Heeding God's Call meeting in Refuge in Christ Church, Chester: 5/19/2013

More than 40 congregants from Swarthmore Presbyterian, Swarthmore United Methodist, Refuge in Christ, Chester Eastside Ministries, Sacred Heart of Manoa, Temple Shalom, Ohev Shalom, Beth Israel, Chester Friends' Meeting, Marcus Hook Baptist Church, and Chester House of Restoration met today at Refuge in Christ Church, Chester, this afternoon, to form a Delaware County Chapter of Heeding God's Call.

Bryan Miller spoke about how guns reach the street.  Almost all the guns traced from crime scenes are from straw purchases.  US law requires that gun purchasers be checked against an FBI database to be sure they have not committed a felony or domestic violence misdemeanor, that they have not been committed to a mental institution.  PA requires that gun purchasers be at least 18.  Gun stores need maintain records of all gun purchases for at least 20 years.

However, there is considerable demand for guns from people who couldn't pass a background check.  In a straw purchase, an entrepreneur (usually a man) who wouldn't be able to pass the background check pays another person (usually a woman) to accompany him to a gun store and to purchase guns on his behalf.   Once they leave the store, he has a car full of guns that can't be traced to him.  Like any entrepreneur, a gun trafficker depends on volume for a profitable business.  (A few states, including NJ, limit handgun sales to one a month, but PA is not among them).

If (as often happens) these guns are used to commit a crime and are traced through store records to the straw purchaser, she will say it was stolen or lost.  (A few states, including NJ, require gun owners to report lost or stolen guns, but PA is not among them).

PA's relatively lax gun laws are a major reason Philadelphia closed 2011 with the highest per-capita murder rate in the US.

Most gun stores won't sell to straw buyers, but a few will.  Heeding God's Call aims to peacefully persuade those few stores to adhere to a code of conduct (pioneered by Walmart:  videotaping all gun purchases, employee training, software that flags purchasers to whom guns used in crimes have been traced).  Faith leaders of the various congregations meet with gun store owners to explain the code of conduct.  Where a gun store refuses to comply, Heeding God's Call members hold weekly or bi-monthly prayer vigils (always with police permits).

Many chapters also hold prayer vigils at sites of homicides. 

We formed a committee to work toward a Call to Action in 2-3 months:  identifying which gun stores are sources of trafficked guns, raising awareness in the community.  A Call to Action is typically held in a church, would bring together representatives of the many faith communities in Chester and surrounding towns.

Bryan came to gun violence prevention after his brother, Michael Miller, an FBI agent, was shot and killed in 1994, a few days before Thanksgiving.

In Parents Magazine -- Guns within Reach

More than 1.5 million children live in households where firearms are kept unlocked and loaded, and over 100 innocent kids are killed every year. Read this to make sure your child stays safe.

 

By Jeannette Moninger from Parents Magazine

 

Matthew Bellamy loved to hunt with his dad, Chip, near their home in Little River, South Carolina. "We started talking to him about the dangers of guns when he was 3," says his mom, Mylissa. Safety was a top priority for the Bellamys. They always triple-checked their weapons to make sure they were unloaded and kept them locked in a gun safe. But these precautions didn't protect 11-year-old Matthew when he and a 12-year-old friend found a hunting rifle lying on a bed at the friend's grandparents' house three years ago. Assuming the gun was unloaded, Matthew's buddy, who also hunted, picked it up. As he handed the rifle to Matthew, it fired accidentally. The bullet struck Matthew squarely in the chest. He died on the way to the hospital. "We took the right steps to keep guns away from our kids and their friends," says Mylissa. "It never occurred to us to ask others whether they did the same."

With an estimated 270 million civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. -- nearly one for every man, woman, and child -- the odds are good that there's a gun (if not several) located someplace where your child spends time. If that fact doesn't give you pause, this one will: A study published in Pediatrics found that nearly 1.7 million children under age 18 live with a loaded and unsecured gun in the house. It could be on a closet shelf, in a drawer, or under a mattress -- where a child can easily reach it. Yet few parents raise the issue of firearms before letting their kid play at someone else's home. "Most parents who own guns are responsible about keeping them locked, unloaded, and stowed away safely," says Beth Ebel, M.D., a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) Council on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention. "Yet nearly 40 percent of gun-owning households with children have an unlocked gun to which a child might gain access."

Understandably, the nation's focus has been on tightening gun laws in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which took the lives of 20 children and six adults. However, the biggest threat to our kids' safety likely isn't assault rifles, a lack of school security, or weapons that fall into the hands of the mentally ill. It's the guns that are commonly found in our own homes. Each year, nearly 140 minors are accidentally killed and more than 3,000 are injured by firearms, most often at home or while visiting a friend, relative, or caregiver. About a quarter of victims under age 14 unintentionally shoot themselves. And, according to data from the Harvard School of Public Health, these estimates are certainly low, because many unintended shootings are incorrectly labeled as homicides.

Although the AAP recommends that all kids' environments be free of firearms, many loving families choose to own weapons. If yours is among them, it's your job to take every possible precaution (see "Take Our Gun-Safety Pledge," below). But you still can't let down your guard. As the Bellamy family learned too late, other gun owners may not be as careful, so it's crucial to protect your child.

to read more, click here

 

In last week's NYT: Two killings and two guns, unattended

On the afternoon of Aug. 7, 2012, Greg Imhoff — a big, friendly 61-year-old construction superintendent from Madison, Wis., who had moved to Florida with his partner, Shari Telvick — went to check on the home of a neighbor.

The neighbor, Richard Detlor, was a friend, someone Imhoff had known back in Madison, where the Detlors still lived for part of the year. Whenever the Detlors went back to Wisconsin, Imhoff would look in on their house, something he did for many of his neighbors. 

It is impossible to know whether, on that August afternoon, Imhoff ever saw the stranger in the house with the .22 caliber revolver; all we know for sure is that Imhoff was shot in the head. When Telvick and a friend found him that evening, he was lying in a pool of blood, dead. 

The killer turned out to be a man named Billy Ray Retherford, who was on the lam after killing a woman two weeks earlier and was hiding in the Detlors’ empty home. The next day, Retherford was killed in a shootout with the police. He was using the same .22 handgun. 

The gun, however, was not his. It belonged to Richard Detlor, who, according to the police report, had left it, loaded, in the nightstand by his bed before departing for Wisconsin several months earlier. 

When Imhoff’s murder was brought to my attention recently, I was stunned that a supposedly “responsible gun owner” would leave a loaded gun in a house that was empty for months at a time. Yes, the odds of someone breaking into the house and using the gun were small, but they weren’t zero. That the Detlors didn’t take the simple precaution of unloading their gun and locking it up struck me as incredibly negligent.

to read more, click here

Today on NPR -- almost 20% of suicidal teens live in a house with a gun

Nearly a third of children and adolescents screened in an emergency department program are at risk for suicide, and of these, 17% report knowledge of a gun in or around their home.

"Nearly half of youth suicides involve firearms, and 90% of individuals who attempt suicide with guns kill themselves," said study author Stephen Teach, MD, from the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC.

Suicide is among the leading causes of death in young people aged 10 to 24 years.
Researchers say the emergency department may be an excellent screening opportunity to assess teens for suicide risk because this is sometimes the only consistent source of medical care for young people.

"This is particularly true for the most disadvantaged adolescents in our nation," said Dr. Teach, explaining the rationale for his program here at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2013 Annual Meeting.

Dr. Teach and his team developed a simple instrument based on the gold standard, the Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire. They distilled the questionnaire down to its most critical elements.

"It's a fairly simple thing to administer in the hurly burly of a busy emergency department," Dr. Teach said. The Ask Suicide-Screening Questions has only 4 points:

1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?
2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?
3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?
4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

to read more, click here.

In today's NYT: His father's murder drives a Rabbi's Pursuit of Gun Control

Samuel G Freedman

In the months after his father’s murder in early 1999, those months stretching formlessly between the mourning ritual of shiva and the impending trial of a suspect, Rabbi Joel Mosbacher received many messages of solace. There was one type, however, that tested every atom of clerical forbearance he possessed. 

“People said in this trying-to-be-helpful way, ‘This will make you a better rabbi,’ ” Rabbi Mosbacher, 43, recalled. “And nothing made me angrier. I didn’t want to be a better rabbi. I wanted my dad back.” 

He wanted Lester Mosbacher, who had been shot dead in a petty robbery at his small business on Chicago’s South Side the day before he turned 53. He wanted the father who cheered the White Sox and gardened in the backyard and barbecued with a flashlight or umbrella if necessary. He wanted the grandfather for his firstborn son, just 11 months old at the time of the murder. 

As Joel Mosbacher raised his own family and advanced in his rabbinical career, moving from an assistant’s position outside Atlanta to a senior one in this New Jersey suburb, he recognized that no prayer, no fast, no act of religious charity could give him what he wanted. 

Yet on a Sunday afternoon this month, Rabbi Mosbacher stood before an assembly of 200 clergy members, congregants, politicians and police officials in a North Jersey church to tell, in the cause of gun control, the story of his father’s murder. 

“All he did was drive to work, as he had done for 35 years, and he was stolen from his brothers, wife, his children and grandchildren,” Rabbi Mosbacher said. “I’ve carried this story with me, this anger, every day for the last 14 years.” Then he made reference to a verse from Leviticus: “I won’t stand idly by my father’s blood.” 

What Rabbi Mosbacher was proposing was not just support for the gun control legislation then pending in the Senate. In fact, rather presciently, he warned the audience not to “hope for the best from the most dysfunctional institution in America.” 

Specifically, as a leader of the faith-based coalition New Jersey Together, he was propounding its proposal that local mayors, gun retailers, firearms manufacturers and large buyers like the military sign a “covenant” of gun overhaul measures. Among its 30 points, the covenant called for voluntary limits on selling certain types of weapons and large-capacity magazines, sale of guns only through federally licensed dealers and mandatory safety classes for buyers. (Because the covenant was just announced on April 14, the process of getting signatures has not begun.) 

to read more, click here

In today's NYT: How the NRA rates lawmakers -- an interactive map

Here's a link to a map that's searchable by zip code, for NRA ratings on House members and senators

On NPR last week -- the epidemiology of gun violence

(hosted by Neal Conan; Dan Keating of the Washington Post is guest)

KEATING: Well, I mean, it's an interesting - it's an exact mirror in terms of ratio. So a white person is five times as likely to die by a suicide by gun, than by a homicide. And African-Americans are five times as likely to die by homicide from a gun, than by suicide. So quite simply, you know, for every white person shot in a homicide, five shoot themselves; and for every black person who shoots himself, five are killed by homicide.

CONAN: And availability of guns, well, affects both statistics.

KEATING: Well, it's kind of interesting, because then what really drove my story was not just the disparity in the rates, but how that applies to guns and access to guns. So the people that suffer homicide among relatives, family, friends, tend to have a very anti-gun attitude. And so that's prevalent in the city across all races and in the African-American in both cities and African-American community of predominately homicide for gun deaths, and there's a strong urge for gun control both in the urban environment and in the African-American community.

But then as you move out of the city, suburbs and then rural, where the gun deaths shift to suicide, you also shift to a much lower desire for gun control, much more support for gun rights. And so what really is interesting to me about that is that when people die in a gun homicide, the gun is vilified. The gun is blamed, and people want to stop the guns.

But in gun suicide, the gun is not blamed. The gun is actually considered, you know, not the problem, and it's that, you know, they tend to more put a stigma on the person, oh there was something wrong with him. So in the reporting on this, it was - you know, and in talking to the experts, when you go to the academic experts and those kind of people, they have a very strong conviction, and they look at the data about access to guns and suicide, and how much more suicide there is in places where there are a lot of guns.

Gun violence facts, from the Brady Campaign

DID YOU KNOW? In one year on average, more than 100,000 people in America are shot or killed with a gun. Click here to see a fact sheet summarizing gun deaths and injuries over an average year.

• Over a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated (Childrens’ Defense Fund, p. 20).
  
• U.S. homicide rates are 6.9 times higher than rates in 22 other populous high-income countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates. The firearm homicide rate in the U.S. is 19.5 times higher (Richardson, p.1).
  
• Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States (Richardson, p. 1).

• Gun violence impacts society in countless ways: medical costs, costs of the criminal justice system, security precautions such as metal detectors, and reductions in quality of life because of fear of gun violence. These impacts are estimated to cost U.S. citizens $100 billion annually (Cook, 2000).

DID YOU KNOW? Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.

• An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present (Wiebe, p. 780).

• Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings (Harvard Injury Control Center).

• Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of suicide by a factor of 3 to 5 and increases the risk of suicide with a firearm by a factor of 17 (Kellermann, 1992, p. 467; Wiebe, p. 771).

• Keeping a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide by a factor of 3 (Kellermann, 1993, p. 1084).

DID YOU KNOW? On the whole, guns are more likely to raise the risk of injury than to confer protection.

• A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide (11x), criminal assault or homicide (7x), or unintentional shooting death or injury (4x) than to be used in a self-defense shooting. (Kellermann, 1998, p. 263).

• Guns are used to intimidate and threaten 4 to 6 times more often than they are used to thwart crime (Hemenway, p. 269).

• Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens (FBI, Expanded Homicide Data, Table 15) compared with over 30,000 gun deaths (NCIPC).

• A 2009 study found that people in possession of a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault (Branas).

Back on Monday: Joe Nocera's Hammer report

The new meme among gun absolutists appears to be hammers. “Why did you elect to report on guns as a choice of weapon, when according to current F.B.I. stats, bear claw hammers and baseball bats are the number 1 and number 2 choice of weapon?” wrote a pro-gun reader: “Guns are 3rd.”

When I was interviewing Second Amendment absolutists for Saturday’s column, I heard the same thing. So of course, Jennifer Mascia and I looked into it. Guess what? It doesn’t appear to be true, as Slate reported in February. According to F.B.I. data, if you add up all the non-gun methods used to kill people in 2011 (fire, drowning, poison, strangling, hammers, etc.), you get 4,081 non-gun homicides. That’s fewer than half of the F.B.I.’s reported 8,583 gun homicides in 2011. Guns killed more than 17 times more people than hammers and are responsible for nearly 70 percent of total murders. Indeed, Slate reported, “only 496 people were killed by blunt objects, a category that includes not just hammers and baseball bats but crowbars, rocks, paving stones, statuettes, and electric guitars.”

to read more, click here

From Joe Nocera's Gun Blog: The kind of sorrow that settles into your bones

After Roger Hartley lost his friend Mark Hummels to gun violence in January, he realized Hummels was the ninth person he knew who’d been killed or injured by a gun. So he posed a question to his Facebook friends: “How many people have you known who’ve been the victims of gun violence? Suicide, accidental, murder. No politics. No judgment. Just a number.”

The responses poured in. Hartley realized that virtually everyone had a number: one, a dozen, twenty. Joe Heim, an articles editor at The Washington Post Magazine, had gone to Berkeley with Hummels, and decided to take the question to various Washingtonians. He found that even the mayor has a number. (Three.)

Aurora Vasquez, whose niece was shot and killed by her boyfriend, counts only one. That is enough.

“Rest assured that this kind of sorrow, it’s the kind of sorrow that quite literally settles into your bones,” she told Heim. “And it never goes away. And nothing is ever the same.”

to read more, click here.