Pow Pow Crash Boom Bang

The recent shootings in Santa Barbara affected me.  More than the news normally affects me.  Well, that was until a woman was shot in the face in Albuquerque on Friday about a half mile from our house.  She was driving home during rush hour on the same road Ben takes, when a shooter, standing on a pedestrian bridge, shot through her windshield.  I sit here and I think, "What?".  And man, I'm sick of just sitting here, thinking to myself "What?" every time I hear that someone else has been shot.

If you know me, you already know how I feel about guns.  I love them and think we should all have an armory in our linen closet because the U.S. is at risk of becoming a totalitarian state and it is our constitutional right to arm ourselves as a well regulated militia.  If only you could see the smile on my face as I write that...  You are probably thinking, "This is going to be some super liberal, emotional, 'guns are scary and no one should have them!' rant."  False.  I mean yes, in my perfect world there would be no guns because there would be no war and no death and no violence and everyone would be nice to each other and our biggest problem of the day would be whether or not we want ice cream or cookies for dessert.  But perfect worlds aren't real worlds.  And I know the real world solution to gun violence is not to get rid of all guns (I'm an optimist, not an absolutist).

But gun violence is an undeniable problem.  It's a problem that scares me as a U.S. citizen, as Asher's mother, and as a woman.  I'm writing this post as a public healther, a mom, and someone who has been hurt by a crazy person.  Let's talk about guns.

Do We Really Have a Problem?  Or Are You And John Oliver Just Incahoots?
Yes.  We really do have a problem.  The facts I am presenting here come from the Departments of Defense & Justice, the CDC, and JAMA.  Can we just please accept them as fact and not argue that they are inflated or inaccurate or a scare tactic from the whimsical far left?

• 32 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 140 are treated for a gun assault in the ER
• 51 people kill themselves with a firearm every day and 45 people are shot or killed in an accidental shooting
• In 2011, 467,321 (almost half a million) people were victims of a violent crime committed with a firearm
• Firearms are used in 68% of murders, 41% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults
• The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has presented unequivocal evidence that more guns equal more murders, and the data supports it when comparing the U.S. to other countries and when looking at gun regulation/numbers across states within the U.S.
• More U.S. civilians have been killed with guns than all U.S. soldiers who have ever been killed in a war- from the Revolutionary War to present day

How are we doing so far?  Let's tackle the next hurdle to actually engaging in a discussion about guns.  As Americans we love our country.  And we should.  We think we are really, really great.  And we are.  But you know what bugs me?  When people try to say we aren't any worse off than other developed countries in terms of gun violence.  Loosen your patriotism pants for a minute and let's just agree that Americans seem to have a unique propensity for killing themselves and each other with guns?  No.  Okay.  Here you go.

• Compared to all other First World countries, we have average rates of assault and robbery, but we have the most guns, the weakest gun laws and by far the highest rates of gun homicide, suicide, and accidental gun deaths
• The U.S. firearm homicide rates is 20 times higher than the combined rates of 22 countries that are our peers in terms of wealth and population
• 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years have taken place in the U.S. (second place is Finland with 2)
• In 2009, the UK had 18 gun homicides and 155 gun-related deaths.  That same year, the U.S. had 11,101 gun homicides and 32,163 gun-related deaths.

Why do I care how we compare to other countries?  Oh, you are such an American. 

Now that we have (hopefully) established that there appears to be some troubling trends surrounding gun possession (see how I did that entirely with data and not one single gut-wrenching snippet of an interview from a parent who has lost a child to gun violence?), let's dive in a little deeper.

When I say "Public", You say "Health", PUBLIC HEALTH, PUBLIC HEALTH

Public health is a good place to start.  It is objective and it is population based (meaning I'm not talking about any one person).  So what are the effects of gun violence on our country as a whole?  Let's start with cost.  The medical treatment, criminal justice proceedings, security changes following incidents, and reduction in quality of life related to gun violence are estimated to cost roughly $100 billion each year.  The lifetime medical cost for gun violence survivors in the United States is currently estimated to be around $2.3 billion, with half of those costs being covered by taxpayers. 

Cost is important, but I can't pretend that my biggest concern is from the perspective of economics.  It's from a perspective of cause.  I'll get into this more in the third section: my opposition to weak gun control as a woman (alternative title: As a Girl I'm Pissed That a Lobby of Mostly Men Has Enabled Unstable, Hee-Man-Woman-Hating Dudes to Carry Weapons, And Guess What Ladies & Gents, You Should be Too). But until then... What does a public health examination of cause look like?  In 1854 there was a cholera outbreak on Broad Street in London.   Within 3 days, 127 people died.  At that time it was assumed that disease was spread by "bad air" and physicians focused on the immediate situation at hand; managing diarrhea.  But Dr. John Snow, the father of epidemiology, started digging around.  He talked to the locals and mapped the disease outbreak geographically.  And this led him to a public water pump.  Contaminated water was identified as the cause of cholera and the epidemic came to a rapid close (after over 600 deaths) once people stopped drinking from the pump.  Stop traffic.  How the heck did we end up talking about deadly diarrhea?  To respond to gun violence by focusing on guns is like responding to a cholera outbreak by focusing on poop.  Yes, we must address what's happening right in front of us, but what about the water pump?  What is actually causing gun violence?  It ain't guns people.  It's people.  The public health epidemic we face is not a gun epidemic, it's a violence epidemic.  And that is a very big problem (much bigger than guns) to tackle.

I'm a Mom Now, Guess How Much That Changes Things....

On December 14, 2012 I got up from my desk and walked across the hall to my coworker.  "Are you watching the news?" I asked.  She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "I can't, and I don't want to talk about it."  She had a 3-year old and a 5-year old at home.  I was 7 months pregnant at the time, and although I didn't yet have my baby in my arms, what I was seeing on CNN was making me feel sick.  Twenty children and six staff members had been fatally shot in Connecticut.  It was the deadliest shooting at an elementary school and the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.  In doing the research for this post, I started to read the sequence of events that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary, beginning at 9:30 in the morning when the shooter killed his mom and then headed to the school.  I had to stop three sentences in.  Because reading about someone walking, heavily armed, into a school full of sweet children is not something I can stomach.  Reading the interviews of first graders, the 'lucky survivors', is not something I can do.  And imaging how a parent continues to live their life after someone has blown away their tiny child with a Bushmaster AR-15 makes me want to vomit.  And you know what, I'm not unique in that.  There aren't many people in this world who are capable of being so insensitive (err stupid) to say that dead children don't make them stop and think that maybe, just maybe, we should be bearing arms a little differently.  (If you are one of those people stop reading.  I'm interested in engaging in respectful discourse with people who don't agree with me, but if you honestly think that protecting your hobby is more important than the life of a 5-year old, we are done here).  

My dear Canadian friend Carly visited a couple of weeks ago and when I asked her about the potential of moving back to the States, her immediate answer was, "My biggest hesitation about moving to the U.S. is having my kids grow up where there is such a big problem with guns."  A legitimate concern?  You bet your ass it is.

• American children die from gun violence 11 times as often as children in other high-income countries
• Gun homicides are the second-leading cause of death (after car accidents) for kids ages 1-19
• Of all children (10-24) who are murdered in the U.S., 82% die at the hand of a shooter
• In 2007, more pre-school-aged children were killed by guns than police officers were killed in the line of duty

Does this not freak you out?  It freaks out people who don't live here.  So why has it become such a norm?  Why do we say "Oh sad" when we read about a child being shot and then move on with our lives almost immediately?  Something strange and bad has happened in American culture where this is considered normal.

As a mom in New Mexico, I'm not going to lie, I'm more than a little freaked out.  Not only are you not required to have a state permit to purchase or possess a gun, but you don't need to register your firearm.  There is not an assault weapon law or a magazine capacity restriction, and an owner license is not required.  You do not need a permit for open carry of a firearm or to transport a loaded gun in a vehicle.  It is also lawful for a civilian to possess a machine gun.  Couple that with our rowdy police force and I swear, I'm living in the wild west.

It's Easy To Support Guns When You Are Dude, You Know Why?  Your Life Isn't As Scary

The voice that is largely missing from the gun control discussion it that of women.  As a whole.  Why should we care about gun control?  Because we often pay the price for guns ending up in the wrong hands.  The Santa Barbara killings highlight this more than other recent shootings.  This was a kid who hated women and whose agenda was to kill as many as he could.  Yes, this was a rare event.  But guess what isn't a rare event?  People hurting women.

• There is a 270% increase in the likelihood that a woman will die a violent death if a gun is present in the home
• Women are 3 times more likely to be shot and killed by an intimate partner than men are to be murdered by strangers
• A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure someone in a domestic shooting than to be used in self-defense
• During their lifetime, 1/5 of women will be raped, 1/4 beaten, and 1/6 stalked by male offenders

You might be reading this and thinking that it doesn't affect you.  That you will own a gun safely and you would never hurt someone with it.  Here's the problem with your logic: if you get to own a gun, so does he.  And he may not be the upstanding citizen you are.  So to dismiss the issue of gun violence because it doesn't affect you is frankly short-sighted, irresponsible, and insulting to those of us who don't have the luxury of only worrying about what you do with your gun.  It's really easy to think that only sketchy, clearly unstable people hurt others.  So you might be thinking, well my friends and the people I hunt with, we are all good guys and none of us would ever do anything bad.  The person who hurt me has a PhD from Yale.  Ya think people would look at him, assume he is a dangerous, and decide maybe we shouldn't let him conceal and carry?  No they would not.  I have to spend the rest of my life with the knowledge that there is someone in this world who has already hurt me once, who would do it again, and who could be the owner of a gun as I write this post.  Loosey goosey gun regulation probably doesn't keep you up at night, but I've definitely lost sleep over it.

I'm not saying all men are bad or that only men hurt women.  What I'm saying is that I imagine many of you who own a gun have never been the victims of a violent crime.  Or have worried, beyond a general sense of worry, about who might own a gun, or what that person might do with their gun.  This is a perspective I urge you to consider.  I'm not asking you to surrender your weapons, I am asking you to not take lightly the effect your right to have a gun has on those around you. 

So What Do We Do?  

First, let's acknowledge that one of the biggest disservices that has been done to the opportunity for actual change is the gross oversimplication of the issue.  When I've talked to people about guns, they are either all for people having them in whatever capacity the possessor chooses or they think we should take them all away.  At this point the conversation quickly dissipates into an emotionally-charged, "You're okay with children dying!" versus "You want to take away my constitutional right!" hissy fit.  And nothing gets done.  But let's talk about everything that falls between absolute armament and stone-age style sticks and stones self-defense. 

Solution 1:   Better Resources For Gun Violence Prevention

During the 20th century our country noticed an alarming trend of increasing motor vehicle deaths.  We didn't get rid of cars, but we improved driver education, added airbags, issued seat belt laws, and automakers developed collapsible, energy-absorbing steering columns.  Know what happened?  Fatalities fell more than 80%.  Another example of how we respond to bad things-  In 2007 the I-35 bridge in Minnesota collapsed during rush hour. 13 people died.  Immediately, the National Transportation Safety Board began a comprehensive investigation that took over a year to complete.  A private engineering firm was also hired to conduct their own parallel investigation of the collapse.  Following the collapse, the Federal Highway Administration advised states to inspect 700 bridges of similar construction after a design flaw in the bridge was discovered. Something unthinkable had happened, and we realized that anywhere, at any time, a bridge could collapse with us on it.  We aggressively sought answers and made plans for preventing the tragedy from happening again.   So why aren't we as concerned or proactive about gun violence?  Why do we actually seem to be the opposite?  Since 1994, Congress has systematically denied funds to the Centers for Disease Control for any research on gun violence prevention (ahem, thank you NRA, you #$@%^#s).  

Solution 2:  Close the Gun Show Loophole & Require (Better) Background Checks

In nearly every other developed country in the world, universal background checks are required before an individual can possess or purchase a firearm.  Our current system results in about 60% of gun sales requiring a background check, with 40% (online sales, gun shows, etc.) not going through a check at all.  We need to give more authority (and money) to ATF to provide better and more thorough oversight of firearm commerce, at least that's my opinion.  Background checks which must be conducted by licensed gun shops have prevented 1 million people from buying guns since 1998.  Imagine how many people have guns who shouldn't because they found the loophole?

Solution 3:  Can We Talk About the KINDS of Guns We Own?

There used to be something called the assault-weapons ban in the U.S.  It expired in 2004 and was not reauthorized.  Why would a ban like this be important?  When James Holmes shot his way through a theater in Colorado, he had a drum-style magazine holding up to 100 rounds of ammunition, making continuous firing and maximum casualties easy.  Guns like these have no reasonable civilian purpose, and their sale/ownership can be restricted without infringing upon your 2nd amendment right.  Looking at data from the last 30 years, more than half of all mass shooters were armed with high-capacity magazines, assault weapons, or both.  Why would we make it so easy?

Solution 4:  Manufacturers, Do Your Part.

Couldn't all semiautomatic pistols have magazine safety locks so that they don't fire when a clip is removed (many accidental shootings occur when kids find guns in the house and remove the magazine, thinking the gun is now 'unloaded')?  Maybe there is a reason this can't be done that I'm not aware of (I'm definitely not a handgun expert), but I can't help but think There has to be a better way.

Solution 5:  Change How We Think About Gun Violence

Here's the deal, when an economist did an in-depth analysis into the correlations between gun deaths and social indicators, his results were surprising.  Higher population density, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence.  The idea that it's 'the other people' who are at risk of gun violence is dumb.  Gun violence happens when we don't have good gun control and education about the risks associated with gun ownership.  What this particular study found was that firearm deaths were significantly lower in states with gun restrictions in place, in the form of assault weapons bans, trigger locks, and safe storage requirements.  So... question?  Why is nothing changing?

Another way to think of the individual rights vs. collective good debate is speed limits.  I believe that I could safely drive my minivan at 140 mph.  And maybe I could.  But guess what, society has decided they aren't going to implicitly trust my judgement, not when they might be driving on that same road.  Not to mention if I get to drive 140 mph so does my neighbor, and trust me, you don't want this woman driving a bike much less a car much less a fast moving car.  Instead, we all have to drive at a speed that has been found to be safe for everyone.  Why is there so much opposition to setting safer speed limits for guns?

This was a long post.  And I hope it ruffled feathers.  Whether you are irritated because you own a gun and feel a little bit uncomfortable about the things I said, or because you don't own a gun and are more pissed off than you were 15 minutes ago about the state of guns in our country.  Ruffle people, ruffle.  This is an issue that demands attention.  Talk about it with your friends, argue with your spouse, call me up...I'd love to continue this conversation.  But let's start doing something about what is happening right in front of us.