By its nature, a rule produces a reaction which can go in either direction, toward compliance or resistance. The NRA, by its nature, resists all gun rules. It consistently demands extreme freedoms (yes, even freedoms can be extreme!) to own and buy and sell the most dangerous weapons of death available to American citizens. Its strategy to resist rules and regulations has been to wrap guns in the flag, and leverage its ideology with cash from supporters and gun manufacturers. So in the NRA view, guns are no longer thought of a commercial product. They are extensions of the Constitution. The constitutional protections afforded ownership, in the NRA view, should be extended to the marketplace. Background checks, equipment limits, and other rules are seen as interfering with the end result of ownership. In the NRA world, not only is ownership constitutionally protected, the marketplace should be unregulated.
Is a constitutional right abridged if a marketplace connected to that right is regulated? Is the right to own a gun mirrored in the right to buy and sell? More importantly, doesn’t the Constitution protect citizens in a way that they can be free from the intentional and unintentional dangers associated with the use of guns? Does the government have the right under the Constitution to pass laws that make me, you, and others less likely to die, singularly and en masse, at the hands of an instrument that others see as the source of the defense of life and freedom? Should the risk associated with guns be greater for some than for others? Is that risk mitigated or increased if we all own guns?
Of course, cars kill people, too. Society has inherent risks. Yet a study released last May by the Washington-based Violence Policy Center found gun deaths actually exceeded car deaths in ten states in 2009. Bloomberg News reported this will be true as a national statistic by 2015! As the numbers of cars on streets and roads increased, public policy, focused on safety (seat belts, enforcement of driving under the influence laws at the local level, improved safety equipment by auto makers, child seats) have saved lives. Deaths from auto fatalities diminished by 22 percent in just five years, from 2005 to 2010. Dramatic proof of the good use of public policy!
But can parallel effective public policy be crafted to save lives when tied to the one instrument whose ownership involves not only fun, sports and collecting, but also involves a latent but inherent right to kill, even if in the name of public and personal safety and the Constitution?
Research is one way of looking at these questions to determine the impact of policy on gun violence deaths and injuries. Gun violence ranges from suicide (52 percent of all suicides) to mass spree killings, growing more common and commanding public attention. Best estimates (probably slightly understated) say 87 people die per day from gun violence. (I have also seen dramatically larger estimates. Whatever the number, a problem, by fact and comparison exists.) Can policy reduce this number?
In the debate over policy, let’s not forget women are on the front lines. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence says 58 percent of domestic violence homicides committed against women involve a male intimate acquaintance using a gun.
An older study by two Harvard professors found the US has the highest rate of domestic violence gun murders—82 percent of total murders of an aggregate of 25 high-income nations, while having only 32 percent of the aggregate female population. Every study, every statistic indicates that women are at risk from gun deaths in situations of domestic violence and that the risk is not lessened by gun ownership by women in the household.
In fact, for women the home is the most dangerous source of gun violence and murder against women. Guns of all types are statistically more likely to be used to kill women in their households than to prevent crime or personal attacks (self-defense).
There is sufficient certainty that guns are being used to kill women in their domiciles, not stop crime or criminals. Women are at greater risk for gun violence at home than any other place. In 2010, three women a day were killed by guns as a result of violence at home, 94 percent by men they knew.
When faced with overwhelming statistics about how, why, and by whom and where women die, the NRA speaks of shifting the view to crime, arming women, and resists the idea of universal background checks, which, overwhelmingly, other gun safety advocates, domestic violence researchers, women’s groups and women themselves—along with the majority of all Americans—support. Fifteen percent of ownership applications under the Brady Bill are rejected because of federal legislation that prohibits gun sales to persons convicted of or restrained from domestic violence.
The other group vulnerable to gun violence is children. The Joyce Foundation reports child victims of gang homicides are likely to be male, younger, killed over arguments, and killed by a gun 90 percent of the time. Their deaths are a source of national rage and shame, of criticism for the media of how the children of the poor are marginalized, of hypocrisy by politicians, of a national failing; of communities mired in their own senseless destruction.
In the competition for sound bites, a number of incidents unfolded last weekend, and one was stopped by quick action at a Florida college. I did see ten seconds of video that reported the actions and thinking of those we seldom see or hear from, but whose views the debates of policy are aimed at: the young who are at risk to plan and carry out big acts of gun violence in school or social settings. Yes, Los Angeles County, through its Mental Health Department, operates a School Threat Assessment Response Team (START).
START uses a complex of typologies, identified risk factors, warning signs, lessons learned (institutional knowledge), statistics-driven action plans, brain functioning science, psychology, monitoring, review and management plans to identify students with an expressed, clear propensity and desire to engage in school-based gun violence.
Some of its identified students have been as young as eight years old. And they were planning mass, spree murders. This group represents the key unknowns in policy. Consistently, a part of their mental health issues is a fascination with guns. One middle school student sawed off a shot gun to conceal it in a book bag.
START’s hotline receives 30 – 50 a day! START works up a full assessment on each referred student. Since 2008, START has responded to more than 250 school incidents, from elementary schools to colleges. START are experts at training, and bring counselors, law enforcement, school officials (teachers and administrators) and parents together in a dynamic to prevent school-based violence. Are parents interested? Overwhelmingly, yes. “They want their children to receive help as long as they need,” says Tony Beliz, START director. “And they don’t mind their children’s names being placed in a database.”
When asked by the CBS reporter about how his clients respond to incidents when they occur, Beliz said his 50 highest-risk clients are “fascinated by these prior incidents—and how they might do it better.”
That answer and description of a behavior often the source of speculation is not anecdotal, it’s empirical. It’s a real-time, reality-based report. It comes from the country’s only program that is daily working with youth at high risk for initiating school-based violence. It goes beyond anything we have imagined. Their engagement is not only with violence, or to duplicate existing violence, but—as historically true with hot rod cars and ham radios, DJ mixing boards and computer apps—a group of kids out there are studying and analyzing mass school violence to find points of innovation—ways that “they might do it better.”
These kids have their own rules. Within their mental health issues is a deep and significant attachment to guns, as their source of achievement, reality, fantasy and power. They are being aided and assisted by an organization and a group of people whose resistance to new rules is enabling their pursuit, and whose logic denies both their compliance and our mutual responsibility.
As START shows, let’s put in rules that work.
