Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Buying Guns, or Voting - Which Should We Be Making More Difficult?

After the Virginia Tech massacre, the shooting in 2007, an investigation determined that the shooter had legally purchased a gun, and that he was not in any data base.  Even if he had not been able to legally purchase a gun from a licensed gun dealer where a background check was required, he would have been legally able to purchase a gun at a gun show without a background check.  There is NO prohibition that prevents or even discourages a person who is dangerously insane from purchasing a gun at a gun show.

In the United States, to be prohibited from exercising our rights requires a court decision.  A judge has to rule on removing our right to vote, or removing our right to own a gun.  The right has been very interested in restricting the rights of people to vote, actively acting to disenfranchise tens of thousands who are legally entitled to vote their single vote.  The right has been determined to make it as easy as possible for people to own guns, every possible kind of gun, unlimited guns.  They give lip service to preventing guns from falling into the hands of people who are legally prohibited from owning them, or who should be prohibited from owning guns, but they also do everything possible to make owning and carrying guns as unrestricted as possible. Guns can kill and wound people, innocent people.  In attempting to prevent people from voting the danger that Republicans are trying to prevent is merely the election of Democrats or other liberals - the LEGAL election of representative government candidates.

To put this in perspective, a recent article from article from Reuters reports that the United States has 90 guns per 100 people, more than any other nation in the world.  The next closest country in guns per capita is Yemen, at 61 per person.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.
After the Arizona shooting, sales of the kind of gun used for the massacre, the Glock (also owned by victim Giffords) 'surged' according to the this article, so these statistics are already obsolete, too low.

The Reuters article on the per capita study notes
"Civilian holdings of weapons worldwide are much larger than we previously believed," Krause said, attributing the increase largely to better research and more data on weapon distribution networks.
Only about 12 percent of civilian weapons are thought to be registered with authorities.
I have no objection to people owning firearms; I am not anti-gun.  But we have a lot of guns and not enough regulation for who owns them, when we have these kinds of shootings.  We have not done enough to keep people who misuse firearms from owning them.  Improvements were made after the Virginia Tech massacre, but not nearly enough improvement.  While the data base for restricting SOME sales to criminals or those who have dangerous mental health issues has risen to 1.1 million, there are an estimated 2 million names that are waiting to be added to that data base.  Arizona has only submitted 4,400 names, of the estimated 122,000 people who are legally prohibited from gun ownership, while at the same time Arizona is one of the most permissive states with no requirements whatsoever for concealed gun carrying.

Our ability to prevent guns from being in the hands of the wrong people has to become consistent with the quantity of guns we own in this country, a quantity we continue to expand at a rate unprecedented anywhere else in the world. 

Yesterday, I saw on conservative blogs lots of criticism of the Pima County sheriff for not having done more to stop the crazy man from shooting up Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims.  They went after the sheriff for having spoken out against the rabid political rhetoric that created a toxic political atmosphere, one which encouraged some people to act out violently.  We cannot claim that the only people to have done so are crazy; there were plenty of threats and acts of violent vandalism in Arizona, to which he referred.  The sheriff has no legal authority to do anything except enforce the law, and that law did not give him the right to do anything more than what he did.

At a time when conservatives are slashing rather than restoring our infrastructure, slashing rather than expanding the budgets for items like the government branch which maintains the NCIS database of people legally prohibited from gun ownership, and certainly having slashed the funding for mental health and the mentally ill, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing and on what we are willing to spend money.  It does not need to be endless politically-motivated witch hunts by Republicans like Darrell Issa.  It DOES need to be on essential infrastructure, including the NCIS data base maintenance.

We don't need to restrict the legal voting rights of any of our fellow Americans.  We do need to be restricting the gun ownership of those we have already determined to be legally barred from obtaining guns, including private sales and gun show sales.  We need to be using the laws we already have on the books more effectively.  We need to stop dangerous people from having and using guns, by closing the gun show loophole and by keeping our data base current.  It is a matter of priorities.

8 comments:

  1. It also seems important to mention the 30 round clip in this recent shooting. Like silencers, extended magazines for handguns serve no useful (or legitimate) purpose for a civilian.

    Without this extended magazine Loughner would have likely been stopped without injuring & killing as many people as he did. Unfortunately, though, buying a large magazine is legal in many states.

    Prohibiting the sale of these magazine additions in the U.S. seems to be very feasible given that a few states already prohibit ownership, and it is a non-essential addition that would require somewhat difficult machining to duplicate at home.

    Gun control is definitely needed, but restricting the sale of guns in general is not the only way to save lives.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Tim, welcome to Penigma, and thank you for your comment.

    I havent' suggested restricting gun ownership or sales, other than to be aware of how many guns we really have in this country, and keeping current with the data entry of the names of those people who are already legally prohibited from gun ownership.

    While a great deal of hysteria will be circulating in the public domain over the supposed dangers of the mentally ill. In fact, what is encompassed in that term are problems like ADHD; it's not all paraonid schizophrenics so categorized. In fact, incredibly few of those with some kind of mental health problem are dangerous or should be restricted from gun ownership. That is a restriction that should only be applied to those rare few who are a danger to themselves or others.

    One of the more insightful thing I've heard in the discussion surrounding the tragedy was that most of those who have been involved in some kind of violence planned to kill themselves. Alcohol use is involved with far more incidents involving injury or death with guns than mental illness of any kind.

    I have to admit, in view of that fact of life, allowing guns into bars seems like a bad idea. It's bad enough that bars have to employ bouncers to sort out those who get belligerant with their fists. Adding guns to that scenario is no improvement.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am pretty sure this guy intended to kill himself from what I have seen of his good bye notes he was just stopped before he finished shooting at others.

    The big problem here and in the West Virginia thing is our treatment of mental illness. The guy in West Virginia was sent by a judge to be evaluated for 48 hrs and was not committed. This guy and his parents were told he was probably schizophrenic and could not come back to school without an evaluation. Unfortunately, in both cases, they were over 18 and until they broke the law no one could commit them to an institution. Being committed is what shows up on the background check for buying a gun, not being evaluated or booted from school. In the past someone could have committed them before they did something but then you had the problem of aging parents being committed so the children could get the checkbook and retarded children being committed because the parents did not want to deal with them. Like everything else we went from one extreme to the other and need to find a happy medium so people like Loughner and the West Virginia guy can be committed and helped but much harder to abuse than it used to be.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Arizona law actually allows for a 48 hour mental health evaluation if anyone had reported him to the mental health authorities with a concern that he might be a danger to himself or others. Apparently, no one thought to report him, and as a consequence, no action was taken.

    Schitzophrenics aren't always a danger to themselves or others, but of course, they can be. So can people suffering from a variety of other mental illnesses. The tragedy here is that no one reported him to the authorities who could have perhaps evaluated him and determined if he needed treatment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I will defer to ToE to elaborate on when someone fits the criteria for being denied gun ownership due to mental illness.

    I would however point out that there are reasons such as drug interactions which might make someone a temporary danger to themselves, but where that danger goes away when medications are either adjusted or completely changed.

    In any case, the number of people who are denied guns is something on the order of 1% of the NCIS list.

    The real problem here is not so much that this guy was not given a psychiatric evaluation that might have prevented him getting a gun, so much as it is that Arizona both makes carrying and buying guns very easy and very common, while NOT providing a current list of people already known to be dangerous and prohibited from carrying a gun.

    When there is an estimated 122,000+ people who don't qualify for gun ownership that Arizona has not sumbitted to the federal check list, there is little reason to think that this man would had been identified as a mental health risk on the gun check list either.

    Other states are NOT as backwards about this as Arizona is. Arizona has chosen not to make this a priority. Lets hope that changes.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Whoops, a typo.

    "In any case, the number of people who are denied guns is something on the order of 1% of the NCIS list."

    that should read "the number of people who are denied guns for mental health reasons from the NCIS check is about 1%.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Loughner's personal history did not disqualify him under federal rules, and Arizona doesn't regulate gun sales.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41021843/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

    We don't actually know that Loughner is a dangerous schizophrenic. We don't know what a mental health examintion will actually show. All we know so far is that Loughner is an adherent apparently of a right wing conspiracy nut who believes the government is brain washing people through grammar.

    That is stupid, like birthers are stupid for believing in their conspiracy theory, but it is not crazy.

    While his lawyer may try to use an insanity defence that doesn't mean it will succeed. That kind of defense was made much more difficult than it used to be.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The charges which have been filed to date are federal charges. If his attorney wishes to use the insanity, she will file under 18 USC 17 and be required to prove that "At the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts" Whether or not he will qualify for that defense remains to be seen, as he will undoubtedly be undergoing a rigorous mental health evaluation in the near future.

    Federal law pertaining to the purchase of firearms is also instructive here. A person is ineligible to purchase or own a firearm if one is a convicted felon, (or has been dishonourably discharged from the Armed Forces), has been adjudicated to be suffering from a mental illness which renders them harmful to themselves or others. Note I said adjudicated. This means not just being treated, but that a judge or mental health commission has ordered treatment.

    ReplyDelete