclear weapons would be more likely to kill people.
People are killed with baseball bats and knives, but you don’t kill sixty people from a 32ndstory hotel window with knives or baseball bats. And, yes, people can commit suicide in very many ways, it is just that if a fun is present, they are much more likely to be successful in killing themselves. In fact, “About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death, while drug overdoses — the most common method of suicide attempts — are fatal in less than 3 percent of cases, according to researchers at the Harvard Injury Research Control Center.”[14]
Suicide is preventable, but it is very hard to prevent when there is a gun in the house.
I mentioned that the corollary to this argument is the claim that “we don’t have a gun problem, we have a mental health problem.” There is a certain truth to the idea that the United States’ obsession with guns and violence indicates there we are culturally and socially ill. There are more than 300 million guns in the United States, which is almost half of all of the guns in the world.[15]Only a third of Americans own guns, which means that some people own a whole lot of guns.[16]We have more than twice as many guns per capita than any other nation in the world,[17]yet there are countries where there are also many guns but not many gun deaths. Hunting is very much a part of the culture of Canada and Denmark, but they have a very low incidence of gun related deaths.[18]
You might reasonably say that there is something wrong with Americans. Canadians have about a third as many guns, per capita, as we do in the United States, but the U.S. has about 50 times as many gun related deaths.[19]Meanwhile, mental illness exists in every nation, just without all of the mass murder and domestic killing we find in the United States. The difficult truth is that there was no way to tell, for example, that the white guy with a lot of guns was any more likely toshoot 500 people in Las Vegas than any of the white guys we know here in the Ozarks who own as many guns as he did. There is no way to know which person is going to express their depression, or cope with their bankruptcy, divorce, or miserable home life, by shooting up a theater, a nightclub, a school, or a concert.[20]The only part of this we can even begin to control is the access to weapons and ammunition.
More importantly, the mentally ill are much more likely to be the victims of violence than they are to be the perpetrators of violence.[21]Blaming mental illness is just another deception used to shut down conversation about gun control. In the absolute height of hypocrisy, Speaker Paul Ryan trotted out this old saw about mental illness in less than 48 hours after the Las Vegas shooting,[22]while earlier this year he martialed legislation through the house to remove restrictions against the mentally ill being able to buy guns.
Trump signed this into law in February 2018. They then went to work trying to make it legal to buy silencers.[23]Trump’s own son made TV commercials supporting the legislation to allow people like the murderer in Las Vegas to put silencers on their weapons.[24] This is the kind of failure of leadership we have witnessed time and again when it comes to sensible gun laws. And yet, Paul Ryan stood in front of the TV cameras and blamed this incident on an undiagnosed mental illness.
I want this conversation to be rational and factual, and here is the fact: mental illness is not the cause of gun violence. As researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Gavelston showed,
“individuals who had access to guns, compared to those with no such access, were over 18 times more likely to have threatened someone with a gun, even after controlling for a number of demographic and mental health variables. Meanwhile, most mental health symptoms were unrelated to gun violence.”
They concluded that,
"Taking all this information together, limiting access to guns, regardless of any other mental health status, demographics or prior mental health treatments, is the key to reducing gun violence.”[25]
If you believe there is a shortage of treatment for mental illness in this country, then I agree. Put more money into mental health. But don’t put the blame for gun violence on the mentally ill. And if you want to reduce gun violence, limit access to guns.
“Good Guys Need More Guns”
But this conclusion runs right up against the third argument: the answer to gun violence is more guns. Good guys should be armed to stop bad guys who are armed.
In our two most recent high profile mass shootings, in El Paseo and Dayton, the police were able to stop the shooter in mere moments. In Dayton, the shooter was taken down by police in just 32 seconds but in just a half a minute, he was able to kill 9 people and wound 14 more. And, in some of the famous mass murders such as the Pulse nightclub and the Marjory Stillman high school in Florida, there were armed guards. At Pulse, the armed guard was the first person shot.
https://time.com/5644578/good-guys-with-guns-el-paso-dayton/
Still, and previously mentioned, the majority of gun deaths are suicides, and the chances of death from a suicide attempt are much smaller if there is no gun present.
Another of the top categories of death is domestic violence. As tragic as the death toll in Las Vegas was, more than that many women are shot and killed by their husbands or boyfriends every month. According to the Violence Policy Center (VPC),
“More than 1,800 women were murdered by men in 2016 and the most common weapon used was a gun … . 93 percent of women killed by men were murdered by someone they knew … , and that all too often that man is an intimate partner.”[26]
There is a lot of domestic violence in our country, but if there is a gun in the home, the woman is five times as likely to be killed. Further, a woman in the United Sates is “16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than in peer countries.”[27]A woman who buys a gun to protect herself is much more likely to be killed with that gun than she is likely to successfully use it to defend herself.[28]Some estimates are as high as 17 times more likely to be killed if a woman pulls a gun on an assailant.(SOURCE?)
We are talking about math here. One of the things to love about math is that numbers don’t care what your opinion is or what you want to believe. Math is math. And the math is that 50 more women will be killed this month and 50 more next month unless we find the will to do something to change the trend.
“Gun Control Laws Don’t Work”
Finally, the fourth argument claims that gun control laws don’t work - “just look at Chicago and Washington, D.C.” That is true enough; the gun laws in Chicago and Washington have done little to solve the gun violence in those cities, because a city’s gun laws hardly matter to anyone who has a car, or to anyone who is capable of taking a train or a bus out of town. But gun laws do work in Canada, the UK, Denmark, Japan, and Germany.
After the Sandy Hook shooting, Adam Gopnik wrote that -
“There are complex, hand-wringing-worthy problems in our social life: deficits and debts and climate change. Gun violence, and the work of eliminating gun massacres in schools and movie houses and the like, is not one of them. Gun control works on gun violence as surely as antibiotics do on bacterial infections. In Scotland, after Dunblane, in Australia, after Tasmania, in Canada, after the Montreal massacre—in each case the necessary laws were passed to make gun-owning hard, and in each case… well, you will note the absence of massacre-condolence speeches made by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia, in comparison with our own President.”[29]
In Australia, following a mass murder at Port Arthur on April 28, 1996, in just 12 days, legislators passed sweeping gun control laws and the government instituted a massive buy back program that netted over a million guns.[30]Australia had previously suffered a mass killing at a rate of about one a year. Since Port Arthur, there have been none, for 22 years and counting.[31]
People in Australia didn’t like it. They had a gun culture much like ours. Many of the legislators who enacted these strict gun laws were not re-elected. They all knew that they were falling on their political swords, but they did what was right to protect the lives of Australians. And more recently, after the mass shooting at a Christchurch mosque, New Zealand’s parliament voted 119 to 1 in favor of banning “most semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles in the country.”[32]Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell, or Donald Trump, doing what is right because it is right, even if it cost them their next election? There is something wrong with Americans, and we need to be more like Australians and New Zealanders.
In the USA, following the Las Vegas shooting, sellers ran out of bump-stocks, even after increasing the price by 200%,[33] and there has been a predictable rise in gun manufacturer’s stock.[34]Nothing stimulates gun sales like a mass shooting. It is a sad commentary on American mentality, but it is true.
A part of that is the fear of the changes in gun laws that never seem to materialize, though that fear seems to have lessened during Trump’s administration.[35]But that is not all of it. When people at gun ranges have been interviewed after shooting an altered weapon that fires dozens rounds in mere seconds, they often report feeling elation. It was exciting, rewarding, and it made them feel powerful.[36]Is that because they made dozens of holes in a paper target? Or was it because they fantasized about how many people they could kill with that weapon? How does it feel to own several military styled weapons?
Do you think any of these repressed, fearful, gun collectors watched the same news that we watched - 500 injured, 59 dead - and thought to themselves, “I could do better than that”?
That’s part of the problem with announcing that this was the largest, the worst, the most deadly, because, for a certain portion of the population, that is a challenge. This shooter didn’t take all of his guns and ammo to that hotel room. He even had a stockpile of explosives and a fairly elaborate escape plan. He meant to do more. This was supposed to be his first attack. Part of the problem with giving these monsters a name and news coverage is that every part of their plan becomes a lesson plan. Their death becomes an object lesson for future murderers.[37]
As with so many other of the modern challenges we have looked at, there is a simple, evident, and obvious solution to carnage we see every year in America. Every other developed nation in the world has already done what we have refused to do. As Gopnik put it,
“Gun control is not a panacea, any more than penicillin was. Some violence will always go on. What gun control is good at is controlling guns. Gun control will eliminate gun massacres in America as surely as antibiotics eliminate bacterial infections … . Those who oppose it have made a moral choice: that they would rather have gun massacres of children continue rather than surrender whatever idea of freedom or pleasure they find wrapped up in owning guns or seeing guns owned—just as the faith healers would rather watch the children die than accept the reality of scientific medicine. This is a moral choice; many faith healers make it to this day, and not just in thought experiments. But it is absurd to shake our heads sapiently and say we can’t possibly know what would have saved [all those lives].”[38]
It is not just the 59 people who died in Las Vegas or the fifty women who will die next month in their own homes. It is the very predictable 40,000 people who will needlessly die each year, if we cannot muster the political will to do what is right, obvious, and necessary. No more thoughts and prayers. No more asking for forgiveness; no more memorials or blood drives. This is a problem that can be solved, and there is nothing but moral shame in store for us if we don’t get it done.
The good news is that the overwhelming majority of Americans want sensible gun reform. In an August, 2019 NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey finds that 89 percent of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun purchasers; 76 percent support "red flag" laws to identify dangerous persons and deny them guns, and 75 percent favor a voluntary buyback program in which the government would purchase firearms from current owners. Sixty-two percent of Americans favor a ban on the sale of semi-automatic weapons.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-08-19/poll-majority-favor-gun-control
With numbers like that, you would think that elected officials would have to bend the knee to public opinion, but they have become masters of the hide-and-seek waiting game after each mass shooting. They simply have to make vacuous promises and then wait out the short-attention span public. Emotions run high when a lot of people have just been killed, but especially in this time in history, the news cycle moves on and people forget.
Following the August shooting in Dayton, I would call it a shooting rampage, but is something that lasted 32 seconds really a rampage? An outburst of violence, perhaps. At the vigil, Ohio’s governor showed up to speak to the gathered crowd. Republican governor, Mike DeWine, tried to offer the same platitudes Republicans always offer when the blood of innocent citizens is still wet on the pavement. He started out by pointing out the size of the crowd gathered at the vigil, saying that the gathered thousands represented “the love and resiliency of this great and wonderful community,”
But he was shouted down and finally gave up trying to speak at all. First it was just one person who called out, “Do something.” And that became a roar from the crowd, demanding: Do something! Because we all know that what is behind the platitudes, the crocodile tears, the thoughts and prayers, behind Mitch McConnell’s
https://nypost.com/2019/08/05/crowd-at-dayton-shooting-vigil-drowns-out-ohio-governor-do-something/
promise that “we will discuss this” when the senate is back in session. Or the president’s assurance that this time they will have to take action. But we know what they are doing, they are just waiting, waiting for a fickle public to go on to worry about something else.
The survivors in Parkland swore that they would not let the issue die. That they were devoted to real change. But, the power of the status quo is strong. You would think that the parents of the children who died at Sandy Hook would be able to hold onto the microphone. . . that we wouldn’t so quickly forget about the victims at the Mother Emmanuel Church, at the Pulse Nightclub, but people can’t seem to maintain the needed passion, and the gun lobby knows it, they bank on it, they bank on it big, and so far they have always been right. But what if we do something?
I was inspired when I heard protesters in Hong Kong singing "Do You Hear the People Sing" from Les Miserable. It gave me an idea: We never get gun laws changed because after each mass shooting reported in the news, there is talk about sensible gun law reform but in a couple of weeks, the news cycle moves on and momentum is lost. What if we put a group of 20 or 30 people together to do flash mobs in gun shops (Bass Pro, Walmart, etc) to sing "Do You Hear the People Sing" ?. . . it could keep the topic in the news, it could possibly embarrass gun sellers (if any of them still have a conscience) and maybe, just maybe, we could start a movement that would eventually end in gun reform. It is a kind of civil disobedience and it might even be construed as being against some law…. But I am 63 years old and I’ve never been arrested. If not now, when will I?
[1] Ben Casselman, Matthew Conlen, and Reuben Fischer-Baum (2016). “Gun Deaths in America,” FiveThirtyEight.com. Available at: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/
[2] “Self-Defense Gun Use” (n.d.). Violence Policy Center. Available at: http://vpc.org/revealing-the-impacts-of-gun-violence/self-defense-gun-use/
[3] Scott Martelle (June 19, 2015). “Gun and self-defense statistics that might surprise you -- and the NRA,” LosAngeles Times. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-guns-self-defense-charleston-20150619-story.html
[4] The Gun Violence Archive tracks gun-related violence in the United States, available at: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
[5] Kristin Hugo (October 5, 2017). “People Are Giving Too Much Blood After the Las Vegas Shooting, Medical Officials Say,” Newsweek. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/people-are-giving-too-much-blood-after-las-vegas-shooting-678190
[6] Mallory Shelbourne (October 2, 2017). “Scalise encourages blood donations after Las Vegas shooting,” The Hill. Available at: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/353430-scalise-encourages-people-to-donate-blood-after-las-vegas-shooting
[7] See, for example, Dan Glickman (February 22, 2018). “Supporters of gun control must be more like the NRA in order to beat it,” The Hill. Available at: https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/375056-supporters-of-gun-control-must-be-more-like-the-nra-in-order-to-beat-it
[8] See “The Heller Decision and What It Means,”Giffords Law Center. Available at: https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/the-second-amendment/the-supreme-court-the-second-amendment/dc-v-heller/
[9] Eric Tirschwell and Mark Frassetto (June 25, 2018). “10 years after Heller: Fiery gun rights rhetoric, but courts back Second Amendment limits,” USA Today. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/25/heller-ruling-courts-uphold-gun-control-second-amendment-limits-column/729202002/
[10] Thad Morgan (August 30, 2018, updated). “The NRA Supported Gun Control When the Black Panthers Had the Weapons,” History. Available at: https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act
[11] Olivia B. Waxman (October 25, 2018). “How the Gun Control Act of 1968 Changed America’s Approach to Firearms—And What People Get Wrong About That History,” Time. Available at: http://time.com/5429002/gun-control-act-history-1968/
[12] Ron Elving (October 10, 2017). “The NRA Wasn't Always Against Gun Restrictions,” NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2017/10/10/556578593/the-nra-wasnt-always-against-gun-restrictions
[13] Ironically, it was President Trump who eventually instituted the ban on bump stocks, much to the “disappointment” of the NRA faithful. See: “The Latest: NRA ‘disappointed’ by bump stock ban” (December 18, 2018), Associated Press. Available at: https://www.apnews.com/c502e176975e4089bcfab98174936e53
[14] Jon Schuppe (September 17, 2018). “More than 20,000 Americans a year kill themselves with a gun. Alarmed gun sellers are joining the suicide prevention fight,” NBC News. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/more-20-000-people-die-gun-suicide-each-year-alarmed-n906796
[15] Kara Fox (March 9, 2018). “How US gun culture compares with the world in five charts,” CNN. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html
[16] Scott Horsley (January 5, 2016). “Guns In America, By The Numbers,” NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-the-numbers
[17] Carol Schaeffer (June 19, 2018). “US citizens own 40% of all guns in world - more than next 25 top-ranked countries combined, study suggests,” The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gun-ownership-country-us-legal-firearm-citizens-statistics-a8406941.html
[18] Nurith Aizenman (October 6, 2017). “Gun Violence: How The U.S. Compares With Other Countries,” NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/06/555861898/gun-violence-how-the-u-s-compares-to-other-countries
[19] “UPDATED: How American gun deaths and gun laws compare to Canada's” (Updated December 4, 2015), National Observer. Available at: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/12/04/news/how-american-gun-deaths-and-gun-laws-compare-canadas
[20] There are protocols for assessing risks of violence for people receiving mental health and/or substance abuse care, but this is only effective for people receiving care. See, for example, “Mental Illness and Violence” (January 2011), Harvard Mental Health Publishing. Available at: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/mental-illness-and-violence
[21] Varshney M, Mahapatra A, Krishnan V, et al (2016). “Violence and mental illness: what is the true story?,”Journal of Epidemiol Community Health(70:223-225). Available at: https://jech.bmj.com/content/70/3/223
[22] Rebecca Shabad (October 3, 2017). “Paul Ryan says mental health reform is ‘critical ingredient’ in stopping mass shootings,”CBS News. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paul-ryan-says-mental-health-reform-is-critical-ingredient-in-stopping-mass-shootings/
[23] Lydia Wheeler (October 8, 2017). “Five things to know about GOP's gun-suppressor bill,” The Hill. Available at: https://thehill.com/regulation/legislation/354251-five-things-to-know-about-gops-gun-suppressor-bill
[24] Andrew Buncombe (June 1, 2017). “Donald Trump Jr leads campaign to overturn restrictions on gun silencers despite mass shooting fears,” The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-jr-son-gun-silencer-control-laws-restrictions-campaign-remove-mass-shootings-fears-a7767586.html
[25] “Mental illness not to blame for gun violence, study finds” (February 7, 2019), Science Daily. Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190207102607.htm
[26] “More Than 1,800 Women Murdered by Men in One Year, New Study Finds” (September 18, 2018), Violence Policy Center. Available at: http://vpc.org/press/more-than-1800-women-murdered-by-men-in-one-year-new-study-finds/
[27] “Domestic Violence & Firearms” (n.d.), Giffords Law Center. Available at: https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/who-can-have-a-gun/domestic-violence-firearms/
[28] Evan DeFilippis (February 23, 2014). “Having a Gun in the House Doesn't Make a Woman Safer,” The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/having-a-gun-in-the-house-doesnt-make-a-woman-safer/284022/
[29] “The Simple Truth About Gun Control,” The New Yorker (December 19, 2012). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-simple-truth-about-gun-control
[30] Anne Davies (December 31, 2018). “John Howard's decisive action on gun control revealed in 1996 cabinet papers,” The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/01/john-howard-port-arthur-gun-control-1996-cabinet-papers
[31] Clifton Leaf (February 20, 2018). “How Australia All But Ended Gun Violence,” Fortune. Available at: http://fortune.com/2018/02/20/australia-gun-control-success/
[32] German Lopez (April 10, 2019). “New Zealand Parliament votes 119-1 to ban assault weapons,” Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18304415/new-zealand-gun-control-mosque-shootings-assault-weapons-ban
[33] Jamiles Lartey (October 5, 2017). “Bump stocks sell out across US as ban looms after Las Vegas shooting,” The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/bump-stocks-sell-out-across-us-as-ban-looms-after-las-vegas-shooting
[34] Adam Shell (October 2, 2017). “Gun stock prices climb after Las Vegas mass shooting,” USA Today. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/10/02/gun-stocks-rise-after-las-vegas-mass-shooting/722538001/
[35] Alvin Chang (March 7, 2018). “Gun sales usually skyrocket after mass shootings. But not this time,” Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/7/17066352/gun-sales-mass-shooting-data
[36] Dave Mosher (October 10, 2017). “Here's what can happen to your brain and body when you shoot a gun,” Business Insider. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/firing-gun-brain-chemistry-neuroscience-2017-10
[37] See, for example, Adam Lankford and Eric Madfis (September 5, 2017). “Proposal for Denying Mass Killers the Attention They Seek and Deterring Future Offenders,” American Behavioral Scientist (62.2: 260-279). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764217730854 . David Trilling also interviewed Adam Lankford in “’Don’t name them’ – Criminologist asks journalists to help stop mass shootings,” Journalist’s Resource. Available at: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health/mass-shooters-suicide-bombers-journalism/
[38] Gopnik, op. cit.
