Time to Ban Guns?

Last week the New Republic published a piece by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, a regular columnist for that publication, that makes the argument for banning all guns from American society. Interestingly, the writer isn't talking only about civilian gun ownership, as she advocates disarming the police as well.

It's been a while since I last saw something in print that staked out this position, and so I found myself thinking that it might be time to ban guns, or it might be time to review the reasons why we should not do so.  Further, the columnist sets forth her reasons for making the argument, explaining that she believes it is necessary to make the case for elimination of guns from our society in order to bring the possibility into the public mind.  And that got me to thinking about the other side of the coin: reasons why, instead, it might actually be counterproductive to do this.

First, a little background for those who may not be familiar with the publication. The New Republic is a "progressive/liberal" magazine with a focus on politics and public policy.  It has been around for over a century, and its founders included that luminary of American journalism named Walter Lippmann.  (For those with an interest in the history of American journalism, I highly recommend Ronald Steel's book Walter Lippmann and the American Century, a superb biography that was published in 1981 and won the Bancroft Prize.)  So this is not some millennial left-wing blog site.

Let us first consider the case for banning guns.  In its most elemental form, it is starkly simple.  Guns are used for things other than killing people, to be sure, but Maltz Bovy does not address that, so I will set that aside for the moment and focus on this particular use.  Guns are used to kill people.  Yes, we know that "guns don't kill people; people kill people."  And we know there are other ways of killing people, as people killed each other, sometimes in large numbers, for millennia before the invention of the firearm, which historians place in the 12th or 13th Century.  So the gun is simply a tool, an inanimate object without autonomy.  Thus, as a careful user of English, I am constantly irritated by news accounts that someone was killed by (rather than with) a gun, just as I am when there is a report that someone was "killed by an SUV."  But guns are used to kill people, and it is argued that they afford more of what the New York Times called "brutal speed and efficiency" in a recent editorial advocating a new ban on semiautomatic rifles.

So let us imagine 21st-Century American society without guns.  To be sure, that does require some imagination.  We cannot assume it will be like more primitive societies that didn't have guns because they hadn't been invented yet, because at the same time they didn't have guns, they also didn't have modern social institutions that provide stability and make violent behavior generally unacceptable.  In other words, we have made much progress toward creating a "civil society" in the last half millennium, so if we could just eliminate guns, that would be a great leap forward, with apologies to Chairman Mao for appropriating the phrase.  Of course we also cannot assume an American society from which we magically removed all guns would be suddenly transformed into a North American version of Japan, where guns in the hands of civilians are rare.  There are vast sociocultural differences between Japan and the US.  To offer just one example, many of the shootings occurring in the US each year are related to the urban subculture involved in illegal drugs and gang activities, and Japan doesn't have anything quite analogous to that.

But let us imagine that we could eliminate all guns, and thus all shootings, from American society.  Would that eliminate all crime?  Well, no, obviously not.  It would not eliminate crime, it would not eliminate violent crime, and it would not end homicide.  It would reduce the number of killings - both homicides and suicides (the latter of which typically outnumber the former) in which guns are used, necessarily to zero, because this is an absolutist hypothetical.  But there are other ways of killing; they simply tend to be more difficult and may require more skill or planning.

In general violent crime, to be successful, requires the same things that are required for success in war: careful planning or some other approach that results in the victim being surprised or unprepared to put up a defense; disparity of force; or both.  Firearms are not required.

Now let's look at things from the intended victim's viewpoint.  How does one avoid becoming a victim?  Well, take the elements required to make you a victim and hold them up to a mirror, and you see that you must be prepared to put up a defense and must be able to avoid being on the wrong end of disparity of force. So the keys are education and training, mental preparation, and possession of a tool that can serve as an equalizer if the person(s) intent on victimizing you are bigger, stronger, faster.  This is the rationale for the possession of a gun for personal defense.  Note the importance of education, training, mental preparation, and practice.  Without these, the gun is unlikely to serve its purpose.  It is not a talisman.

At this point it is tempting to go off on a tangent about whether private ownership of guns increases or decreases the risk to one's personal safety. The published literature is replete with "evidence" pointing in opposite directions.  If there is a gun in the household it is more likely to be used to injure or kill a member of the household than against a criminal intruder, says one side.  Oh, no, says the other side, the number of times guns are successfully used for self defense is greater by an order of magnitude, if you look at data collected and reported by criminologists.

So, rather than going off on that tangent, I'll just opine that the private citizen who does the "right things" mentioned above (education, training, mental preparation, practice) along with other "right things" such as safe storage, is going to be one for whom the risks of ownership are low and the value of possession for personal protection has obvious appeal.  In a household with children or other irresponsible people and adults lacking the good sense to secure firearms effectively; or a history of domestic violence; or people who are depressed and think the world would be better off without them ... yes, clearly, there are households where guns don't belong.

But when the advocate for a total ban is talking to a gun rights advocate and it gets down to brass tacks, one believes in the right to armed self defense and the use of lethal force in defense of life, and the other does not.  Once the discussion arrives at that point, there isn't really anything more to talk about.

So now let us imagine that we would like to see fewer guns in American society. Maybe our idea of "fewer" is zero, but let's leave it imprecise for the moment. We could say we'd like to keep guns out of "the wrong hands."  We could say we'd like to ban "weapons of war" (even though we mean the AR-15, when it's actually the M-16 that is a weapon of war).

So we press for universal background checks, and we say no one "needs" an AR-15, and we can find millions of gun owners to agree with us.  After all, the number of gun owners is about ten times as large as the number of owners of the AR-15 and similar rifles, and it's easy to compromise on what the other fellow has.  The large majority of members of the NRA are OK with universal background checks, although the percentage might drop a little if you remind them that if Uncle John is going to buy a new hunting rifle and decides he'll give his old .30-06 to Bobby, who is ready for his first deer season, that transfer has to go through a dealer.

Now, hold on, say the hardliners to their brethren inclined toward a softer position.  This is only the beginning.  This is a slippery slope.  Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile.  Every time they say "common sense gun control" remember it's always the first step toward something you won't like.

And that brings us to the question raised by Maltz Bovy's essay.  Not the first one: is it time to ban guns?  The rationales for and against could fill a book (and they have, many books), and I've given you the highlights.  No, the second one: is it time to make the case for this and try to bring it front and center in the public mind?

On the pro side, Maltz Bovy is right, if you tacitly accept that something is not possible, then it is not possible.  If you start talking about it like it is not only possible but clearly the right thing to do, then you can work on shifting public opinion your way.

On the con side, if you make a forceful public argument that unequivocally states your endgame, the very first move of the very first pawn will be resisted.

If you are a gun control advocate, Maltz Bovy is not helping your cause.  If you are a gun rights advocate urging the compromisers to take a harder line, Maltz Bovy has just made your case for you.

Muting the "Trump-Et?"

The other day Donald J. Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential contest, issued a public statement in the aftermath of a shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Tafsheen Malik and Syed Farook, a Pakistani immigrant and her husband, the Illinois-born son of Pakistani immigrants, attacked a large holiday gathering of Farook's coworkers, reportedly using semiautomatic rifles to kill 14 people and injure 21 more.  The pair were married, and early details of an ongoing investigation suggested both were "radicalized" Muslims who had embraced the concept of jihad as an Islamic fundamentalist war with Western society.

This mass shooting occurred as the federal government is grappling with decisions about admitting to the United States thousands of refugees from strife-ridden Syria, where the Islamic extremist group ISIS controls large areas of the country, now engulfed in civil war.

Mr. Trump called for a ban on any further immigration of Muslims into the United States until the federal government can "figure out what the hell is going on."

This was just the latest in a series of provocative statements from the candidate during a months-long campaign in which he has distinguished himself from others seeking the office in many ways, perhaps most notably a complete rejection of any notions of political correctness.  Trump has shown that he is ready, willing, and able to offend absolutely everyone.

In other parts of cyberspace, although not yet in the blogosphere, I have characterized Trump as jingoistic, xenophobic, nativistic, racist, and homophobic.  I have said he appeals to the basest impulses and the ugliest prejudices to be found in the American psyche.  His attractiveness as a candidate, I believe, relates to the fact that there is a segment of the electorate that is incoherently angry about many changes going on in the world around them.

[No, I am not a fan.]

His demand for a suspension, as he later qualified his call for a ban, of immigration by any and all Muslims until our government figures out "what the hell is going on" stems, I believe, from the simple fact that Mr. Trump himself does not know what the hell is going on.  Geopolitics and foreign policy are, and will likely remain, well beyond his ken.  What he sees is that there are Islamic extremists whose intentions toward Western society in general and the US in particular are malevolent.  Therefore, he insists, until some foolproof test is devised whereby it can be determined whether an individual Muslim who wishes to come to the US is, and will remain, no threat to Americans, we should allow absolutely no Muslims to enter the country.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has been with us for a very long time.  Before the Civil War, these tendencies were already very much with us.  American society went from 1.6% foreign born in 1830 to 9.7% in 1850, and the us-versus-them view of immigrants by the native-born was sufficient to provide the foundation for a strong nativist current in US politics in the second quarter of the 19th century.

That this phenomenon is not new, however, makes it no less repulsive. America has always been a beacon of freedom - political, religious, economic, social - to the rest of the world, and that necessarily attracts immigrants.  That is a fact of which we are justifiably proud.  We are inspired by "The New Colossus," the famous poem by Emma Lazarus that is inscribed in a place of honor at the base of the Statue of Liberty, a poem that concludes with the words

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! 

Mr. Trump has declared that ISIS, and Islamic extremists like Malik and Farook, along with the terrorists who killed over 120 people in Paris last month and others who have carried out attacks around the globe, have proven that all of the world's billion or so Muslims are suspect and must be viewed through a prism of presumptive guilt.

Words such as repugnant, appalling, reprehensible, and disgraceful can only begin to describe this kind of public pronouncement and the rationale that underlies it.

So what? you may be asking.  We live in a country in which freedom of expression is guaranteed.  People can think and say whatever they want, with few exceptions: no shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre or making other utterances that could pose an immediate danger to the public safety, for example.

Yes, freedom of expression is guaranteed - against abridgment by government. If someone who finds Trump's public utterances opprobrious punches him in the nose, that person has not violated the candidate's First Amendment rights, although he will likely be charged with battery.

This also means that the press has no obligation to report Mr. Trump's declarations.  They may do so if they think what he has to say is newsworthy. They are equally free to choose not to report, although they risk losing audience share if they don't report a story that is sure to interest the public.

What would Trump have to say to get the news media to decide it doesn't bear repeating?  Can we assume that no matter what he might say, no matter how outrageous, they will tell us, because it's news?  Probably so.

Then, at what point is there an obligation on the part of the press to say, here is what this fellow said, and these are the ravings of a madman?

Oh, no, they can't do that.  That would be interpreting.  They mustn't do that. They can only report the interpretations of others.  So they can tell us other Republican candidates have condemned what Trump said.

Let me tell what I think of that: Baloney!

The news media have a great deal of control over what and how much we learn about candidates.

Here is an example.  You've all seen how news organizations commission polls because of the public interest in the "horse race" aspect of the presidential campaign.  Within the last week, three polls were commissioned by news organizations: CNN, MSNBC, and USAToday.  All three looked at how Hillary Clinton matched up against Republican candidates in hypothetical general-election pairings, Clinton versus Trump, or Cruz, or Rubio, or Carson.  (MSNBC included Bush; the others did not.)

Missing from these polls, as reported by the superb political website realclearpolitics.com, was any match-up between the Republican candidates and Bernie Sanders.  Oh, well, that must be because Sanders doesn't match up anywhere nearly as well as Clinton.  After all, the conventional wisdom is that he's unelectable because his image is that of a crazy left-wing socialist.

Not so fast.  A poll conducted last week by Quinnipiac University (not on behalf of a news organization) looked at exactly those Sanders-versus-Republican-candidate match-ups, and ... well, waddya know?  Bernie does even better than Hillary, leading against Trump, Carson, Rubio, or Cruz.

The media have reported this campaign season's news as if Bernie Sanders is barely worth a mention.

Well, let me tell you something.  There is a candidate in this race who is barely worth a mention, and his name is Donald Trump.  Trump is a disgrace to this great nation.  Remember Ronald Reagan, who famously said Republicans should never speak ill of each other?  This was known as Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment."  Now consider this: Senator Lindsay Graham and former Governor Jeb Bush, two other Republican candidates, described Trump as "dangerous" (Graham) and "unhinged" (Bush) in the wake of The Donald's call for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslim immigration.

The news media do not have an obligation to report, breathlessly, the ravings of a madman who has been characterized by his fellow Republicans as "dangerous" and "unhinged."

Not when they have clearly made a deliberate decision to minimize their coverage of the campaign of Bernie Sanders, whose career and whose candidacy have been the most positive and principled this pundit has ever seen in American politics.

Is it newsworthy that we have a candidate who taps into deep-rooted American prejudices and ugly, base, xenophobic instincts?  Perhaps.  Should that be reported?  Before we can answer that question, we must ask another.  Does Trump merely tap into those ugly features of the American psyche?  Or does he encourage, ignite, inflame them?

I think you know my answer.

Shame on you, Donald Trump.  And shame on you, complicit journalists.
  

Research on Gun Violence Banned? Not Exactly.

Churchill, Thompson submachine gun, 1940

As a physician specializing in emergency medicine, I have a keen interest in areas of research that are related to my practice.  This includes public health and injury prevention.

Much medical research is funded with public dollars.  In fact, most medical research is funded either with public dollars or by industry, meaning the pharmaceutical industry and the manufacturers of medical devices. Among folks in academic medicine, it is considered a truism that publicly funded research is much more likely to be of high quality, whereas industry-funded research is much more likely to be biased, with problems ranging from study design intended to produce certain results, through dubious statistical methods, to spinning results to draw conclusions that aren't really justified.

Many years ago my colleagues in public health came up with the idea that violence is a public health problem.  This led to an interest in all sorts of research into the nature and causes of interpersonal violence.  One area of this research involves violent acts committed with firearms.

Early on some of the researchers adopted a metaphor from the discipline of infection control in which guns are viewed as "vectors" of "disease," rather like the way in which the female anopheles mosquito is a vector for malaria.

And here you can see where some trouble might begin.  You see, there are people - many Americans among them - who like guns.  And so, if you adopt a viewpoint that guns are a vector of disease, you will inevitably find yourself in conflict with those people.  If you want to control malaria, you are likely to decide an effective approach is to wipe out the population of mosquitos that transmit the parasite that causes the disease.  If you view guns as a vector, according to this metaphor, you are likely to think that eliminating guns from human societies may be the solution to the problem.

The reaction from gun rights advocates was predictable.  Maybe violence is a public health problem, they said, but guns are not a vector of disease, and this is an essentially flawed metaphor - a metaphor that biases the research done by the medical scientists working in this field, nearly all of which seems to begin with some sort of hypothesis that guns are bad and that wherever you look at the role of guns in human societies you will find trouble that would go away if we just took guns out of the picture.

At the same time that public health researchers were publishing one study after another that concluded guns are a problem (if not the problem), social scientists (especially criminologists) were doing research that seemed to reach very different conclusions, often finding that guns are used at least as much - maybe much more, according to some - to deter or stop crime than to injure or kill innocents.

It would be easy to conclude that researchers examining the same questions and reaching essentially opposite conclusions probably are all biased, and their opposite conclusions reflect opposite biases.  And that may be the case.  If you are reading this essay, that suggests you are interested in my opinion, so I'll tell you I have read most of this research, and it is pretty clear to me that there is plenty of bias to go around, and it is quite difficult to tell how much the results are influenced by it.  This much, however, I can tell you: the truth is not entirely on one side of this question.

One cannot reach any other conclusion than this: more research would be a good thing, and the less biased that research is by preconceived ideas on the part of researchers, the better.

Where should the funding for that research come from?

Well, public dollars seem a sensible choice, given that gun violence is a public health problem (in the view of medical scientists) or a social problem (in the view of social scientists).  (It is obviously both.)  Besides, what sort of private funding might there be?  You can imagine the potential source of bias if the money came from the firearm manufacturing industry, on one side, or billionaires (such as Michael Bloomberg or George Soros) who ardently support pro-gun-control advocacy groups, on the other.

And that takes us back to 1996, when the National Rifle Association was fed up with the public health research that pretty uniformly concluded guns are bad and we should get rid of them.  The NRA lobbied Congress, with the result that an omnibus appropriations bill prohibited the flow through the CDC of research funding that would "advocate or promote gun control."  (Those are the actual words in the legislation.)  Notice that this is not a prohibition on federal funding for research into the problem of gun violence.  But an article in the New York Times explains how it effectively became that, mostly because the CDC became "squeamish" about funding research in this area.

This puts a little bit different spin on the subject than what we have repeatedly been reading and hearing in the news lately, which is that the NRA succeeded in putting an end to research into this problem.  Two quotations from the Times article offer insight into two quite different perspectives on what the NRA asked the Congress to do:

 “We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the CDC-P, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.

 and

Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, said his group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones.  “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” Mr. Cox said. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”

In 2011 further congressional action extended this restriction on the flow of research dollars so that it affected all other agencies funded through the Department of Health and Human Services.

It seems clear that more research is needed.  It is not clear that congressional action is needed to reverse the actions taken in 1996 and 2011.  I may be extremely naive, but if were in charge of these dollars at the CDC, I would look for opportunities to fund research on gun violence that appeared to lack obvious bias in either direction, and consider the burden of proof to rest upon anyone who objected to convince my congressional overseers that the research was intended "to advocate or promote gun control."

And what sort of research might be funded?  Perhaps you've heard of the National Academy of Sciences.  One of the institutes under its umbrella is the Institute of Medicine (IOM).  The IOM's Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education has a Committee on Law and Justice that published an excellent report addressing this question two years ago: Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.  (If you follow the link you will see that you can buy a paperback copy of the report, but you can also read it online or download it as a pdf, free of charge.)  If you wonder about bias in this IOM report, I would draw to your attention that two of the reviewers of the report were Paul Blackman, a criminologist and political scientist who is regarded by his detractors as a shill for the NRA, and Arthur Kellermann, a distinguished medical professor and public health researcher whose work is harshly criticized by gun rights advocates.  The IOM does an excellent job of pulling in diverse viewpoints on controversial subjects.

When we see and hear in the news that more than 30,000 people are killed with firearms each year, and many more injured, a small fraction of these in horrific mass shootings that grab the headlines, we all want somebody to do something about it.  The question is what.

And the answer is not whatever seems to you or me to make sense.  I can tell you from my experience of 37 years studying medicine (beginning with medical school) that what makes sense often turns out to be completely wrong when subjected to scientific study.  We need more research.

Thanks to the IOM, we have an agenda.  It is possible to approach this research with an open mind and without bias.  That kind of research has not been prohibited by Congress.  So let's get moving!