Tag: “bump stocks”

I was there, Marching for Our Lives

Posted on by kathiemm
Last year, I wrote about my belief that we know the names of too many shooters and not enough victims. This year, I centered my poster around Parkland victims’ faces, aiming my focus at the march on the safety of children rather than on the punishment of shooters.

By Sarah Mensch

Yesterday, I marched for 2.5 miles with an estimated 50,000 people in Boston. As a student, I stood toward the front, and when I looked around I could see so many of the children I wrote about protecting late last week walking next to me. They looked tired; this was their Saturday morning, intended for soccer practice or Girl Scouts or watching cartoons, and they were spending it pleading for legislators to make school a safer place

A fifth-grader, marching for our lives

The March for Our Lives did not maintain the level of pride or excitement I’ve felt at other rallies I’ve attended; at the Boston Women’s March in 2017 I felt solidarity in my womanhood, and at the Deaf Grassroots Movement rally I felt admiration for my Deaf professors and classmates. But at the March for Our Lives, I felt anger, grief, and most importantly, determination.

The walk-outs at high schools all over the nation and demands from students in Florida specifically have already resulted in Governor Rick Scott (R) signing a new gun bill into law that raises the minimum age to purchase a gun, ends same-day gun licensing, and bans bump stocks.

The littlest protester.

I and the hundreds of thousands of others who marched yesterday have a new obligation today, one that is much more uncomfortable than our duty to be good adults and protect our children: we have to hold on to our anger and our grief. We have to maintain its magnitude and it’s momentum, because without any emotional charge, change in the way states handle guns doesn’t start with the Florida gun bill, it stops there. And until no child or adult dies at the hands of gun violence, we have not done enough.

Given that I’ve just given anyone who reads this a hefty call-to-action, I want to make it clear what organizations Engaging Peace readers can support to make gun safety in the United States a reality:

Some other young protestors, marching for our lives

What Does Social Science Tell Us About the Link Between the Presence of Firearms and Violence? Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm
2 men playing arcade game Fast Draw (Southland Engineering Inc., 1964) at California Extreme Arcade pinball Show 2009. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: numb3r

by Alice LoCicero

Note from Kathie MM: This is the first in a two-part series based on the Psychology Today website.

Another day in the US, another mass killing with firearms.

The current public conversation about firearms is disturbing, because when anyone posts or publicly states the possibility of even what are known as “common sense” gun regulations — such as restrictions on automatic weapons or background checks before purchase in all situations (including so-called gun shows) — there is apt to be an aggressive and hostile backlash.

The most recent time when we thought that — after the Las Vegas mass shooting — there might be a glimmer of light where Congress might be willing to at least ban so-called “bump stocks” that allow a semi-automatic weapon to shoot like an automatic weapon — Congress froze and did nothing. (But  the state of Massachusetts has acted to ban them.)

The situation is worrisome, since the number of firearms in the US in 2017 is 300 million, very close to one per person. Perhaps more disturbing still, half of those 300 million firearms are owned by just 3% of Americans; about 9 million Americans own about 150 million firearms.

Let’s talk about just a few highlights of the relevant gun-use science. Early research is summarized briefly in a 2013 Psychology Today article by Professor Brad Bushman.

Professor Bushman recently published another study, with over 1,000 participants, showing that images of firearms — whether used by police or soldiers on the one hand, or by criminals on the other — increased the accessibility of aggressive thoughts.

In 2014, Andrew Anglemyer, a scientist from the University of California, San Francisco, reported that an analysis of the results of 16 studies “… found strong evidence for increased odds of suicide among persons with access to firearms compared with those without access … and moderate evidence for … increased odds of homicide victimization when persons with and without access to firearms were compared.…”

Note from Kathie MM: Please join the dialogue. What will it take to get people to heed social science research about how access to guns increases the propensity to use them? Join us in our discussions of these issues.