Gun Violence and Gun

¶ … Gun Violence in the United States According to the Gun Violence Archive, which keeps track of gun-related violence in the United States, 2016 has had 53,602 known incidents, resulting in 13,854 deaths and 28,505 injuries. There have been 363 mass shooting incidents in 2016. In 2015, there were 372 mass shootings killing a total of 475 people and wounding 1,870, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker ("Guns in the U.S.: The statistics behind the violence" 2016). Defensive use accounts for 1683 of all gun-related incidents in 2016, and 1,988 gun incidents in 2016 were classified as being accidental (Gun Violence Archive, 2016).

In 2015 alone, there were 64 school shootings. Some of those incidents did not involve casualties, but the numbers still prove alarming, revealing the extent of the problem ("Guns in the U.S.: The statistics behind the violence" 2016). Even more mass shootings take place in ordinary businesses -- about 45.5% of "active" shooting incidents happened at businesses (Simon & Sanchez, 2015). An "active" shooting refers to a public event, in which "both law enforcement and citizens have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses," (Simon & Sanchez, 2015).

In those events, the shootings end up escalating because not only police but also civilians also have guns. Between 1968 and 2011, there were 1.4 million firearm-related deaths in the United States, more than the deaths that resulted from every military conflict since the War of Independence ("Guns in the U.S.: The statistics behind the violence" 2016). Guns are also proliferating. With every mass shooting, gun ownership surges (Simon & Sanchez, 2015).

The gun lobby backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) believes arming people with more guns would prevent gun violence, which is like saying that eating more fast food will prevent a heart attack. Yet the NRA continues to cling to its stance, and continues to raise and spend vast amounts of money on ensuring that gun laws remain sacrosanct. Raw data on gun violence exists, for the most part.

There is still, however, "an official mystery in the United States as to the number of people who are killed by the police," (Kodjak, 2015). The Gun Violence Archive is a non-profit organization, not an officially recognized tracking system. However, according to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 1,754 officer-involved incidents in which the suspect was shot or killed with a gun, and 307 incidents where the officer was shot or killed with a gun in 2016.

However, there is still no causal research that public health officials can use to design sensible gun policy. The reason for the lack of causal research is that gun fanatics have infiltrated the government to a dangerous degree. Gun fanatics are protecting the Second Amendment to the point where it is interfering with civil liberties, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the right to information.

The Republican approach has been "lock up the science for 20 years and try to proceed by yelling," (Barzilay and Mahoney, 2016, p. 1). The United States has a gun proliferation problem that is embarrassing as well as it is dangerous. For example, the United States ranks "number one in firearms per capita" and also has "the highest homicide-by-firearm rate among the world's most developed nations," (Masters, 2016).

School shootings like Columbine have also drawn attention to the extent of the problem: guns are not being used to defend poor little old ladies from home invaders. These weapons are falling into the wrong hands. Whether those hands are using the guns to commit suicide or homicide does not matter. What does matter is that too many people have guns that are using them violently, neither to protect their families nor to form a militia in case Donald Trump gets out of control.

As Barry (2015) points out, Americans are slow on the pickup. Americans have failed to draw a connection between mass shootings and gun homicides, instead framing the gun rights issue as a matter of principle that transcends ethics or human rights. Central to the issue is also the language and discourse. The term "gun control" is one that is reflexively hated by gun advocacy groups, even those that might be amenable to some forms of gun regulations (Barry, Mcginty, Vernick & Webster, 2015).

To come to a reasonable solution regarding gun regulations that still preserve the inherent right of all Americans, gun control advocates need to rebrand themselves as gun rights advocates. Framing the gun issue as a rights-based issue would remove the value-laden language of gun "control," which raises the hairs on the necks of government-fearing folk.

Why the CDC cannot research gun violence In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been investigating gun violence but when NRA "accused the agency of promoting gun control," Congress actually "threatened to strip the agency's funding," going so far as to pass a tack-on bill called the Dickey Amendment (Frankel, 2015, p. 1). Therefore, the CDC technically can research gun violence; but it hasn't because it would face devastating funding cuts and receive no additional funding for gun research. The same is true for other research agencies.

"Young academics were warned that joining the field was a good way to kill their careers. And the odd gun study that got published went through linguistic gymnastics to hide any connection to firearms," (Frankel, 2015, p. 1). The self-imposed ban on gun research is barely legal, deeply corrupt, and sinister enough to sound like a conspiracy theory. Moreover, funding for gun research is much less than it is for guns or the NRA, which has a nefarious stranglehold on the American government.

In 2012, after the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama issued an executive order freeing the CDC from its previous research ban but the CDC still has not been able to attract the funding. When Obama set aside $10 million for the research, Congressional Republicans said no. One million members of a coalition of public health organizations, medical groups, and research universities have clamored for a more legal, sensible, and ethical framework.

Recently, 141 medical groups sent a collective letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, but it is unlikely to go anywhere (Masters, 2016). The CDC maintains the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System -- All Injury Program (NEISS-AIP), with only $50,000 per year (Barzilay and Mahoney, 2016, p. 1). The collection of raw data is insufficient for creating public policy, which is the way the NRA wants it. Without empirical data, it will be impossible to pass gun control laws.

The NRA has opposed gun research so vehemently because it knows what the research will reveal, and it is actively suppressing the facts. The facts do not constitute a political agenda, as the NRA suggests; the facts are just the facts. If the NRA believes that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," then they should actually bear the burden of proof and use CDC data to substantiate their claims.

The NRA (2016) has become an organization that reflexively opposes any type of gun control or gun regulation, not an organization that necessarily defends anyone's constitutional rights. Their hard-lined stance, coupled with deep pockets, is infringing on the rights of Americans to have access to credible data related to gun violence. Moreover, the NRA opposes research by presuming that the CDC has a political agenda. A research hypothesis is not a political agenda.

Generally, the position of hard-lined gun advocates is less about logic, reason, and constitutionality as it is about anger, emotional responses, and contrarian liberal bashing. As Melzer (2015) puts it, gun rights organizations like the NRA and their "deeply committed supporters also purchase firearms for a more symbolic reason: to send a warming to the federal government that individuals have the rights and are willing to fight," (p. 793). All of the NRA's arguments are logical fallacies.

Some are slippery slope fallacies, and others are straw man fallacies, but there are no cogent arguments coming from the pro-fun lobby. The self-defense excuse is commonly invoked: many people who own guns claim that they have scared off intruders simply by brandishing the weapon (Lott, 2010). The argument is that people need guns to defend themselves from other people who have guns, which is why gun ownership has been on the rise in some states in the U.S. However, self-defense only perpetuates the problem.

Too many Americans already own weapons," (Spitzer, 2015, p. 7). Yet just like the fallacies inherent in the argument that background checks would be too difficult to implement, there is also a fallacy in claiming that it would be too difficult to control guns because too many guns exist. Health Risks involved with firearms. Guns are a public health issue. The American Medical Association has officially called firearm violence a "public health crisis," (Barzilay and Mohney, 2016, p. 1).

Specific risks can be classified as accidents, suicide, and homicides, with the latter potentially broken down further into categories that could include police shootings that were not classified as homicides. "The United States loses far more people to gun violence -- homicidal, suicidal, accidental -- than almost any other country, and there is one reason: the easy availability of guns," ("Gun violence in America is out of control," 2016). Most gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides.

There are some empirical data on gun-related suicide deaths that point to causality, at least case control studies. In one, researchers studied 47 adolescents who had died, comparing to 47 adolescents who had attempted, and another 47 in a control group, people who had suicidal ideations and were in a psychiatric ward but who had never actually attempted suicide.

The results showed that those who did die by suicide were twice as likely to have a gun in their home; firearms is a risk factor for suicide in other age cohorts, too ("Firearm Access is a Risk Factor for Suicide," n.d.). "Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk," ("Firearm Access is a Risk Factor for Suicide," n.d.).

Looking at it another way, firearm suicide attempts are more likely to be successful, at a rate of 85%. On the contrary, the most widely used alternative suicide attempt methods have case fatality rates below 5% ("Firearm Access is a Risk Factor for Suicide," n.d.). One reason for the gaping difference between rates of suicide deaths between firearms and non-firearms is the ease of access to the device and its quick lethality.

Researchers controlled for extraneous variables like rural versus urban settings and found that there were no differences; the gun remains the key variable in predicting a successful suicide, offering those with suicidal ideations the means by which to carry out their own deaths. As a public health issue, gun violence needs to be studied like other public health issues, like obesity or cancer. The political muzzle on science is inexcusable, and it is no small wonder the NRA is able to get away with their rabid lobbying.

Given the muzzle on science, policy might need to change from a different direction: a more legalistic one. One method of circumventing the power of the NRA would be to begin by reviewing the landmark 19th century Supreme Court case United States v. Cruikshank, in which the Court ruled that the Second Amendment "has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government," (United States v. Cruikshank).

A case would have to be brought to the Court that showed that gun violence is infringing on other personal rights, though, and this could be difficult particularly as Trump will be in charge of selecting the next Justice. Another approach would be to continue allowing states to individually decide and determine their own gun laws, as is the case now. There are several problems with this approach.

One is that the Second Amendment still has not been clarified to mean what the Framers originally intended: that guns are for protecting the people from tyranny, not for committing an embarrassing number of violent crimes. Moreover, variations in state gun laws may be making the problem worse. As Knight (2013) found in extensive research tracing the gun regulations in multiple states that states with weak gun laws tend to become trafficking points for states with tight gun control laws.

The state to state gun traffic creates almost a black market or at least a grey market effect. In fact, "criminal possession of guns is higher in states exposed to weak laws in nearby states," showing that the black market in guns flourishes in the nebulous legal environment (Knight, 2013). Another problem with a lack of federal legislation is that it leads to unclear laws that vary widely and are thus open to misinterpretation and ambiguity. Americans are already stupid enough -- they need to think in absolute terms.

"The attention to detail in gun regulation is both incredibly specific while at the same time creating regulation that isn't fully comprehensive," (Cage, 2013, p. 1). The federal government needs to extricate the NRA from its policy making and revert to a science-based or at least legalistic approach. An outright ban on handguns or any firearms is unlikely, and would be unconstitutional. Only about one quarter of all Americans support an outright ban on handguns (Goldberg, 2012).

That number is actually quite high considering the rabid rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum and the rise in gun ownership in some states. Just shy of half of all Americans admit to owning a gun; but there are actually enough firearms in America to arm every single man, woman, and child -- and those are just the licensed weapons (Goldberg, 2012).

Certainly, there can be enough public support for a more sensible gun policy that does not involve revoking Constitutional rights but which does frame the issue as a matter of the right to live. When two rights conflict, usually the one that is more pressing tends to.