GUNSENSE

SPEAKER RYAN, THE GOP, AND GUN-VIOLENCE: A NATIONAL DISGRACE

Speaker Ryan & a gun bill? Not right now.

Everyone knows that American gun-violence has been in the news lately. Everyone also knows that Americans, by huge majorities, support universal background checks on the sales of all firearms and that these very same Americans have informed their Congressmen of their preferences.

And still Congress has done nothing. Why?

Let's review.

—On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, killing 49 and injuring 53 before he was shot and killed by law-enforcement officers.

—Early Tuesday morning, July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was wrestled to the ground by two policemen and fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The video leaves unanswered questions about the legitimacy of the lethal force employed by the officers.

—On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul. Again, the only video of the event raises several questions concerning the actions undertaken by the officer on the scene.

—On July 8, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, killed five policemen and injured eleven others in Dallas, Texas during a peaceful protest regarding the recent police shootings.

—Between the shooting in Orlando and the shootings in Dallas (June 13 to July 7), there were 42 mass shootings in America, leaving 38 dead and 155 wounded, according to The Gun Violence Archive.

—On Wednesday, June 22, 2016, Congressman John Lewis and others staged a sit-in the well of the House of Representatives, demanding a vote on a No-Fly-No-Buy bill.

Americans had had enough, and these Congressmen who staged the sit-in were doing what they could to respond to the people's legitimate concerns about gun-violence.

Congressman Lewis and his supporters never got their vote.

And now Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has not only delayed, and for all practical purposes, killed the process of bringing a gun-bill to the floor, he has also threatened to penalize those who staged the sit-in in June.

So—in the face of the recent carnage in America, our Speaker is worried about whether Congressman Lewis has violated Parliamentary procedure in his peaceful demonstration in the House well.

Speaker Ryan, and those among the GOP who support him, are no longer credible representatives of the American people. Their allegiance is sworn to the NRA and the funding from the gun-lobbies that secure their jobs.

If the recent blood-shed cannot move them to action, then they will not be moved. Period.

Gun reform will come to America; it is, in fact, already happening.

But it is happening despite the work of the GOP-controlled Congress, and not because of it.

We move forward, then, around the obstructionists, or over them, or under them, or through them. But we will mover forward.

It saddens me to say this, but Paul Ryan and his supporters are no longer credible witnesses to the violence that has infected our country.

They have become its enablers, and history will see them as what they are: part of the problem and not part of the solution.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

SHANNON WATTS & MOMS DEMAND IN LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

Shannon Watts (center), Jamie Ford (far right), and a few of the dedicated women of Moms Demand, Little Rock.

On Wednesday, April 27, I had the good fortune to hear Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, in a question-and-answer session at The Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I became active in the gun-violence prevention movement in January 2013 when our state legislators attempted to pass a campus-carry bill, and since Shannon had founded Moms Demand a year earlier, on December 15, 2012, I got to know her through various social-media channels.  But I had never met her.

Having met her, and spoken with her now, I see why Shannon is a powerful advocate for gun-violence prevention. First, she has no hidden agendas—she is not secretly attempting to confiscate firearms from American gun-owners; she isn't attempting to vilify gun-owners (in fact, her organization's members include gun-owners); and she isn't even attempting to repeal the Second Amendment.

She is simply trying to make America a safer place to live, work, and raise children. The organization's platform is difficult to criticize, once it's understood. (And the gun-lobbyists have worked overtime to misrepresent it.)

In fact, her major initiatives find broad support among the American public:  she advocates for universal background checks on all purchases of firearms, and she proposes to do this by closing the loopholes on gun-show and internet gun-sales, where background checks are not required.  (Amy Schumer, in fact, has weighed in on this enormous problem in another of her biting, hilarious videos. You can, and must, view it here.)

For the record, though, 90% of the American public support these proposals, as well as 75% of the NRA's membership. And gun-owners in general overwhelmingly support them as well.

Shannon also advocates for safe-storage of all firearms within the home, a simple and preventive measure that would stop the rash of child-shootings that are now part of our daily headlines—shootings that are routinely ignored by the national media.

The problem, of course, as Shannon said, lies with our politicians who continue to support bills that the public opposes, and they do so because they are paid to do it by the NRA.  It isn't news, it isn't complicated, but it is formidable: money and politics make powerful and, at times, destructive allies.

But 91 people in America die from gunshot wounds every day, and Moms Demand, like most every American, believes that this figure is a national embarrassment.  So, the organization is working to decrease that number, and they have been very successful to date in building a campaign with both short and long-term goals.  And remember, the NRA has been working its agenda for 30 years, and Moms Demand has been around for a little over four years.  Their impact has been little short of miraculous.

Of course, Moms Demand is part of a network of gun-violence prevention groups, such as the Brady Campaign, whose roots extend back to the 70's, but Shannon's organization, as its name implies, focuses on mothers (although everyone is welcome), and as a result has a distinctly grass-roots feel to it that is designed to allow even the busiest Americans to participate in meaningful ways, often through a few minutes at the keyboard using social media or on the phone calling an elected official. 

The success of Moms Demand in uniting mothers at this fundamental level was obvious in Little Rock. I knew many of these women previously through social-media connections, but had never met them.  Jamie Ford, Jaimee Alverson, Kat Koran Hills, Austin Gelder Bailey, Julie Dunekacke Jaeger, Shelley Adams—and others whose names I should, but can't recall—are working quietly in Little Rock, and well beyond, to make our country a safer place. 

The important thing to note about Moms Demand, as an organization devoted to reform through political channels, is that Shannon has insisted that no action taken on behalf of gun-violence-prevention is too small.  One tweet, strategically hash-tagged, will have an impact.  As her organization has grown, she has kept that message in the foreground, and this tactic has served the movement well.

It's also important to articulate one of the unspoken assumptions behind the success of Moms Demand:  the horrific and inexcusable levels of gun-violence in America are so clear and obvious that when one American becomes aware of these levels, the gun-violence prevention movement has gained another supporter. 

So, Moms Demand, first of all, is about raising awareness, and that can be done with just a few clicks a day. Their website is full of helpful suggestions about how anyone can do this, and once you become involved with this group of talented women, you will find solid guidance about getting further involved with the movement at a level that you can sustain. And that is one of the reasons the movement has grown:  sustainable involvement is the focus.

Anyone can make a difference.  It's an obvious, simple, and often overlooked truth. But it's also a profound truth.

Historical aside:  Gandhi repeatedly said the same thing about nonviolence—embrace it only to the extent that you can sustain it.  Sustainability is essential to a successful social action, and Shannon clearly knows this.

So finally thanks to Shannon Watts, thanks to Jamie Ford, who oversees the organization of several states in this region, and thanks to all the women that I met in Little Rock who are working to make Arkansas a safer state, at times against heavy odds. While resisting gun-legislation in a red state is a multi-faceted operation, Moms Demand is in the fight with us in a big way.  They have extremely smart, energetic, and dedicated workers, and I am thankful that they are here.

Now, if we could just get a Fayetteville chapter started!

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!

 

 

PROFESSOR SCHMIDT DEAD AT DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

I did not know Professor Schmidt, who was murdered in his office today at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. I do not know the details of the case. I do not know if the shooter has been apprehended at this time.

Professor Schmidt's life was no more valuable than the other 30,000+ who will perish this year from gun-violence. Nor was his life less valuable. But each of these deaths is a diminishment, a degradation, a blemish.

Among developed nations, America claims 30% of the population and 90% of the gun fatalities. I know that suicide accounts for 60% of that number, which only deepens the tragedy and extends the front lines of the engagement that we all face.

This is now part of our legacy to the modern world. It is not the only legacy. But this is the one that casts a long shadow because it involves survivors and mourners, the larger extended community that is left, often alone, to deal with this national problem and the personal loss the problem entails. It is a legacy that multiplies long after we have turned our attention to the most recent murder, and so the effect grows and grows and grows in the wake of our legislators' apathy, and finally the mood of the nation—if there is such a thing—is affected, and that mood seem perceptibly to grow darker and darker. 

At this point, I am supposed to point to all of the good work being done by our heroic gun-violence prevention activists, and so it is right and proper to consider this my salute, because they are doing heroic work, and they are having a real and growing effect. But just now my heart is not in the optimistic mood.

So maybe there is a national mood, after all, and maybe my heart is registering that mood, and because my own heart is weary of this mood, maybe our hearts will carry us to the tipping point, where the majority who support reasonable gun legislation and background checks will regain their voice and maybe our legislators will begin to listen to those voices.

That is the best that I can say today, and it is the best that I can hope for tomorrow.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON, FEAR, CHRISTIANITY, GUNS & AMERICA. WHEW.

Marilynne Robinson's recent piece, "Fear," in The New York Review of Books, carries several obsessions, and it might be helpful to list them and get them out of the way:

1. Christianity, and its current status in American life
2. A defense of Christianity regarding its current status in American life
3. Fear in American life, and why this fear is un-Christian
4. Guns and why guns will not alleviate America's fear of losing its religion, i.e., Christianity (to bring R.E.M. into the mix)

Ms. Robinson is a very learned woman, a gifted novelists whose fiction I adore, and a Christian historian who has forgotten more about Christianity than I will ever know.  I would suggest that anyone who is remotely interested in visiting that busy intersection where Christianity, guns, gun-violence, and our "Christian patriot militia" are currently congregating read her piece, and read it now.

The essay seems to me, at least, not fully assembled, which is why I listed its component parts. As I read the essay, I mentally supplied a good number of the links between those parts, and it's always dangerous to leave that job to a reader.  Still, I read the piece sympathetically, if a bit skeptically.

Still, this much is clear.  Ms. Robinson is embarrassed by those who would drag Christianity into the violent corners of American life, and then militarize the faith in an ill-fated, even suicidal, attempt to guard the faith, while ostensibly protecting something or someone else: like Kim Davis, or gender equality, or Cliven Bundy, or whoever has recently misread the Bible and made a public spectacle of their misreading.

She's right.  It is embarrassing.

All of which brings me to my point in drawing your attention to this piece. Ms. Robinson is approaching the gun-violence problem in America through her deep sense of Christian history and tradition. She is not quoting statistics; she is not taking on the gun-lobbyists; she is not foaming at the mouth on Twitter with Dana Loesch.

She is bringing a larger, historical context to bear on the problem. It doesn't fit Twitter, it won't play on Facebook, and Instagram has no room for it. You couldn't even read it from a bannered podium at a gunsense rally.

But what she has to say, and what dozens like her are saying about gun-violence in America, are having an impact on the conversation. 

And lest we forget:  we have scores of gun-violence prevention advocates, the first-responders, who spend their days in the trenches, correcting every false statement from the gun lobbies, organizing the rallies that keep this issue in the headlines, and approaching our elected leaders who have simply looked away toward the gun-lobby dollars as our country continues along its armed and dangerous path.

The work of these advocates is endless, dangerous, and heroic.

I could name names, but if you've spent any time on this blog or read my Twitter feed, you know who they are.

Let me end with an analogy. While climate-change has created many of the natural disasters that have kept our first-responders busy saving lives and property, and while these first-responders are deservedly in the headlines, there are thousands of anonymous scientists and climatologists working on long-term solutions that might one day relieve our first-responders of their increasingly frequent and burdensome obligation to repair the damage that our damaged climate is dealing out to us on a daily basis.

So our firemen and our scientists are working quietly hand-in-hand, buying time, ameliorating disaster, and concocting solutions.

And so it is with gun-violence prevention in America. While the lobbyists and activists work selflessly to restore sanity to America's gun policies by confronting those who would further relax gun laws in our country and militarize our culture, others are quietly teaching classes in gender politics, racial violence, nonviolence, or writing about the world's wisdom traditions—read "world religions"—and how guns and violence have no historical place in them, or designing curricula that foreground love and compassion, and how love and compassion are options that all of us can choose and deploy and, in so doing, win for ourselves and our country a measure of peace and tranquility. 

Yes, many people are doing that. And doing it very quietly and very effectively.

Having periodically spent a few months as a first responder when the Arkansas legislature was in session in 2013 and 2015, I know that my heart and my talents lie in the other camp, the camp that's set up just behind the front lines, where all of us back here feel doubly obligated to produce results because of the hard work that's going on up there on those front lines.

But we're working together, and we're fortunate to have each other as allies. And we're getting results too, which is why we each continue in our camps.