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."

 

MANY THANKS FOR YOUR HELP ON AR HB 1249!

As most of you have heard, HB1249, Representative Collins’ bill to put guns on our campuses without allowing our Boards to opt out, passed through the House Judiciary Committee this morning.

This was expected.

The crowd in opposition to the bill was overflowing. UAPD Police Chief Gahagans led off the testimony against the bill, and he was extraordinary: measured, authoritative, a true and rare expert in every sense of the word. President Welch, from ASU testified, as well as President Bobbitt. Everyone provided forceful and credible opposition. The community’s position on this unpopular bill is clear, and I want personally to thank everyone who joined our efforts. (I was unable to go because of teaching obligations, and so have now mastered the skill of lecturing and checking messages simultaneously!)

The bill will now go to the House floor, and then next week on to the Senate. It hasn’t yet been assigned a Senate committee.

In my opinion, it is very important that we see our efforts in a larger context. As I have often said—and so speak only for myself—my primary goal has always been to leave a public and articulate record of my disapproval of this destructive and dangerous bill, and together, we have done this and are continuing to do it.

This record will be vital as we approach the mid-terms in 2018, the next legislative session in 2019, and of course the national election in 2020. We are all constructing important narratives that will shape opinion as we move forward, and the fact that we are able to do this together is significant.

We will, of course, do everything that we can to make our opinions known as the bill passes into the Senate next week, and eventually the Governor’s office, if it finally lands there. Our Governor has expressed his support of the opt-out clause, but nothing is certain, especially since his veto, if it were exercised, only requires a simple majority to override.

But finally, I want to thank this organized and dedicated community. Opposition to the gun bill now is the strongest that it has ever been in this state, and I would hope that together we can parlay this energy into the kind of change, in other areas, that our state deserves.

So again, thank you very much for your support!

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

BERNIE SANDERS, THE NRA & HIS GROWING GUN PROBLEM

Anyone who was listening to the Democratic debate on Sunday, March 7, and heard Sanders make the comment that the NRA promptly endorsed knew that this was a bad moment for him. If you're a progressive candidate of any sort, you don't want to wake up the next morning and find the NRA standing by your side, particularly when your opponent, Hillary Clinton, has been for months unflinching in her criticism of that organization and their reckless gun policies.  

But that happened to Sanders, and now, as if having the NRA sing your praises weren't bad enough, The Washington Post published on Friday, March 18, an op-ed by Mark and Jackie Barden. The title of the piece is chilling, direct, and heart-breaking:  "Sanders Is Wrong About the Lawsuit We Filed After Our Son's Murder in Newtown."

Their son, Daniel, of course, fell victim to Adam Lanza and his Remington Bushmaster AR-15 on December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary. In a  matter of days, Senator Sanders had hit a dangerous double:  he gained the NRA as a supporter and the parents of a child murdered at Sandy Hook as an adversary. 

By any stretch of the progressive imagination, this was a bad run for the Senator from Vermont.  

But it speaks to one of the problems that faces the Senator as he turns to face a nation increasingly hostile toward the NRA and the destructive culture it has produced—he comes from a state that is a "gun-rights paradise" and has led the nation in allowing, even encouraging, unrestricted gun ownership. Sanders' constituency is about the size of Memphis, TN, but is 97% white, and as of 2012, was the most rural state in the Union. Vermont also has one of the lowest rates of gun-homicide in the country, a result of its largely rural population and still very active tradition of hunting, an activity, as opposed to self-defense, where gun-violence is relatively rare.

But Senator Sanders has now entered the national stage—diversity, complexity, and hard, nuanced choices are the order of the day, and he arrives there from a racially homogenous, rural, and gun-friendly state. His constituency is white, and they are well armed. Go after guns in Vermont, and you will go out of office.

So his problems now are more complicated, and he shows signs of lacking the tact to negotiate them. He finds himself wedged into the difficult position between a gun-toting constituency in Vermont and the NRA, the radical and dangerous organization that speaks for many of Sanders' supporters back home and has the potential to weaken his progressive stance.

That he has compromised here by leaning toward the gun manufacturers is particularly unfortunate for him. And particularly telling—the massacre at Sandy Hook has emerged, whether rightly or wrongly, as a litmus test on gun-control for our politicians, and Sanders has chosen sides. He has chosen to avoid directly confronting the gun manufacturers and their unfettered marketing of a specific kind of weapon to an untrained public—a weapon that is capable of killing quickly and widely, and would seem unnecessary for civilian purposes.

The law suit that the Bardens and others are filing against Bushmaster does not, as Sanders inexplicably indicated, hold Remington accountable for manufacturing the weapon that Lanza used in his killing spree. Manufacturers cannot, of course, be responsible for every misuse of their product. That is simplistic, and Sanders must know that, but his insistence on misrepresenting the law is baffling. The law suit, instead, holds Remington accountable for their marketing of the product, an entirely different issue:

Indeed, Remington promotes the AR-15’s capacity to inflict mass casualties. It markets its AR-15s with images of soldiers and SWAT teams; it dubs various models the 'patrolman' and the 'adaptive combat rifle' and declares that they are 'as mission-adaptable as you are;' it encourages the notion that the AR-15 is a weapon that bestows power and glory upon those who wield it. Advertising copy for Remington’s AR-15s has included the following: 'Consider your man card reissued,” and “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.'

The law that looms both over Sanders' comment and the suit against Remington is called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). The bill was signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26, 2005, and was heavily supported by Wayne LaPierre and the NRA. It provides unprecedented immunity for gun manufacturers and their products, and is partly responsible for the violent ad campaigns that some of these manufacturers are now waging. The law does not, as the gun lobbyists rightly point out, give them immunity from selling defective products. Still, as many legal historians argue, in passing this law, Congress was particularly aggressive in allowing the gun industry this particular kind of shield. Clearly, no other product on the market has quite this kind of protection.

From the beginning, Clinton has aligned herself against the law, and said that she would act to repeal it if elected. Repealing the law could potentially do much to alter the militaristic, macho culture that gun-manufacturers like to promote in their advertising. Sanders, on the other hand, voted for the law in 2005—his constituency would have supported it—but under increased national scrutiny, has recently back-pedaled a bit, indicating that he might consider repealing portions of it. He is clearly trying to avoid the issue. Clinton is embracing it.

Every political candidate at the national level is involved in the project of winning votes. Period. And in the most difficult moments, winning votes encounters a bedeviling problem:  What happens if personally held and private convictions, when publicly articulated, will not sway as many voters as a slightly modified version of those same convictions certainly would?

Most of the time, our candidates compromise, and offer up a version of their convictions that will appeal to the largest demographic that seems palatable to them at the moment.

Senator Sanders, of course, has made a career out of claiming that he refuses to make these compromises, and I respect him for that.

But as he enters the national spotlight, the Senator has found that life for a so-called "principled" candidate is hard. And compromises must be made.

The first one he made, of course, was running as a Democrat, the party that he has spent decades vilifying, condemning, and disparaging. But to mount a viable campaign for the Presidency, he also saw that he must become part of the system he disparaged for years. 

But now he finds himself praised by the NRA and corrected by a Sandy Hook family, and that's not a good mix for him.  

So maybe he's making compromises; maybe he's trying to garner votes from an unlikely demographic. Perhaps Senator Sanders is dog-whistling members of the NRA with his refusal to attack the PLCAA, hoping to attract a few of their votes. I can easily see how more moderate, gun-owning Democrats would desert Clinton and move toward Sanders based on this tactic alone (many gun-owners are single-issue voters, and their single issue is guns). Clinton has led Sanders, however, kicking and screaming, into a more centrist position concerning firearms (as he has led her on economic matters), but it is precisely this kicking and screaming that makes many gun-violence prevention advocates uneasy and unwilling to support him.

And since gun-violence in America is unparalleled among developed countries, for many voters this has become a central issue in the 2016 election. I count myself among that number.

 

 

 

 

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The Only Three Facts That Matter About Gun-violence: a Primer for Beginners

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!

 

 

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.

 

 

NO, JOHNNY, MLK WOULDN'T HAVE SUPPORTED THE AMERICAN GUN LOBBY

Mention the name Martin Luther King, Jr. online in connection with nonviolence or reasonable gun-control measures, and soon enough, you’ll be reminded of how ignorant you are and that, in fact, King applied for a license to carry a firearm and was denied one, but obviously supported concealed carry and any other form of armed resistance that your troll cares to attribute to him.

As always, this incident from King’s life is taken out of context and is grossly misrepresented. Here’s what happened.

On the evening of January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed in Montgomery, Alabama. King was at a meeting at the time, but his wife, Coretta, and his infant daughter, Yolanda (not three months old), were home. Because they were in the back of the house at the time of the explosion, they miraculously escaped injury. When King heard the news, he rushed home to find a group of angry and armed African-Americans vowing revenge. His response to them was unequivocal and clear:

If you have weapons, take them home.  If you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with non-violence. Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.

Still, King’s advisors were concerned, and they urged him to consider the matter of self-defense. The threats against King’s life from the white racists in the area were constant, violent, and often specific. And the bombing gave King pause. Finally, at the urging of his colleagues, he applied for a license to carry a gun in his car. Of course, his application was denied.

But then King had one of the most important realizations of his life. In Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King describes it:

Meanwhile I reconsidered. How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided then to get rid of the one weapon we owned. (131)

King refused to arm himself, even in the most dire circumstances.

So King would not have supported the American gun lobby, sponsored by the NRA, that dominates the current gun-discussion with intimidation and fear-mongering; and your troll's attempt to recruit King to the gun lobby's camp is fatuous and a sign either of desperation or ignorance.

Probably both; they often travel side-by-side.

King meant what he said: violence is not the way.