Domestic Terrorism: Look In The Mirror?

There's an old sad saying that "marijuana does cause insanity - but only in politicians." Alas, the same holds true for guns.

President Obama, spurred by America's latest mass shooting, delivered a "rare Oval Office speech" on Sunday night. His focus was on terrorism, by "thugs," and their "perverted interpretation of Islam" which he called "a cancer with no immediate cure" - but one he felt confident we would defeat. He restated his efforts to combat ISIS overseas, and then turned to a few thoughts on the domestic front - where Americans with guns kill tens of thousands yearly, selves and others, and injure ten times that, very very few of such shootings having anything to do with Islam. In other words, our own perverted form of cancer is much more widespread, and also with no immediate cure. Call it domestic terrorism, or American gun culture.

I write as an adult in long-term recovery from the particular American malady. My dad was a Midwest farm boy, raised as a hunter. He raised his own son – me – to handle guns too (not my sisters, though – he was a traditionalist/sexist that way). For some years, we commonly took drives to the closest shooting range, where I was trained by both him and professionals to load, clean, and shoot rifles, pistols, and shotguns. It was strict training, too – not only was I graded on my marksmanship each week, but if you swung a barrel around carelessly in any directions, you’d get yelled at at a minimum, or maybe slapped hard. They took safety seriously on the gun range.

I got to be pretty good, filling the “bull’s eyes” on targets of all kinds, including black silhouettes of humans where I was told to put holes in the head or heart, or wherever (pretty macabre in retrospect, that). Off the firing range, I shot at cans and bottles, or pine cones on trees, hitting many at various ranges until my dad admitted, likely with both pride and regret, that I was better than he was. My first time skeet shooting, I nailed the first clay “pigeon” with the shotgun and many more after that. Eventually, I took some tests and was certified as some sort of “junior marksman” - by the NRA, no less!

Then I grew up, and thus came the end of my weaponry career, other than a couple of “youthful indiscretions” that need not be detailed here. Although I might have had a couple of Walter Mitty-ish or Rambo-like fantasies of breaking up robberies and such with a well-aimed gun, I basically forgot about weapons in real life, as being a non-hunter, there was no need to be around them. But once I started studying and then working in the public health arena and in hospitals, the issues of gun violence and gun policy kept arising. The most dramatic example was learning, and seeing, that military surgeons were being trained at Los Angeles General Hospital as there were more gun wounds showing up there then on any battle front.

Way back in 1995, I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle "The Politics of Gun Control" a very good book on American gun policy, by political scientist Robert Spitzer, wherein he likened the debate over gun policy in the USA to the international arms control struggles (his book is good enough to have just had a 6th edition published in 2015). He noted that about half of all American homes had at least one gun; more than 30,000 people were killed with guns annually, half of those suicides, with additional injuries totaling as many as 250,000. “Gun rights” proponents continually assert that much higher numbers of crimes are prevented by gun owners, but with little proof of those numbers, which are thought to be vastly overestimated. More respectable studies indicate that gun owners are four times more likely to be shot when confronted by an assailant, and that the higher the prevalence of guns in a community, the higher rates of gun-related death are. Those are crucial facts, ignored by the NRA, which even succeeded in getting gun research de-funded to avoid having to to deal with more such damning factual information.

And that has worked for the gun lobby, of course, with the NRA really serving as a marketing arm of the gun industry - as usual, one can follow the money to the real motivations. The tool here is fear - of criminals, and of the evil government. In any event, 15 years back, Spitzer noted, “the gun culture unites and motivates gun enthusiasts,” but “no parallel force provides similar unity and motivation to gun control proponents.”

As shown by this past week's San Bernardino tragedy and response to it, the same dynamic still prevails today, on both policy and personal levels. Extremists dominate the debate. Spitzer also noted in his 1995 book that “rational policy-making recedes from view when the political combatants spend most of their time screaming political obscenities at each other.” But the NRA and other gun lobbyists win, most every time. Even bans on “assault weapons” die, along with childproof safety measures, bans on armor-proof bullets, background checks, and anything else. Any little such proposal is treated as akin to “confiscation.”

Ironically enough, it sometimes seems that the further one is away to actual need for a gun, the more rabid that need is felt. Affluent white suburban men can be particularly vehement about their need for self-defense, even though the overall violent crime rate in our nation has nearly halved in the past 20 years - and again, more risk comes from having a gun in the home than from criminals outside it. Hunting is fine - I feel no need to do it, but that's just me - but a very small percentage of gun owners hunt. Likewise target shooting. So it comes down to fear of crime and tyranny, not that having guns is any real deterrent to those (if the evil government really wanted to get you, they would, not matter what your arsenal). And our government has in fact let this sad and lethal status quo prevail, supported by an interpretation of the Second Amendment that United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Now the fights are over issues like "guns vs. mental health treatment," "terrorism vs. home-grown gun violence," "prayers vs. action." and the like. But these are false dichotomies; it is not either/or. We need both a more "well-regulated" approach to guns; non-Islamic gun-toters are still a far bigger problem than "terrorism"; too many politicians, praying or not, are on the take and shamefully cowardly for that, having just yet again voted down background checks after the San Bernardino slaughter.

And, predictably, a surge in gun sales has ensued after this latest tragedy.

So after all that cheerful perspective, what to do? Australia changed their gun policy radically, basically banning much private gun ownership, in the 1990s, with a radical decline in gun violence - there are arguments about cause and effect there, but lessons to be learned. Again, the concentration of guns in any community seems to correlate with gun violence, suicides, and accidents (as a teenager might observe about that, "No, duh"). But we have something like 300 million guns now and they are not going away anytime soon; nor would outright confiscation be a workable policy. On Sunday, Obama was careful - too careful, many of us would argue - not to push too hard on the domestic gun terrorism issue; he called for keeping anybody already on a "no-fly" list from getting guns, and for decreasing access to "assault weapons." That's fairly low-hanging fruit. The assault weapons ban in California expired before it could really have an impact, and any effective such policies must be national, not state or local. Taxing and regulation ammo has been proposed as one way to get around gun law restrictions, and should be considered. But most of all, buying and owning guns should become at least as restricted as other privileges in our society - owning and driving cars for example, as those kill many Americans too. Mandated training, tests, background checks, and the like need to be much more rigorous than now. No reasonable person should object, and most would not. Heck, I'd even bargain with the NRA to allow them to be the preferred source of such training - but only if they'd back off on the fanatic, divisive, con job they've pulled on gun owners and politicians. Perhaps it could be structured so they'd make at least as much money from training fees as they get from gun makers, and everybody wins. In that spirit, this farcical but grounded in reality analogy has been circulating online, and became doubly relevant with the latest anti-women's health shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado:

"How about we treat every man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun. It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?"

Well?

Polls show the vast majority of Americans support more sane gun policy. More rational, reasoned gun owners must speak out and advocate for policies that do not endanger us all – including themselves – and do not make all gun owners look like the proverbial gun nuts. This will likely take at least a generation, as workable guns decline and those who are obsessed with owning them die off - but somebody has to start the process. So, let us start. Please.