GUNSENSE

THREE ARGUMENTS THE NRA MAKES IN THE WAKE OF A MASS SHOOTING—AND WHY THEY ARE FALSE

After every mass shooting in America, and depending tragically on how many are killed, our nation erupts in a polarizing debate about how the shooting could have been avoided. The NRA sees it as an opportunity to further their agenda of selling more guns to more people in more places.

Gun-violence prevention groups point to a country with a flawed background-check system and a love affair with the "assault rifle," which for ten years (1994-2004) in our country was banned.

The NRA's message is consistent:  more guns in the hands of more people will discourage and potentially stop these attacks. The gun-violence prevention groups consistently disagree.  

Who's correct, and what are the facts?

Here are three arguments the gun lobbies traditionally make after a mass-shooting, with the counter-arguments following them.  President Trump's Twitter stream made versions of these arguments today. You will hear them from our NRA-sponsored lawmakers in Congress, as well as in their counterparts in our state legislatures.

• More guns in more places will discourage these mass shootings.  More research is needed (and the NRA has done everything in their power to frustrate that research), but the numbers we do have show, in fact, that mass shooters ignore the possibility of facing an armed civilian. Once a person has decided to commit such a violent act, these kinds of logical considerations fall to the wayside.
  • The counter-argument: In fact, more guns not only fail to prevent these shootings, they increase the amount of gun violence in the community at large.  More guns, more gun violence. Details here. 
• Gun-free zones will always invite mass shooters.  Another version of the previous argument.  You will hear our legislators use the standard NRA rhetoric:  they will speak of "crazy killers," "sicko shooters"—our President's phrase—and "soft targets."  But in fact, it has been shown that school-shooters, specifically, do not choose their targets based on whether or not they are gun-free zones. Other considerations are far more important to them. 
  • The counter-argument:  In fact, these school shooters often return to schools where they experienced emotional trauma and never consider whether it has been designated a "gun-free zone" or not.  Details here.
• The increase in mass-shootings in America is due to violent video games, a decrease in family structures, a general breakdown in American society, or mental illness.  The idea here is to take the focus away from the guns, to stop us from looking at our flawed background-check system and the proliferation of assault rifles, and to insure that our gun manufacturers keep their bottom lines healthy.
  
  • The counter-argument:  The reason for the increase in our mass-shootings is embarrassingly simple.  Among developed nations, America offers the easiest access to lethal weapons, such as an assault rifle, of any country in the world.  And if the NRA has its way, that access will become easier and easier.  Details here.

The NRA has spent decades perfecting their propaganda regarding gun-violence in America. It is bold, loud, and often false.  Now, if we want to insure the safety of our students and citizens, we must begin to gather the information that will allow us to construct our own responses, based on facts and an insistence on public safety. Many groups are already doing this, and have been doing so for a long time. We are making progress, and with your help, we will continue to do so.

For an introduction to gun-violence prevention, and a list of those organizations that are doing such good work, see my piece, "Getting Started with Gun-Violence Prevention."

 

AFTER PARKLAND: TWO PIECES YOU NEED TO READ

After every mass shooting, a steadily growing number of Americans—concerned, activated, enraged—ask the inevitable and necessary question:  What can I do?

It's a good question, and two years ago, I posted a piece that offered advice to those who wanted to become part of the solution.  You can find it here.  It's still relevant.  And I encourage you to contact one of these organizations; they have carefully laid out ways for you to help that will fit both your schedule and your level of commitment.  We can't all be full-time activists, and the best organizations realize this.

My guess is that each one of you has wondered how our country has arrived at this particular place—more guns than citizens, more mass shootings per capita than any other developed country, more legislators opining about the horrific nature of these slaughters while piously claiming that now is not the time to discuss these senseless tragedies.  The NRA and America have a long and complicated history—much too long for me to address in a blog posting—but there are two mini-histories, if you will, that are deeply relevant to our current problem with guns, and they're not complicated.  

If you take the time to read these two pieces, you will understand the broad outlines of the two trends that have most shaped the problem that we now confront.

The first piece here was published just after the Las Vegas shooting, and it's titled, "The NRA Wasn't Always Against Gun Restrictions."  You want to pay special attention to what happened to this organization in 1971, which is detailed in the section, "The Hardliners Took Over the NRA after an NRA Member Was Killed by Federal Agents." 

The name to remember is Harlon Carter, a Texas lawyer who turned the NRA into a conservative, pro-gun, anti-immigration lobby.

And by the way, if you're a fan of the Drive-By Truckers, you'll want to have a look at this video of the band's single, "Ramon Casiano," that details the murder of Casiano by Carter.  Carter is never mentioned by name, but it's a powerful send-up of the founder of the NRA's violent campaign, as well as the racism that powers it.

The second piece, "A Confirmed Decline in Hunter Participation Should Be a Call to Action for Sportsmen," tracks in effect the decline in sales of traditional hunting firearms.  Faced with this declining revenue, arms manufacturers had to appeal to another demographic simply because Americans have been steadily losing interest in hunting and the firearms that traditionally accompany that sport.

The argument the gun-lobby made was fairly simple:  you don't buy shotguns nowadays to shoot quail; you need military-style weapons to repel the hordes of heavily armed invaders that are currently planning to trample the borders of our country, our homes, our schools. 

An essentially militaristic advertising campaign and the fear-baiting that provided its fuel—it struck home with many Americans, and the gun industry began to recover its losses.

So—a growing lack of interest in hunting, which led to a drop in traditional firearms revenue, corrected by an NRA that has become increasingly militaristic in its appeal to self-defense and closely aligned with the gun manufacturers whose bottom line they have made their number one priority. 

And of course buying the politicians who will support their violent agenda—that too is a priority, and we have learned sadly that many of our legislators will simply work for the highest bidder.  That is old news, but it is always tragic news.

In short, we're confronting an unholy alliance between the NRA and the new demographic they have spent over forty years creating to bolster a revenue problem. The gun-lobbies have a head-start, and they are very good at what they do, but reasonable solutions appeal to reasonable people, and I still believe that we are ultimately a reasonable nation.  

We will prevail in this struggle because more and more Americans are becoming involved every day, and they are not giving up.  Patience and commitment at a sustainable level are the keys to success. 

Here in Arkansas, for example, Moms Demand has grown from a fledgling group of women in Little Rock to a broader-based organization that now has representation in many parts of our state, and they have accomplished this in only a couple of years.

And remember, the mid-term elections are coming.  And voting is activism in its purest form. 

AS IT HAPPENED, I WAS IN BATON ROUGE WHEN THE ATTACK TOOK PLACE

I was in Baton Rouge, visiting family, when the shooting started.

I was never in any danger; I had no desire to move toward the cordoned-off area, either during the event or after the shooter was down and the area declared safe. 

Like the rest of the country, I followed it on Twitter, the local news station, and the other platforms that shared information as it became available.

Reports, as always, were ceaseless and draining, often qualified with the adverb that's working overtime nowadays, "allegedly," and I tried to remain calm.

I wasn't alone. Everyone tried to remain calm.  

The phone rang as friends and relatives from around the country called to make certain that we were safe. Human beings caring about human beings. No one takes it for granted any longer.

But Baton Rouge has problems that are longstanding and difficult to solve for a host of reasons that I'm not qualified to address. So I won't.

But personal testimonies and postings about the troubled city have been appearing everywhere, and I find "Maggie's" a credible one. If you have a few moments, you might want to look at it.

But I also remembered a passage from the "Preface" to Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, where the German philosopher speaks about the "chills and fears stemming from isolation," a condition that has become an increasingly prominent aspect of American life:

Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every person burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time . . . 

And so all of us, citizens of a nation now sharply divided, and in the face of these daily executions, are trying to recover ourselves however we can, as we wait for the next event. And even when we wait in a crowd, surrounded by our fellow citizens, or our colleagues, or our family, we understand what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of the "chills and fears stemming from isolation" that come at us as we hold radically different opinions about seemingly intractable problems.

We feel helpless and angry. We feel alone.

So let's first recognize that we have become a country whose citizens are continually seeking shelter in ways that are both productive and destructive, and let's learn to tell the difference between the two. 

But let's not ignore the feelings that are leading us to seek shelter. And again: that we are now a country whose citizens are seeking shelter however they can and whenever they need to do it.

The hardest part? Learning to recognize those chills and fears, and to say to ourselves, now I must take shelter. Now I must take care of myself.

These are wretched feelings. And they are spreading. And each of us will deal with them in different ways; we will attempt to recover as best we can, even when it means recovering from ourselves and our obsessive attention to our own feelings and opinions, and to the political embarrassments and assaults that our media daily serves up. 

But this is necessary work that we all must undertake, and it is work that we must give everyone the space to undertake.

At this point, I don't know anything else to say or do: take shelter when necessary, on your own terms, and encourage others to do the same.

 

WHEN A BAD GUY WITH A GUN STOPS FIVE GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

 

The screen cap above is taken from the website of the Academy of Combative Warrior Arts in Richardson, Texas, just outside Dallas. We learned recently that Micah Johnson, an Army veteran who killed five Dallas policemen at a protest march, had not only continued military drills in his yard after being discharged, but had also received tactical training at this Academy. While the Academy website promotes training in self-defense, it also offers training in assault tactics. It's a full-service organization, offering specialized programs for men, women, children, and Christians who are doing missionary work in countries that might not want them there. Here is their description of the assault-tactics program:

Reality is highly dynamic, you will be drawing your firearm, moving, shooting on the move, fixing malfunctions, etc. all under high levels of stress. Most people never get to train these skills as they are not typically allowed on the static gun range. With this disconnect in mind, we have created what we call A.C.W.A. - T.A.P. (Tactical Applications Program), which consists of real world applications of dry fire drills and scenario based interactions. These drills work to instill and hone these missing skills, creating a firm foundation for you to work from. You can see some basic fundamental drills in the video clip above, this is only the beginning.

The NRA, of course, for almost four decades now, has been creating the kind of fear in our citizens that has generated these kinds of organizations. They have been militarizing our country, encouraging untrained amateurs to buy military-grade weapons in fear of being attacked by looters, drug-addicts, and minority populations.  These so-called training academies do little to prepare its students to address the kinds of gun-violence we have seen recently, and that is why armed civilians rarely, if ever, are able to stop such a slaughter.

But what happened in Dallas last week reveals a paradox the no one in the gun-community wishes to discuss. Bad guys can also enroll in these programs. And so a bad guy with a gun killed five good guys with a gun. The bad guy had been trained to do this, both by the Academy and by his time in the military.

The score then, coming out of Dallas, is sobering:  one bad guy with a gun took down five good guys with guns.

In other words, 5-1. 

The bad guy won.

And we taught him how to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR MY STUDENTS: ALTON STERLING, PHILANDO CASTILE, AND THE DALLAS SHOOTINGS

Knowing that I was involved in the gun-violence prevention movement, one of my students asked me this morning to respond to the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the shootings in Dallas last night.

It is a difficult moment for our country now, and very often, it is equally difficult to respond coherently to these events, even as the details of the tragedies are unfolding.

Still, I found the request reasonable, even necessary. Here is what I wrote:

I stand with all innocent victims of gun-violence. And I view the senseless taking of life, whether by snipers or unnecessary police-shootings or accidental shootings or suicides facilitated by the easy availability of guns, as symptomatic of a country whose gun lobbies have established the gun as a reasonable, though military solution, for settling civic and psychological problems.

The point is that gun-violence has been taking American lives now in practically every corner of the population for a very long time, although police violence in the black communities has finally and rightly risen to national attention. There are many ways to respond to gun-violence in our communities, and when faced with this kind of brutality, most of us want to help. That is a very human and essential reaction.  

One strategy, however, will not work for every community. We have to be creative; we have to share our ideas; and we have to respect the different approaches that we will encounter. I have for the past two weeks, anticipating the Dalai Lama's birthday on July 6, been posting on my Facebook page, once a day, pictures of peace-workers who realized that violence is never the appropriate response to violence—and to be sure, cultivating fear, division, paranoia, and insecurity, which the NRA, and the politicians they fund, do so well, is a potent form of violence.

I posted these pictures because I take these people as my models.

Their vision and method of working are two-fold, and by example they make two recommendations:

1. Work in your immediate arena, doing what you can, where you can, when you can (social media, talking, writing, connecting, organizing, raising awareness).
2. Tap the long-term, unfolding commitment to the principle that peace and nonviolence are the most effective responses to violence, particularly for the long term. Last night's protest in Dallas had embraced this philosophy. And the workers I most admire and who continue to be my teachers have all, without exception, acted with the same conviction.

It is not a solution that everyone will accept, or that works for everyone, and I often fall short of its ideals, but I believe that this path, the path of nonviolence, of civil disobedience, is the right path.

After the initial shock of the tragedy passes, many people return to their normal lives, but it is then that the real work of gun-violence prevention begins, continues, and develops. But I do feel that each of us, if we are to be responsible citizens, must choose a method to respond to this violence, a method that is sustainable over the long-term.  

This choice will be and should be different for everyone.

The point is not to over-react, and not to undertake activities that we can't sustain—the NRA and Congress depend on this draining burst of hyper-activity, knowing that the American people will soon forget, at which point the gun-lobbies and the NRA can get back to making money and buying our elected officials. This is what they do best, and tragedies of this sort provide only a momentary inconvenience for them.

So, it is better, in short, to tweet once a day in support of a GVP organization for three years than it is to tweet 100 per day for a month.

Find your pace, an activity, a method that works for you, and stick to it. Many of my friends do far more than I do, many do far less.

It doesn't matter.

The long-view is the important view. Thanks for reaching out. I hope you are well. 

A PLEA FOR CIVILITY: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY GUN-LOVING FRIENDS

Dear Gun-Lovers:

Let me speak personally to you, without statistics, without affiliation, without insult, without condescension.

Without history, in effect, which is impossible, I know, but worth trying.

I want to speak to you person-to-person. You know what I mean: the bill-paying, family-raising, slightly disgruntled, wish-things-could-be-better person who, if we were stranded on a lifeboat together, would find a way, if we had two oars, to row together toward a safer place. I would look at you, and you would look at me, and we would know what we had to do, and we would do it.

That's the person who's writing this letter, and that's the person I want to address.

I know, in fact, that you are such a person most of the time—wanting and willing to help your fellow citizen when the chips are down. But like me, you have opinions that often divide us. Like me, you want your opinions to be right. Even better, you want them to be founded on facts. Why? Because you want your opinions to be founded on something that can't be overturned. And if they can't be overturned, then they must be right, and by extension, you too must be right. 

After all, being right is a good feeling. No doubt about it.

But I want to suggest that being right at the present moment is less useful than being civil during every moment that we have left together. 

Why? Because I continue to believe that we can row this boat together; or I believe that trying to row this boat together makes sense, that it is our last option, even though Congress tells us every day, every hour, every minute, that co-operation is fatal to the health of the Republic. Together, we must stop listening to Congress and listen to each other—with civility. 

Remember: many of our politicians today are exactly those people that Washington, Madison, and Jefferson (you're always quoting them) warned us against. They are destroying the spirit of co-operation, the very spirit we need now to solve our problems. You know that, and I know that.

The problem is that the gun debate uses statistics, and you have your set of statistics, and I have mine, and we toss them back and forth at each other, as we have done, for years. But statistics, when they appear in polemical settings, are often designed to polarize, and now, at the current moment, this polarization is killing us, literally, every day. 

It works like this. I don't change my mind because I have confidence in my statistics, and you don't change yours because you have faith in your numbers. The only thing left to do then is to call each other "stupid," or "ignorant," or "libtard," or "ammosexual," or "racist," or "sexist," or if we're feeling compassionate, we might go with "liberal" or "conservative" because each label softly offends the other one.

And offending is what we're trying to do.

So have we wasted our time? Probably. 

Maybe there are those who haven't made up their minds on the issues that you and I have long ago decided, and maybe they're quietly watching our back-and-forth, and maybe they will finally embrace one position or the other based on our shouting match. 

But I doubt it. Why? Because uncivil rhetoric appeals only to those who have already committed both to the position and the attack-language associated with that position. If we ever do convince someone who hasn't already formed an opinion, the key ingredient in that act of persuasion, along with statistics, will likely be civility.

I believe that. The problem is I don't know if you do. 

But I have hope. I'll say it again, my new mantra: you and I have much in common because, as I said at the beginning of my letter, you're probably a family-raising, bill-paying American, and so we have much to lose at this current impasse if we don't respect each other's opinions when they differ.

To quote the great British folk-singer, Roy Harper: "We're both fighting for the very same breath, and what did you say were your reasons?"

So I think we should both re-boot, and start again with the premise of civility.

We already agree that we have important decisions to make regarding the future of guns in our culture, and we're going to have to do it together. Civility is not simply another word for "manners;" civility is about civilization, and civilization is a group project, and civilization can perish or prosper. We need to commit to that project, particularly that project of prosperity. And we need to do it now. And we need to do it together. 

If you don't think civility is a revolutionary concept, if you think it's something your parents preached, or your teachers insisted on in class, then you're not paying attention. 

Civility, wielded at the right time, is the revolution. And I believe that the right time is right now.

Very few people are doing it, and so we could, together, make history.

But I can't do it alone. And neither can you. 

That's the beauty of it.

Thanks for your time, and your civility,

Gunsense

REMEMBERING SANDY HOOK THREE YEARS LATER

Amidst all of the tributes for Sandy Hook that will take place today, I would point to only one thing: our clear need to develop the space for an ongoing civil discourse about gun-violence and its effect on American life. Period.

There will always be divisions, anger, heated exchanges, but we must also have moments of reciprocated respect and civility. Moments—we can start with those, and only those.

Charles Blow in his New York Times op-ed today is already calling for such a demilitarized zone of discussion, and I'll close with his plea:

I thought of how productive it would be if more people with discordant views on gun regulations could have as civil a discussion as I had with my brother — full of mutual respect, adults disagreeing but not attempting to demonize, honestly searching for solutions.

The gun lobby poisons these conversations. It pumps out and promotes a never-ending stream of worst-case scenarios until it builds a level of fear and paranoia that only profits gun makers and grinds all progress to a halt.

So if you're concerned about gun-violence in this country, you might make room on your list of talking-points for civility and productive discourse:  ask for it when it seems to have disappeared, and cease the conversation when it refuses to return.

That's my resolution for the New Year, which nowadays begins on December 14.

3 HOPEFUL SIGNS THAT AMERICA'S GETTING GUNSENSE

After the Umpqua Community College shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, which occurred on October 1 and left ten dead and seven wounded, America sat up and noticed.  

As we always do.  

We were shocked, and we said so, and we prayed for the victims, and we denounced our legislators.

Since then, Mass Shooting Tracker has registered ten more mass shootings (fewer than one a day), and while these incidents received little coverage, our country seems to be growing increasingly impatient with the NRA's stranglehold on our politicians.  

Last night, as I stumbled on these postings, I entertained the hope that maybe, just maybe, the prevention of gun-violence in this country is inching its way up the importance-scale in the lives of everyday Americans—what the statisticians call the "saliency" factor.  

So it's time to share some good news.  Here are three recent indications that we are making, in fact, real progress toward real solutions in preventing the senseless gun-violence in this country that many are now comparing to a disease. I'd recommend that you follow the links and read the articles because they contain a lot of important information that I couldn't include in this piece. Plus, you'll start to feel hopeful, and we all need that.

1. A recent Gallup poll found that 55% of Americans support tighter laws surrounding the purchase of firearms.  This figure represents a sharp rise of eight points from last year, and registers a year-long movement toward support for stricter controls.  At the very least, this shows that the NRA's campaign to loosen our laws is no longer winning the hearts and minds of the American people.
2. A study of the NRA's membership reveals that its constituency is moving toward extinction, or irrelevancy (only 7% of American gun-owners now belong to the organization).  Largely white, male, rural, and comparatively uneducated, this demographic is being statistically diminished in the American population by the growth of Black, Hispanic, and to a lesser degree, Asian populations.  The bad news for the NRA is that these groups support strict gun-control by substantial majorities. Add to these populations, the majority of other Americans who support stricter controls on firearms, and the NRA's future begins to resemble the Brontosaurus—large, unwieldy, and harmless.
3. California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom recently unveiled a ballot initiative that, most significantly, would require background checks for the purchase of ammunition as well as ban possession of "large capacity" magazines. Most importantly, I would point to the fact that Newsom is explicitly taking on the gun lobbyists in his state, basing a political career on it, and bypassing the politicians who have been purchased by the NRA.  He is trying to float this initiative because he believes the people of his state are ready for these changes. It's a creative work-around that must be giving nightmares to the NRA.  This much is clear:  Newsom now considers the NRA to be both vulnerable and aligned against the interests of the people of California.  Even twelve months ago, this initiative would have seemed improbable, at least, if not impossible, and as we all know, as California goes . . . 

So in the wake of the horrific shootings that crowd our daily calendar, is it overly optimistic to hope that the American people are waking up?

Is it too much to claim that we are realizing that the will of a distinct minority can no longer indulge its interests and line its pockets while the majority of the country suffers the devastating consequences of gun-violence at such a high and unjustifiable level?

I don't think so.

I think our country is righting itself once again, as it always has, and we can be proud of the hard work that many have undertaken to move us toward real and equitable solutions to this national problem.

Thanks to everyone who has helped! We are making progress.

CONFESSION: I DON'T TRADE INSULTS WITH TROLLS ANYMORE (AND WHY YOU SHOULDN'T EITHER)

I've decided not to trade insults anymore with people who don't like the fact that I'm trying to  prevent gun-violence in America. Most of my friends made this decision a long time ago.

Why it took me three years to do it I don't know—and don't care to know—so I will probably relapse from time to time. My bad.

But here's the long and short of it:  insulting others, particularly if you're good at it, can become addictive, and it's a habit you should avoid.  It is, however, a constant temptation in the gun-violence prevention movement.

So for those of you new to this struggle, let me draw out the scenario that leads you into this nasty addiction, and I'll hope that you can avoid it and not make the mistakes that I made.  

We need you healthy and free of addiction.

I've sketched out the sequence of events that can lead you into this quagmire, and I hope you'll memorize them and so avoid the kind of trouble that dogged me for several years.

First, you post an article late one night that questions the current American gun-policy, sometimes with statistics.

Next, a troll makes a wise-crack (one that is often sexual in nature) and cites an article that supports his point. These people are usually white males, and if they have a picture associated with their account, it will either feature guns, or flags that they associate with an historical epoch that never existed as they believe it did, or sometimes dead animals, and most commonly a skull with a bandana and a badly written slogan—because skulls are scary to trolls and writing is not something your troll has tried very much.

If it's a photograph of the troll's face, he'll have a goatee and a shaved head; or it'll feature a cowboy hat, which dishonors cowboys, or a baseball cap, that disgraces ball-players, with a slogan that calls up a fantasy-league of forgotten dreams which they take to be history because Rush or Breitbart told them it was.  

They appear not to have engaged in any sort of physical exercise, unlike cowboys and baseball players, for many years. 

It's getting late now, and you're tired, but you can't stop.  You're credibility is on the line, after all. (No it's not, but the fog of war, and all that . . . )

So you drop a link that sources numbers supporting your original posting, and the troll will then attack your new source as being unreliable, un-American, and cited only by cowards like yourself who are having, by the way, children with your sister; or at least that's the implication because, as you'll note, these words are poly-syllabic and beyond the reach of your troll. If he attempts those words, however, he will mis-type them because typing is not something your troll has tried very much either.

And you respond that his source is equally unreliable (I've never indulged the sexual slurs), and that the webpage he cites has one of those twirling globes that even your mother, who is 93, thinks are dated and stylistically embarrassing.

At this point, neither of you has convinced the other one to abandon his opinion and run in slow motion through fields of flowers to embrace at sunset.  

But a lot energy has been spilled in erecting this red-faced standstill, and it's really late.

Now, your troll ramps up the name-calling to the point that you wonder if it might be actionable. (It's at least "totally gross" in my 6-year-old daughter's sense of the phrase.)  

At this point you will lapse into an emotionally exhausted silence, desperately trying to convince yourself that you've gained an intellectual superiority of some sort because you baled out just before a defamation suit against you became conceivable.  

The point is you haven't done anything productive. Those who are quietly watching this online exchange are only impressed by how quickly adults can begin to behave like children in a school-yard spat.

In fact, you've taken time away from other tasks that might actually help you move others toward the solutions that we need. And so your adversary has, in fact, won because his diversionary tactic has succeeded. (Which I believe, by the way, is a conscious strategy of the gun-fringe.)

O, and I forgot this part:  Just before the exchange grinds to its halt, you'll often get a mini-lecture dimly related to American history and the founding of our country.  Names are dropped.  Like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, whose prose so intimidates your troll that he wrongly assumes that you too will be intimidated too by a language that you've mastered and he hasn't.  

Don't go there.  Just don't. 

The only productive place you go now is to bed. It's late; you've wasted a lot of time and even more energy.

Tomorrow you will do much better.

And everyone will be stronger, happier, and more willing to tackle the real problems that lie before us.

And the trolls can't deal with that.

 

GETTING STARTED WITH GUN-VIOLENCE PREVENTION

If you want to become involved in the gun-violence prevention (GVP) movement, the options might seem a bit daunting at first. 

Do I need to join an organization? 

Do I have to engage those social-media platforms that further drain what little time I have to commit to this cause?  

And with my limited time, how can I locate the most reliable websites with the most reliable information? 

And most importantly, what is the most efficient—meaning, the least time-consuming, yet effective—way to have an impact on this problem?

I will try to answer those questions for you.

But first of all, let me say that I do understand your questions. I work a full-time job at an American university where I teach, write, and direct a large program.  With my wife, I am also raising a family.

I figured I didn’t have time for GVP activism either. 

Until I did.  Until our state legislators tried to put guns on our public college and university  campuses.

Until I felt what many Americans have felt about our country’s dysfunctional relationship with firearms—that it has to be made healthy again because too many innocent men, women, and most tragically, children are being sacrificed to it.  My particular focus has been guns-on-campus, but I now support a broad range of gun-violence causes.

Over the past three years, as I have undertaken this work, I have met exceptional folks who have devoted their lives to reducing gun-violence in this country, and if you get involved, you will meet them too because they are very generous with their time.  

These are the brave souls who are in the trenches and running the GVP organizations; the first-responders to every piece of legislation that furthers the gun-lobbyist’s agendas; the watchdogs to every ploy by the NRA to increase the presence of firearms in American life, and the fact-checkers for all of the misinformation disseminated by the radical gun-fringe in this country.

They do the heavy-lifting, and they do it every day. But they need your help.

So I have put together a primer on how the rest of us can pitch in and sleep better at night, knowing that we have made a contribution, and can still survive our busy days, taking care of our families and our loved ones.  

And even ourselves, if we think about it!

What follows then is the road-map that I wish I had several years ago when I began. 

Three words are useful in organizing this road-map:  LEARN, JOIN, ACT.

If you approach each one of these stages in moderation, you'll make real and long-lasting contributions to eradicating this national embarrassment.

LEARN

First, spend some time learning the terminology and the specific challenges that you might face as you wade into these waters. Like any socio-political movement, GVP has its own vocabulary and acronyms, and you'll need to know the fundamentals.

But the problem is pretty straightforward: people are dying needlessly because America has let the gun lobbyists and manufacturers set the policies that will most line their pockets. And our politicians, in the face of this money, feel that they are powerless to resist this carnage. The fundamental concept and wedge-issue is gun-control, and the best introduction to this topic comes from the The New York Times.  Read this piece carefully, and you will have a grasp of the basics:

• "Gun Control Explained"

As I read more and more over the past few years, I kept a list of the pieces that I found most helpful, and I have posted them on my blog, Gunsense. You will be interested in some topics, in others, not as much.  That's as it should be.  At this stage, you're discovering what part of this movement most attracts you, and reading through the relevant literature is the best way to locate your major interest.  You will find the specific list here:

• "Talk Back to the NRA"

JOIN

This is my favorite part of the process because here I get to list the pages and websites run by those dedicated folks I mentioned above. Note:  this is a highly selective list, and there are many more organizations and individuals doing vital work. You will find them as you work through this list and broaden your field of reference, and I encourage you to begin building a stockpile of your own trusted sources. I have listed here both websites and Facebook pages. Find a few that you like and join them, like them, get on their mailing lists, drive their numbers up, and you will heighten their profile and deepen your knowledge. I haven't annotated these entries.  Suffice it to say that they are all major national organizations, often with state branches tailored to the agendas of your own region.

I have worked most often and most successfully with the first one listed here, Moms Demand, and I have had very productive interactions, both on and off-line, with its founder, Shannon Watts.  Her group is efficiently organized on a national basis—she is, after all, the mother of five children, so efficient organization is a job requirement that all mothers will understand—and she has made it a Moms Demand goal to  accommodate all levels of commitment and knowledge about the issues. No one will feel out of place at a Moms Demand meeting.  The other groups, many of them older, have different and equally effective perspectives on the American gun-violence problem, and all of them are worth investigating.

• Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America
• Students Demand Action:  End Gun Violence in America
• The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
• The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
• Women Against Gun Violence
• Everytown for Gun Safety
• Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
• Americans for Responsible Solutions
• Parents Against Gun Violence
• Violence Policy Center
• No Notoriety
• Gun Violence Archive

 ACT 

You will eventually want to do something, right? Perhaps the most effective, traditional, and least time-consuming way to act is so simple that it defies credibility:  call your Congressmen and Senators and give them your opinion on the issue. Congressional staffers who work the phones tally the calls (pro and con) and report the results to their legislators.  The gun-lobbyists have been very successful in this simplest of all political actions, and it has had a real effect on their success.  We can do the same thing. Pick up the phone and call.  Many of the organizations that I listed will keep you informed of what you need to consider, when to call, and what to say.  It's an action that is extremely influential and very efficient. Here are a few websites that will help you locate your representatives quickly:

• Find Your Representative
• Find Your Senators

Also you'll find a helpful round-up of thirty decisive actions that you can do immediately to help in this cause:

• 30 Gun Control Actions You Can Take Now

And remember: as soon as you begin visiting these sites, you will find plenty of other ways to become involved and help push this cause forward.  You have lots of support, however you wish to become involved.

Of course, social media plays a large role in the GVP movement, and you'll need a Facebook page to access some of the sources listed above and a Twitter account, if you choose to help out in Twitter campaigns, or even if you want to use Twitter simply to follow GVP news in general. But that's another posting.  

IN ARKANSAS

The conventional wisdom with gun-violence prevention always encourages local and state action first, often inspired and fueled by the national organizations. I live and work in Arkansas, and gun-violence prevention in this state, while alive and well, does not currently have a great deal of resources, aside from the energy and devotion of its proponents, which are substantial and focused. 

Those of us who are active in this area have good working relationships with the state legislators who support our goals, and we have created a social-media presence as well. If you live in Arkansas, you can start here: 

• Central Arkansas Brady Campaign Chapter
• Moms Demand Action AR — the FB page for our state
• Gunsense — my own FB page, dedicated to state and national GVP
• Arkansans Against Guns on Campus — a FB page administered by one of my colleagues
• Gunsense — my blog, which you're currently visiting, and the only one devoted to GVP in the state (that I can find).
• @sidburris — this is my Twitter account, and I generally try to tweet & retweet, on a daily basis, the major voices in gun-violence prevention, as well as brief forays into nonviolence and community-building through mindful awareness.  I generally follow-back, as soon as possible.

Nothing that we do is insignificant because anything that we do will raise awareness of this problem among others.

As Mahatma Gandhi, wrote: "The 'fabric of society is not finished . . . It is on the loom, and it is made up of constantly changing relationships."  

We can do much now to change our destructive relationship with guns and strengthen the fabric of our society.  Thank you for wanting to help out!