Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Coral Springs Talk from Coral Springs, United States.
Anyone who believes that all human beings are hopelessly and incurably aggressive and that nothing can be done to halt the growing number of mass shootings in this country should read Chris Weller’s article in Business Insider.
And please don’t try to tell me we the people can’t move our country in the same directions as Australia, the UK, Norway, and Japan if we become more active, more educated about political candidates, more willing to speak out on behalf of nonviolence, more willing to speak truth to power. No community, however rich or white, can be safe from gun violencse while the NRA owns such a large percentage of our Congress. Do you care about your kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews? if so, maybe it is time for you to become a gun control activist.
Note from Kathie MM: Abby Zimet, from Common Dreams (an online real news site to which you should subscribe only if you want more honesty, more courage, more speaking of truth to power in your news stories), tells it like it is. School shootings, mass murders, are becoming so common in our society that they barely make a ripple in the news. So, you have to ask yourselves–are you going to continue to vote for politicians owned by the NRA? Are you going to let the NRA scare you into thinking that violence stops violence rather than begetting violence?
Please read this article by Abby Zimet and act to end gun violence.
Another one. This time on Tuesday in Benton, Kentucky. Two teenagers killed, 18 injured – three shot in the head, and in critical condition. So much ghastly same old same old: Small close-knit town, people shocked and grieving, good kids and “sweet souls” who will be missed, police still searching for a reason for a 15-year-old to open fire, residents coming together in their pain to plan prayer vigils, politicians sending – yes, really – more thoughts and prayers. It was the 11th school shooting of the year, and it’s still January. It was barely a blip in the heedless news.
Maybe because the day before the Benton shooting at Marshall County High School, there was a shooting at Italy High School in Texas. Or because, the same day, someone in a pickup shot at a group of students in New Orleans. Or because, also on Tuesday, there were at least 81 other shootings around the country; they killed 28 more people and wounded 40 more. Or because, in the gruesome new normal, a quarter of U.S. parents fear for their children’s safety while they’re at school, which, by all grim accounts, they should. Or because, in the bloody wake of Benton, local pols could only talk up armed guards, not gun control, which would “politicize” the horror, and the NRA-backed Enabler-In-Chief had to be shamed before he even offered his own crappy bogus thoughts and prayers.
Moms and other gun control advocates are still demanding action. What, we wonder, will it take, besides Preston Cope and Bailey Holt? We need to say their names. “In our time,” writes Sandy Solomon in her “Little Letter to the Future”, published in Vox Populi, “we reckoned our dead in firearms” and “grew ill/from (our) excuses for poor, innocent guns.” In the end, she writes, “About death,/ you know. We knew too much.”
Little letter from the future
In our time we reckoned our dead in firearms—
handguns, rifles, automatic weapons;
in much-parsed constitutional clauses;
in politicians bought by lobbyists
and salesmen. In our time, we objected
most of us, but we couldn’t stop those guns.
They squatted beside the desperate, the guy
who craved suicide; they incited
wild-eyed murder, mass murder.
In our time, we just hoped we wouldn’t
be unlucky, that a sick boy toting
what we called an AR-15-style
Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle,
wouldn’t burst into another first-grade
classroom where our kids studied addition,
subtraction; or into another night club
where we celebrated Saturday night;
we just hoped that a stray bullet wouldn’t
cross Central Park to reach the shady
bench on which we sat talking with a friend,
that no cop would imagine our hand reaching
for a pistol instead of a wallet or a phone.
We had to calibrate for guns. And those
with darker skin had to calibrate
more (no talking back, no attitude,
no running away, no looking tough or strange
or hard, no looking like yourself most days).
We knew the slogans: people, not guns,
kill people, a gun in the hands of a good
guy trumps a gun in the hands of a bad
guy, and on and on. We grew ill
from those excuses for poor, innocent guns.
They were everywhere—inside the jacket
of a man at the next table, in the glove compartment
of the car beside us at the light. Ubiquitous
and lethal, they entered our wild logic
awake or asleep. In those days, we let
our toddlers discover a parent’s gun, safety
off, badly hidden under a pillow
or jammed, for our own protection, inside a bag
under a restaurant table, and when our sweet,
curious children wrapped their little fingers
around the gun’s shape so they could gaze
into its empty maw, while we looked
away or dozed, we let them pull the trigger,
we let them kill themselves. About death,
you know. We knew too much.
Grandmothers Against Gun Violence March to City Hall, August 8, 2015. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Author: Seattle City Council.
A must-read article by David S. Bernstein in the Atlantic argues that despite media furor over mass shootings, “Americans Don’t Really Understand Gun Violence.”
Why? Because they focus only on fatal gun violence — the tip of an enormous, bloody iceberg of untold pain and suffering for victims of nonfatal violence and their families.
Although estimates suggest over a million survivors of gun violence in the US today, “nobody really knows how often people are shot by their intimate partners, how many victims are intended targets or bystanders, how many shootings are in self-defense, how such incidents affect community investment and property values, or how much it costs taxpayers to care for victims.”
Ignorance includes assumptions that nonfatal shootings are generally confined to African American neighborhoods; however, data show that from 2001 to 2013, “nonfatal-assault victimization rates declined among African Americans and increased significantly for whites.”
The reasons we know so little about nonfatal gun violence are largely politically based. For example, in 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment “which, along with accompanying budget cuts to the CDC, effectively took the federal government out of the business of funding gun research. Though it was ostensibly designed to prevent federal backing of biased anti-gun propaganda, the National Rifle Association-backed law has had a huge chilling effect.…”
If we want to reduce the epidemic of gun violence, we need more information about it. Speak out against the suppression of information and in favor of research.For motivation, see this video.
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 Todayarticle 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.
