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.

In yesterday's NYT: Say Goodbye to the Assault Weapons Ban

By DAVID FIRESTONE

Fans of military-style assault weapons can stop worrying — their gun lobby has done its work, and all but assured that Congress will not pass a ban on their dangerous toys.

Senate Democratic leaders have decided not to include the ban, proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, in the official gun bill that will reach the floor in the next few weeks. It was always a long shot, but now Democrats have officially given the ban the cold shoulder.

Ms. Feinstein will probably manage to bring up the ban as a separate amendment, putting senators on record and letting the public know how they stand when given a chance to prohibit the kinds of guns used in so many massacres. As an independent measure, however, it’s guaranteed to fail. And it’s not even clear that an important piece of the ban, outlawing high-capacity ammunition magazines, will have enough support for a simple majority, let alone the 60 votes needed to get past a Republican filibuster.

Forcing supporters of gun control to hold votes on separate amendments carries significant danger. If Democrats like Ms. Feinstein get to introduce amendments, then Republican senators will do so, too. And they will almost certainly submit proposals designed to put red-state Democrats on the spot, like new limits on the responsibilities of federal firearms agents, or a bill requiring every state to honor other’s gun permits. If those kinds of measures pick up 15 Democratic votes, they could poison the entire gun package, making it unpalatable for gun-control supporters.

to read more, click here

GunCrisis.org: Seeking solutions to Gun Violence in Philadelphia

Their mission statement:

On the average, at least one person has been murdered in Philadelphia every day over the last 25 years — and more than three-quarters of them have been killed with a gun.

The Gun Crisis Reporting Project is a nonprofit, open source journalism organization intended to fill the gaps in gun violence reporting, seeking not to blame but contending that there is an epidemic of homicide by gunfire in Philadelphia and similar cities — and seeking solutions.

We will strive to bear witness to this crisis but avoid the perpetuation of fear, stereotypes and polarizing debates. We are interested in the theory that youth violence would be best addressed as a public health challenge — but will seek innovative solutions and evidence of violence reduction in every corner.

We study the landscape and the roots of the crisis, strive to illuminate the individuals and organizations working to intervene and disrupt violence, and expand the community of citizens who refuse to rest until we make a difference.
And we rememebr the victims.

to read more, click here

Heeding God's Call -- an Interfaith Group Preventing Gun Violence

Heeding God’s Call is a faith-based movement to prevent gun violence. We unite people of faith in the sacred responsibility to protect our brothers, sisters and children.

• We embrace Dr. Martin Luther King’s hope for peace and safety in our communities.
• We resist apathy to this epidemic of violence, because fear, closed doors, and separation will not end it.
• We unite to bring God’s vision of a peaceable kingdom, without the violent loss of over 30,000 American lives by gunfire each year.

To read more, click here

Trailer for Trigger -- the ripple effect of gun violence

In today's NYT: In some states, gun rights trump protection orders

By MICHAEL LUO

Published: March 17, 2013 Comment

Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to obtain a temporary order for protection. 

Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he would “put a cap” in her if her new boyfriend “gets near my kids.” In neat block letters she wrote, “ He owns guns, I am scared.”

The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.

About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her. 

“I remember thinking, ‘Cops, I need the cops,’ ” she later wrote in a statement to the police. “He’s going to kill me in my own house. I’m going to die!” 

Ms. Holten, however, managed to dial 911 on her cellphone and slip it under a blanket on the couch.  The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene. As they mounted the stairs with their guns drawn, Mr. Holten surrendered. They found Ms. Holten cowering, hysterical, on the floor. 

For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been prevented. Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies. 

to read more, click here

In last Thursday's NYT: Assault weapons ban clears Senate Judiciary Committee

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: March 14, 2013 

WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a measure to reinstate a ban on assault weapons in the first major Congressional test of the issue since the law expired in 2004. But the ban remains unlikely to clear the full Senate. 

Still, the committee’s passage of the bill, along with three other measures that previously cleared the panel, demonstrated momentum by lawmakers who have sought new gun regulations after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. 

Taken together, the votes show a willingness by lawmakers to confront the pro-gun lobby, which has stifled new gun limits for years. As recently as last year, it would have been unthinkable for these bills to have even been considered in a Senate committee. 

But those measures — which include a ban on high-capacity magazines and enhanced background checks for gun buyers — will now be considered by the full Senate, where gun rights sentiments run far deeper than in the committee, to say nothing of the House, where members are even less avid to take up new gun curbs. 

The renewal of the assault weapons ban, an earlier version of which was rejected by the full Congress in 2004, even with the tacit support of President George W. Bush, is almost certain to fail in the Senate, should Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, even allow it on the floor.

“The road is uphill. I fully understand that,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, the author of the bill, said after its passage by the committee. “My passion comes from what I’ve seen on the streets,” she said, adding, “I cannot get out of my mind trying to find the pulse in someone and putting my fingers in a bullet hole.” 

Mr. Reid said on Thursday that he had talked with Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the committee, and had promised a vote on some type of bill that considers the committee’s actions, probably by mid-April. 

While the plan has not been formulated, it will probably include a limited gun safety bill focused on stemming gun trafficking and enhancing background checks to compel states to better comply with laws on reporting records regarding criminals and mentally ill people. But even those measures will not have broad support, and 60 votes will be needed to cut off debate and move to a vote. Lawmakers will probably work with a measure passed by the committee last week that would make the already illegal practice of buying a gun for someone who is legally barred from having one — known as a straw purchase — a felony and increase penalties for the crime. 

to read more, click here.

Joe Nocera's blog: gun violence, day by day

Joe Nocera is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.  Each day, since Feb 1st 2013,  his blog has been recording gun violence incidents in the US -- they google "shooting" each day, and choose from the results.

That is what my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I did last week in compiling the stories for today’s column. The column gives only the smallest of hints as to how many shootings there are on any given day; my guess is that even Google doesn’t find them all. To give you a fuller picture, we’ve reconstructed the Google search for “shooting” from Monday to Saturday last week. Since the Newtown shooting on December 14, the United States has suffered 18 gun deaths per day, for a total of 1,330. In case you were wondering.

Every day, when Jennifer Mascia and I compile this report, we are stunned at the number of children who are accidentally shot — and often killed — because a gun-owning adult in their household has put a loaded gun someplace where they can get their hands on it and shoot it. We have three such examples in today’s report, one of which resulted in the death of a 4-year-old in Houston. Other nations mandate that gun owners keep their firearms in safes bolted to the floor. Why don’t we?

Today on NPR: Zombies aside, gun control faces obstacles

Two more gun control bills are heading to the Senate floor after narrowly winning approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The legislation requiring background checks for nearly all gun sales will likely face stiff opposition in its current version, but it's the second proposal, banning assault weapons, which may get particularly heated pushback from lawmakers.

Maybe if zombies attacked, you might need a semiautomatic assault weapon for self-defense. That was one concession Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was willing to make this week when the Senate Judiciary Committee was debating the assault weapons ban. But short of an entire zombie takeover, Leahy says he's always been perfectly satisfied with his .45-caliber at home.

to read more, click here

In today's NYT: Focusing on violence before it happens

By ERICA GOODE

 LOS ANGELES — In the days after the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Tony Beliz and his staff at the county’s mental health department here made a series of calls.

They checked in with a 16-year-old boy with a fondness for bomb-making chemicals who, two years before, told them, “I have to get rid of the bad people in this world,” and described a “special plan” he said he would put into action in a few years. 

They called the mother of another teenager — they have nicknamed him “Jared Loughner,” after the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 — who was obsessed with weapons and killing, had access to firearms and had extensively researched school shootings. 

They contacted a 20-year-old who in 2010 was fantasizing about killing members of his family and carrying out a shooting at school. 

The young men had been brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, and was taken countywide in 2009 by Dr. Beliz, a deputy director of the mental health department. 

In the national debate that has followed the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, much of the focus has been on regulating firearms. But many law enforcement and mental health experts believe that developing comprehensive approaches to prevention is equally important. In many cases, they note, the perpetrators of such violence are troubled young people who have signaled their distress to others and who might have been stopped had they received appropriate help. 

“When we looked at kids who had committed attacks, the vast majority had come to the attention of an adult for a behavior that was concerning but would not necessarily cause someone to conclude they were planning an attack,” said Bryan M. Vossekuil, former executive director of the National Threat Assessment Center, part of the Secret Service, and a co-author of a 2002 guide to threat assessment in schools published by the service and the federal Education Department. 

Many secondary schools and universities around the country have protocols for dealing with students who threaten violence. And cities besides Los Angeles have started programs intended to identify students at risk. But criminal justice experts say that the program in Los Angeles, financed under California’s Mental Health Services Act, is noteworthy for the sharing of information among agencies and for the degree of follow-up in keeping track of worrisome students over time. 

“I think L.A. really is a shining star and a standard in relation to how a big city can actually collaborate,” said J. Kevin Cameron, an expert on school shootings and executive director of the Canadian Center for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response, who has consulted with the program. 

to read more, click here

Last week in Media, PA: Democracy Unplugged discussion on gun control

Dayenu fact sheet

God Bless America

To read about the facts behind the poster, click here

from Pediatrics: Firearm-Related Injuries affecting the pediatric population

• From the American Academy of Pediatrics

Policy Statement

Firearm-Related Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population

1. COUNCIL ON INJURY, VIOLENCE, AND POISON PREVENTION EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

The absence of guns from children’s homes and communities is the most reliable and effective measure to prevent firearm-related injuries in children and adolescents. Adolescent suicide risk is strongly associated with firearm availability. Safe gun storage (guns unloaded and locked, ammunition locked separately) reduces children’s risk of injury. Physician counseling of parents about firearm safety appears to be effective, but firearm safety education programs directed at children are ineffective. The American Academy of Pediatrics continues to support a number of specific measures to reduce the destructive effects of guns in the lives of children and adolescents, including the regulation of the manufacture, sale, purchase, ownership, and use of firearms; a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons; and the strongest possible regulations of handguns for civilian use. ...



Of all injury deaths of individuals 15 through 19 years of age in the United States in 2009, more than 1 (28.7%) in 4 were firearm related, and of those younger than 20 years, nearly 1 (19.5%) in 5 were firearm related.¹ These firearm deaths result from homicide, suicide, and unintentional injury (Fig 2). Black Americans are particularly affected; injuries from firearms were the leading cause of death among black males 15 through 34 years of age in 2009.² Although national data cannot fully document urban and rural differences in the patterns of injuries from firearms that involve children, local data indicate that children in rural areas as well as in urban areas are at risk for firearm-related mortality.^3–5

...
The United States has the highest rates of firearm-related deaths (including homicide, suicide, and unintentional deaths) among high-income countries.⁹ For youth 15 to 24 years of age, firearm homicide rates, as documented by Richardson and Hemenway,⁹ were 35.7 times higher than in other countries. For children 5 to 14 years of age, firearm suicide rates were 8 times higher, and death rates from unintentional firearm injuries were 10 times higher in the United States than other high-income countries. The difference in rates may be related to the ease of availability of guns in the United States compared with other high-income countries. This is particularly true for suicides, as guns carry a high case-fatality rate.¹⁰ Suicides among the young are typically impulsive,¹¹ and easy access to lethal weapons largely determines outcome.

to read more, click here

From the American Academy of Pediatrics: Federal Advocacy to Prevent Gun Violence

Federal Policies to Keep Children Safe

 

AAP's Recommendations to the White House Since the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. that took the lives of twenty students and six educators, the Academy has been engaged in a thoughtful, organization-wide response and call to action to assure the future safety and protection of our nation’s children.

Academy leadership and staff are working closely with partner organizations to raise the voice of the nation's pediatricians on Capitol Hill and among state legislatures to ensure that appropriate legislation is developed to promote children's safety.

Specifically, the Academy is advocating to Congress and the Adminisration the following priorities (for a comprehensive overview, read this summary ):

• Firearm safety: Enact stronger gun laws, including an effective assault weapons ban; mandatory background checks on all firearm purchases; and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
  
• Prevention and public health: Allow federal agencies to conduct research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, and stand by the President's clarification that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors from asking their patients about guns in the home. 
• Access to mental health services: Improve the identification of mental illnesses through increased screening, addressing inadequate insurance coverage and high out-of-pocket costs that create barriers to access, strengthening the overall quality of mental health access, and expanding the Medicaid reimbursement policy to include mental health and developmental services.
• Reducing gun violence in the media and educating children: Develop quality, violence-free programming and constructive dialogue among child health and education advocates, the Federal Communications Commission, and the television and motion picture industries, as well as toy, video game, and other software manufactures and designers, to reduce the romanticization of guns in the popular media as a means of resolving conflict.

to read more, click here

In today's NYT: Charity takes gun lobby closer to its quarry

By MIKE McINTIRE

On a Monday evening in early February, two months into a national debate over gun violence after the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, representatives of the firearms industry were wining and dining lawmakers in Washington. 

The occasion was the “Changing of the Guard” reception and dinner for the incoming leadership of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, which counts more than 250 members in the House and Senate. Hosting the gathering was a little-known but well-connected organization, the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation. 

Despite its low profile, the foundation has close ties to members of Congress, allowing its donors, who give as much as $100,000 a year, to mix with lawmakers at shooting contests, banquets and wine tastings. The food and drink at last month’s gathering were paid for in part by the National Rifle Association and the trade group for the gun industry. 

Over the past year, sportsmen’s caucus members have clinked glasses and puffed cigars at a “Wine, Wheels and Wildlife” fund-raiser at a North Carolina vineyard, a “Whiskies of the World” and cigar reception on Capitol Hill, and a “Stars and Stripes Shootout” in Tampa, Fla., where the top shooting awards went to a Republican congressman and a lobbyist for the N.R.A. Such events provide the firearms industry and other foundation donors with a tax-deductible means of lobbying the elected officials who shape policies important to their businesses. 

to read more, click here

In The Atlantic: Gun violence in US Cities compared to the deadliest nations in the world

(for comparison, the murder rate in Chester was 64/100,000 in 2010, 62/100,000 in 2011, so comparable to Honduras, or New Orleans).

"We can't put this off any longer," President Obama implored the nation last week as he introduced 23 executive actions designed to reduce gun violence in America. While the United States has the highest level of gun ownership per capita in the world, its rate of gun homicides, about three per 100,000 people, is far lower than that of Honduras, the country with the world's highest gun homicide rate (roughly 68 gun murders per 100,000 people). But America's homicide rate varies significantly by city and metro area, as I pointed out here at Cities a few weeks ago.

The map below compares the rate of gun murders in American cities to nations around the world. Building upon Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data used in that post, Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute compiled additional data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other sources collated by The Guardian. (While international crime data suffer from significant reporting and comparison issues, homicide data is more reliable. As the Urban Institute's John Roman points out, it is the one type of crime that is "hard to fake" and also most likely to be reported.)

To read more, and see the map, click here.