GUNSENSE

GUNS ON ARKANSAS CAMPUSES—AGAIN

I've been a faculty member at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, since 1986.

I grew up around guns.

I'm not afraid of guns, and I know how to use them.

And I don't want guns on our campuses. Here's why.

House Bill 1077, introduced by Representative Charlie Collins in the 90^th General Assembly, would allow faculty and staff with the proper credentials to carry a concealed handgun on the campuses of Arkansas colleges, community colleges, and universities. The current bill, as a cursory reading of it reveals, is exactly the same as the current law, Act 226, with one important exception. 

HB 1077 removes the opt-out clause from the current law, the clause that gives to the various Boards of Trustees the final decision on whether or not to allow handguns on the campuses that fall under their supervision.  Since Act 226 became law, the Boards across the state have twice had an opportunity to opt out of the law, and twice the Boards have spoken with one voice, choosing to prohibit guns from their campuses.

I have publicly applauded the Boards for their good sense and courage in resisting this violent legislation.

But Representative Collins has decided that if the Boards of Trustees do not agree with his wish to arm our campuses, the very campuses that these Boards oversee and govern, then he will remove their power to make such decisions.

This is the kind of governmental over-reach that moderates and conservatives in this state, and across the country, have always resisted.

Self-governance has been disregarded in HB 1077, and now the bill should be resisted.

HB 1077 is nothing more than a solution in desperate search of a problem that in Arkansas thankfully does not exist.  In the 12-year period between 2001 and 2013 (numbers gathered according to the Clery Act and available through the FBI site), there were four murders on Arkansas college campuses involving guns. None can be classified as mass-shootings. In fact, if you are seeking a safe haven from mass shooters, one of the safest places in America is a campus of higher education in the state of Arkansas. In the same period of time, you were more likely to die of a lighting strike in our state than you were a gunshot on an Arkansas college campus.

The problem is amplified when we realize that adding guns to any environment increases the risk that they will be misused and that innocent people will be seriously hurt or killed. A recent study from Stanford proves conclusively that in right-to-carry states gun-violence increases exponentially.

Surely, this is not the environment that we want for our colleges and universities in Arkansas.

But what about defensive gun use, the real crux of this bill?

Another recent study appearing in Politico, and drawn from the work of one of our country’s imminent researchers in gun violence at Harvard, shows that those numbers have been seriously skewed to aid arguments in favor of right-to-carry. In fact, defensive gun use, particularly when involving the kind of mass-shootings this bill is designed to address, is almost nonexistent.

Also, we often hear that gun-free zones, such as college campuses, are invitations to mass-killers. This too is false. In an exhaustive study published by Mother Jones, it was discovered that among the 62 mass shootings over the last 30 years, not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a campus because it banned guns. The school was chosen because of the stressful, often bullying treatment the killers had received there as students.

So, gun-free campuses do not invite such tragedies, and placing guns on campuses does nothing to prevent them. In fact, placing guns on campuses invites other tragedies that we certainly wish to avoid here in Arkansas.

And finally, what about the intangibles? What about open discussion and freedom of speech—one of the hallmarks of higher education? 

In October, 2014, at Utah State University, where campus-carry is legal, one of our country’s leading feminist and media scholars, Anita Sarkeesian, was scheduled to lecture. Threats on her life were received, and after conferring with the administration and learning that they could not guarantee her a safe, gun-free environment because of their concealed-carry law, she had no choice but to cancel her lecture. This was the subject of a lead article in The Chronicle of Higher Education—our country’s major publication on higher education—and the damage done to the reputation of Utah State is inestimable. Speakers, dignitaries, artists, politicians, writers, all have been served notice—Utah State cannot guarantee a gun-free, safe environment for their visits.

So, at Utah State, guns have compromised the freedom of speech. And they will do so at Arkansas as well, even at the classroom level, as teachers and lecturers avoid discussing the controversial topics that are the backbone of history, politics, philosophy, and ethics.

To voice your opinion on this issue, email or call Representative Bruce Cozart, the Chairperson of the House Education Committee that will determine the fate of this bill. You can also contact Representative Charlie Collins, the author of the bill, by email here, or you can visit his House page here.

—Sidney Burris, Professor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

 

FERGUSON? MEET TWITTER!

As the graphic above shows, the Ferguson shooting and the grand-jury decision that followed it were the two most tweeted events of 2014.

That didn't surprise me at first. Not really. But then I remembered that Katy Perry and Justin Bieber together have a gazillion followers on Twitter—over 120 million, it turns out, occupying the top two positions on the list. In celebrity-saturated America, then, I was heartened that so many people would have so much to say about the events in Ferguson that began on August 9 when Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown.

And that they would say it on Twitter.

Twitter became, in fact, the go-to news feed if you wanted to stay current on Ferguson. Even more, it became the megaphone of a social-movement as it sidelined the mainstream news sources, assigning the story to anyone who had a smart phone, a basic understanding of hashtags, and a talent for the short, intense, 140-character update. 

If you didn't already know this before Ferguson, you probably know it now: Twitter comes with a rhetoric, a set of embedded recommendations for optimal messaging, and unique characteristics that distinguish its use of language. And some people are better at it than others.

Twitter, then, has created a genre—you knew that—but the genre came of age during the Ferguson tragedy. If you weren't following the events at Ferguson on Twitter, your impression of what happened there is distinctly different from those who used Twitter as their primary news source.

How so? You missed having a front-row seat to watch the growth, planning, and development of a social movement.

The current version of this movement is still in its formative stages, in many ways, but its energy has been around for a very long time, extending back to the early twentieth century when the Civil Rights movement took shape, a recognizably modern shape based on community-organizing that used the tools that lay to hand. Young black activists are currently channeling this energy through Twitter, particularly by using it as a kind of portal or hub to open other forms of communications and sources of authority. It appears to me, at least, to be innovative and even, at times, revolutionary. One of its most potent manifestations is Black Twitter, a virtual community that has developed real power and cohesion in the national dialogue on race and social justice.

As time passes, we will learn more about the shape and direction of this movement, but its renovative energy is instantly available to anyone who cares to access it. Careers are being changed by it, futures reconceived with it, and goals re-envisioned under its influence. You can ignore it, of course, but its impact on our national dialogue—particularly that dialogue outside of the mainstream media—is substantial.

Why is this so? Twitter, more efficiently than any of the other platforms, connects activist sensibilities, almost spontaneously, preserving the undisciplined force of a good and evolving conversation. The result? Ultimately a kind of group consciousness is forged, evolved, filtered, and revised. Not always productively, not always as you might have hoped, but always with movement.

Of course, Twitter is unruly, even rough-and-tumble, but as far as social media platforms go, and in the hands of these capable activists, it gets things done.

And all of this social motion occurs continually, dynamically, and with a kind of looseness that, while it's not adept at long-term goal-formation (committees and meetings are still essential), is unparallelled in the art of inclusion, of opening the dialogue to a larger and more diverse community—in short, of establishing subject matters, almost overnight, as central to a given discussion.

Long before Twitter, Howard Zinn wrote about a similar phenomenon in his book, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He is talking here about the mistaken perception that the Civil Rights actions in Albany, Georgia failed, but he broadens his comments to include social movements in general:

Social movements may have many 'defeats'—failing to achieve objectives in the short run—but in the course of the struggle the strength of the old order begins to erode, the minds of people begin to change; the protesters are momentarily defeated but not crushed, and have been lifted, heartened, by their ability to fight back. Albany was changed forever by the tumultuous events of 1961 and 1962, however much things looked the same when the situation quieted down. The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events (54).

All social-reform movements—from gun-violence prevention to civil rights—would do well to remember this. When reformative energies arise in a culture, and when they stand on ideals that define the common good—equality, compassion, public safety, open access—they will begin to spread, often with great and debilitating resistance, and they spread very slowly at times, but gradually those traits that bring us together have little choice but to triumph over those that separate, segregate, and ultimately endanger us. 

This is so because we are social animals, and we depend on each other, however trying it may be at times, for our daily lives. 

Zinn's point about appearances applies here as well. Twitter at times seems to be doing very little with its incessant chattering back and forth, with its generic inability to deliver clear and detailed proclamations, but that is a misperception of its essential power. Twitter channels energy, often unquantifiable social energy. However much things may "look the same" after a Twitter conversation dies down for the night, the power of the old order—in this case, the entrenched and systemic racism in Ferguson, or the power of the NRA—has begun to erode just a bit because of this impalpable energy which at times figures as a sense of urgency and immediacy that, if it accomplishes nothing else, serves as a call to mobilize.

And once that mobilization begins, Twitter stokes its momentum—and it is difficult to slow down. Because we are social animals, and because we feed off the energy of building communities that are in the business of restoring imperiled rights.

The communities surrounding Ferguson and the current gun-violence prevention movement, whose concerns overlap, stand on the shoulders of those who made it their business "to erode the old order," as Zinn phrased it. Both of these movements have been around a lot longer than many people might know, and their survival alone is testament to their strength and cultural density.

And speaking of these old orders: Missouri was recently cited as leading the nation in black homicide victimization. In fact, Missouri has occupied that spot for four of the past five years.

If you want to get an immediate sense of the vital work that's being done in the black community after Ferguson, and the aggressive forces aligned against it, I'd recommend you take to Twitter.

And don't forget to bring the hashtags #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter along with you. They're your ticket to the main event.

 

YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN

Howard Zinn's full quotation, from which my tweet was taken, goes like this:

This mixing of activism and teaching, this insistence that education cannot be neutral on the crucial issues of our time, this movement back and forth from the classroom struggles to the struggles outside by teachers who hope their students will do the same, has always frightened the guardians of traditional education. They prefer that education simply prepare the new generation to take its proper place in the old order, not to question that order. (From You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train [2002], by Howard Zinn, Beacon Press, p. 7.)

So I'm a teacher. A college teacher, which gives me a distinct environment compared to that, say, of a high-school teacher, and I essentially agree with Zinn. Like him, I too have wondered "how so many teachers manage to spend a year with a group of students and never reveal who they are, what kind of lives they have led, where their ideas come from, what they believe in, or what they want for themselves, for their students, and for the world" (Neutral, 7).

In fact, if we conceal these things from our students, we might be inadvertently teaching them
something else, something "terrible," to use Zinn's word. Maybe we're teaching our students that much of what they encounter in the classroom—history, art, philosophy, economics—should have little impact on the lives they lead and the people they become. And maybe these books and the ideas they put forward will have even less influence on how they define themselves after they leave our classrooms. Or even worse—maybe the very act of self-definition, of taking informed stands and articulating those stands, however they choose to do it, will always play second fiddle to earning a living.

And if that happens, then we have to ask ourselves what we are doing? Are we simply place-holders until the paycheck begins to arrive?

I am aware that many teachers claim obectivity as their goal, and I often find myself among those folks: present both sides of a case fairly and give the students the tools they need to fashion, independently, their own opinions on the material. But here's the problem: we have little understanding of what really constitutes objectivity (outside of the hard sciences), and even less ability, in my experience, to fashion from the chaos of history or art or music any statement that we might timidly—and falsely, I believe—claim to be objective, or free of a given perspective, a nuanced bias.

So why not reveal the genesis and growth of your own opinions? And why not do this with tolerance and flexibility?

Besides, you can't be neutral on a moving train, as Zinn regularly told his classes, and as Eddie Vedder of the band, Pearl Jam, sings in "Down" (listen for Zinn's title in the second verse, from the San Francisco tour, 2006).

If we don't attempt to do this, we run another risk.  The problem is that ojectivity, which claims to deal with the the way things are, is often confused with inevitability, which mandates the way things must be.  And anytime we condone that partnership, we've made a mistake. If we leave our students with anything at all, we ought to let them see how damaging this partnership really is.

So, what as a teacher are we to do? Zinn rejects the idea that our students come to us as a blank slate:

My students had had a long period of political indoctrination before they arrived in my class—in the family, in high school, in the mass media. Into a marketplace so long dominated by orthodoxy I wanted only to wheel my little pushcart, offerering my wares with the others, leaving students to make their own choices (Neutral, p. 8.)

This seems possible to me, even necessary in the marketplace drenched, as it is now, by social media: let our students see how we assembled our own little pushcarts because we have assembled them by looking through all of the others in the marketplace; let them see why we bought this item, and did not buy this item; let them know that the contours of our own individual lives rendered this item sensible, and that item useless.

Why shouldn't our students see what the entire process of assembling a feasible, responsible, informed personality looks like in the 21st century?

We will always have to realize, of course, the power dynamics that exist between the lectern and the desk, so we must insure that our evaluations of our studentshave nothing to do with agreement and everything to do with the internal coherence of their own positions.

But surely we can do that. And just as surely, we can begin to encourage our students, by example, to begin charting their own paths through the marketplace of ideas and cultural practices that await them and even bombard them on a daily basis.

 

LIES, DAMN LIES & STATISTICS: REFLECTIONS ON GUN STATS

Mark Twain popularized the saying that there are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies, and statistics. Twain attributed the phrase to Benjamin Disraeli, but it hasn't been found in any of Disraeli's writing, and so a lot of folks believe Twain wrote it. It does sound like something he would say—it also sounds like Oscar Wilde, for that matter—and so I'll let the issue rest there.  

The gist of the argument, though, is clear:  statistics can be very misleading, and as a result, statistics are often used purposely to mislead a targeted audience. All of us involved in the GVP movement know what I'm talking about; and some of us may have used statistics with "specific intentions" in mind; and some of us may have been the target of a carefully intentioned statistical attack.  

So when I posted the above meme on Gunsense, I figured someone would point out that this was a statistically insignificant number. That's a common tactic, and one that I understand, and one that I see on a daily basis. Sure enough, I was told that this number, 1.3 million, was ".00008% of the national population annualized over 46 years." My commenter also added that this was "appalling." Yeah, I don't think he was appalled either.

But I am. And here's why. Both figures, the statistical percentage and the absolute number, describe the same reality—1.3 million American corpses in fewer than fifty years, all from gun-violence. Civilian gun violence, which is one of the distinctions the meme is making. Each number (.00008% and 1.3 million) elicits a different response to an identical reality. Still, you choose your number, and you select your depicted reality. 

But we need to look a little closer at this specific reality—the dead American.

Were we talking about manufacturing carburetors, and if I manufactured carburetors, I would probably look favorably on a .00008% fail rate, no matter how many I manufactured each year.  And so statistical percentages are often very helpful when dealing with carburetors, to continue with my example.  (Of course, they can also be used deceptively in that arena too.)

But with human life, the case is different because for every victim of gun-violence, many others—the victim's family and friends, the assailant's family and friends, to cite only a few constituencies—are deeply and adversely affected, and so the number of living victims multiplies exponentially.  

Also, the moral and psychological dimension that surrounds such acts of aggression exerts an incalculable influence on the moral health of the community at large, while it also calls attention to the deep and often invisible roots of systemic violence that afflict the community and hinder its ability to provide a healthy environment for its citizens.  Anyone who has worked with survivors of gun-violence or with those who live in particularly violent neighborhoods will testify to the widespread and debilitating effect that a single murder has on the neighborhood's daily life and on the individual lives of every member of that neighborhood. 

Percentages, by their very nature, cannot record this aspect of gun-violence.

In fact, if we want accurately to portray the pure brutality, the stark reality of civilian deaths from gun-violence then we should compare that number to those who die in war—a violent, sanctioned, brutal, and for America, continual arena of endeavor. That in my opinion is the only comparison, the only number, that gets just right the nature of the gun-violence that currently afflicts our country.

Would anyone care to calculate the percentage of two-year-olds who commit matricide with a 9 mm handgun, and so dismiss the shooting in the Idaho Walmart as an insignificant murder, an outlier unworthy of further concern? I am certain that some would, and some have, but I'm not among that number. Even without playing the blame game, I find that single incident—statistically irrrelevant—to be deeply revealing about the current state of America's gun culture. And worthy, therefore, of reflection, even though our "statisticians" might argue otherwise.

A final issue:  if we judge the legitimacy of our response to human suffering by a threshhold percentage, by a fatality rate, then we must initiate a discussion I do not believe we want to have.  

We must determine the number, the percentage, that sanctions and approves our outrage or concern over suffering and death. All of us can point to historical examples when human life has been weighed and evaluated in this manner. And when we looked the other way in the face of such suffering and death.

My hope is that all of us will remember those examples so that we are not doomed to repeat them again.  

LATE THOUGHTS ON THE IDAHO WALMART SHOOTING

The Washington Post's story on the Idaho Walmart shooting was hard to read—still, to me, a tragedy of infinite proportions.  

A few days after the shooting, however, some of the commentary from the GVP community gradually shifted its focus from the tragic nature of the shooting to the obvious negligence of the mother who left her son unattended in the presence of a loaded and chambered handgun.  And the father-in-law's statements didn't help either:  from my perspective, he seems to be a paranoid, angry, grieving white male who loves his guns and has a lot riding on those guns.  Aside from the grief he feels, he's angry that his daughter-in-law's death is being used by some to "grandstand on gun rights." (You can read more about that here.)

I would have thought that a daughter-in-law's death, a two-year-old grandson's having accidentally shot and killed his mother, and the numbing grief that must accompany these events would have trumped PR concerns about gun-rights in America.  

That it didn't shows where some of our citizens stand now on the subject of gun-ownership. It's a dangerous place, clouded by anger and unreason.  But grief, of course, has unexpected effects on its victims. I'll chalk it up to that.

Still, I cannot imagine the sorrow, second-thoughts, and plain, old pain that are currently visiting this family.  My predominant wish, as I read the piece, was that the family find effective ways to support and nurture the two-year-old boy as he grows and matures and learns the truth of what he did.  And what his mother enabled him to do.

A couple of things occurred to me as I watched this story develop over the past few days.  

1. A very loud and active portion of America is actively stoking our gun-culture.  Which is news to no one.  We are becoming a militarized country, and I've previously noted the dangers that go along with this trend. (American Sniper opens on January 16, for example, and is already getting Oscar buzz.  Big sigh.)  Many are eager to bring military solutions to civil disagreements, and that will cause us much suffering.  Among developed nations, America accounts for 30% of the population and 90% of the firearms fatalities.  We need either to find creative and effective ways to live with that—which we have not done and which I hope we cannot do—or we need to change it.  Obviously, I favor the latter path.  But to advocate both for the proliferation of firearms and for public safety is disingenuous, silly, and dangerous.
2. When we increase the number of firearms in our daily lives, as the recent Stanford report clearly showed, we increase the chances that accidents like this one will happen simply because . . . accidents happen.  Gun-owners are not immune to bad judgment and tragic oversight.  Gun-owners are human beings.  Those who believe it essential to carry weapons into Walmart must also accept that a two-year-old commiting matricide, while rare, is an unavoidable feature of the landscape they are actively arming.  As we increasingly arm ourselves in public, we need also to arm ourselves with the truth of what we are doing:  as more and more people carry publicly (whether open or concealed), more and more people will die in this manner.  Those who support right-to-carry laws must also acknowledge this as one of the inevitable consequences of their position.  To do otherwise weakens their own platform.
3. The truth, I know, is seldom simple and rarely clear.  Except in this case:  I'd rather face a two-year-old in a shopping cart with a Nerf football than one with a loaded and chambered handgun.  These are the kinds of assessments gun-owners must make when they elect to carry their weapons with them wherever they go.  Because they are human.  Because they make mistakes.  Here's the question:  Is it worth the risk to carry a weapon with you into a reasonably safe environment?  One where the odds, by Vegas standards, are laughingly in your favor of getting out alive, without even firing a single shot?
4. Sheri Sandow, one of Veronica's close friends, said that Veronica was not carrying a concealed weapon into Walmart because "she felt unsafe."  She was carrying a gun, Sandow continued, "because she was raised around guns." Which is to beg the question:  Why then was she carrying?  She was carrying a gun, then, culturally?  Which means, in some quarters, naturally.  Carry a gun naturally, however, and you might be carrying that gun unconsciously, and when you carry a gun unconsciously, you're putting yourself and others at risk in ways that will not happen when you carry a knife, for example, unconsciously.  (I'd also rather face a two-year-old in a shopping cart with a knife than with a loaded pistol.)
   
1. And let me add this:  I was also "raised around guns" (read more about that here), and because I was raised around guns, I would never have dreamed of carrying a weapon into Walmart.  Being raised around guns doesn't mean that your default action is to carry guns everywhere you go.  But I was raised in a very specific sort of hunting culture, and since there were no birds or deer in Walmart, I didn't need a gun when I went Christmas shopping.  And if I had insisted on carrying one into Walmart, my fellow hunters would have accused me of "showing off," or even worse, of being "downright dumbass stupid."
5. But in our militarized culture, things have changed.  So I counsel this, whenever I'm asked:  if you are carrying a firearm in public, even though you don't feel threatened or unsafe, you need to consider long and hard why you are carrying that firearm.  Run the numbers.  Undertake a real, military-grade threat assessment.  And then ask yourself:  What makes me free of mistaken judgment or my firearm free of mechanical mishap?  That question also is part of a responsible threat assessment.  And maybe at the end of that assessment, some will consider the risk too great.  Some, of course, will not.
6. Finally, grammar is telling.  Veronica was not "taken" from us, as her father-in-law indicated.  The passive voice is inappropriate because it buries the true subject of the sentence and sidesteps the gruesome task of assigning blame for a child's misuse of a firearm.  Veronica's son, in fact, took her from us, and he did that because his mother unwittingly gave him access to the firearm that killed her.  And she did that because, while she was "smarter" than many, as both sides of this debate have indicated, she also shared one quality that unites us all, has nothing to do with intelligence, and causes us truckloads of trouble:  she was human, as Nietzsche reminded us—all too human.

So, if we continue to arm our population, then these kinds of accidents will continue to happen. That is a statistical reality.  Right-to-carry advocates must be forced to connect the dots (more guns, more gun-violence), accept the grim figure that lies at their feet, and feel at peace with the positions that logically lead to these tragedies.  

Are they ready to do this?  Are they ready to say, "Maybe a mother dies, but all across armed America, we feel much safer in Walmart with a handgun tucked away in our zippered purses or an assault rifle slung over our shoulders?  After all, we went to Walmart, and we got out alive."  

Or, I might suggest another question:  How threatened do we really feel in a Walmart in northern Idaho, or in northwest Arkansas, or in central Virginia, and in light of an honest response to that question, begin to adjust our gun-behavior accordingly.  

Because mistakes happen.  

Whichever path we choose, we will have much mourning to do as we come to clarity on this crippling problem.  This one incident in Idaho has given one family a lifetime of sadness, and many more tragedies of this sort will visit families that now assume, inaccurately it turns out, that it can't happen to them.