GUNSENSE

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

HB1077: HOW TO PASS AN UNWANTED BILL & WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

I have just learned that there is a chance that #HB1077, Representative Charlie Collins' bill to put guns on our state college campuses will be voted by the general Senate out of the Senate Judiciary committee, where it faced substantial resistance.

The Senate has very different rules from the House, and an unpopular bill can be shielded from public scrutiny by using this desperate, and essentially undemocratic, tactic.

If this happens, the bill will then go to the Senate floor where it will pass. 

I have also been told that this might happen as early as tomorrow.

Here is what you need to know:

1. The bill is being moved out of committee to avoid public scrutiny and opinion. The sponsors' experience in the House committee taught them a very important lesson: the Arkansas faculty, staff, students, and administrators do not want this bill.
2. Further revelation of this fact exposes the legislation for what it is: an NRA intrusion into Arkansas higher education.
3. They have chosen to do this during Spring Break, hoping that the affected constituency would not notice.
4. This represents a failure of leadership on many levels, too many to enumerate at this time. So now we must step up.
5. It is important as we move forward that we leave this historical record of our resistance to this bill—Representative Collins has said publicly on numerous occasions that if this bill passes, he will then consider a student-carry bill in the next session (2017). These moves are all taken from the NRA playbook, and we have to compile publicly accessible records of our resistance to the minority, though well funded, opinion. 

Here is what you need to do:

1. If you have a Twitter account, please tweet your resistance. Include primarily #HB1077 as a hashtag, and then as you have room, #arleg, #arplx, #NoCampusCarry; and RT similar tweets that embody your opinion. TWEETS MATTER—THEY ARE READ!
2. Send an email to our senators immediately. Here is their email list; you can copy and paste:

 [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Thanks in advance for your help. We can make a difference simply be leaving a record.

 

GUNSENSE ROCKS: VEDDER, PEARL JAM & THE GOOD RAGE

I woke up the other morning and thought to myself, I wish someone over the age of forty would just come unglued in public and start screaming about how wrong violence is, and how we're up to our necks in guns and gun-violence, and then I thought how much I needed that cleansing-rage-kind-of-thing because we are, in fact, shooting ourselves to pieces every day—more than any other developed nation—and coming up with stupid, dogmatic, and illiterate reasons for explaining it. 

I woke up, and I thought that.

Then, I stumbled on this clip from the July 11, 2014 Pearl Jam show in Milton Keynes, England, part of the band's Lightning Bolt tour. Skip to 4:10 into the clip, where Vedder begins an impassioned reaction to the violence that clogs our daily headlines. If you don't have time to watch the clip, you can read a transcription of Vedder's monologue here.

But you need to hear his voice to get the cleansing: it’s strident, dramatic, zealous, and committed. I don't care how much wine he had. I don't care that he ended his monologue on his knees with a sing-a-long to Edwin Starr's "War." (Which, by the way, landed at number 5 on the Billboard Year-End Top 100 for 1970, and which song I loved at the time.)

But more than anything else that happened to me that day, I loved Vedder's whole messy, over-the-top, enraged, declaration of no tolerance for no peace.

At the same time that Vedder delivered his declaration, however, tensions were escalating between Israel and Palestine, and as a result, many pro-Israeli parties felt that Vedder was taking the Israelis to task, even though he never mentioned them by name. 

Vedder responded five days later on the Pearl Jam website with a brief and pointed posting entitled, "Imagine That—I'm Still Anti-War." 

Without apology, he uses John Lennon's "Imagine" to defend the pure and necessary idealism that stoked his rage that night in Milton Keynes. "Call me naïve," he wrote, but "I’d rather be naïve, heartfelt and hopeful than resigned to say nothing for fear of misinterpretation and retribution."

And when I heard this clip, and read Vedder's explanation of his stance, I realized how important it is for people in his position—visible, adored—to lose their patience with violence, and to do it publicly, to abandon the reasoned approach of diplomacy and negotiation, and simply to shriek at the brutality and barbarousness of war.

Because rock 'n' roll makes its strongest appeals without the shackles of reason.

And so here's what I said to myself that day: stop acting like an adult, and do it now, before we're all dead.

And besides, people like Vedder, speaking from their podium, help folks like me and all the  others who are working, backs bent and out of sight, in the vineyards of gun-violence prevention. Or social justice. Or women's health. Or literacy. Or immigration. Just working for the love of it.

I was drawn to Vedder's howl because I have been helping to defeat a bill that would put guns on our college campuses in Arkansas. The political process, while it tolerates every sort of human foible, also depends on a kind of decorum, a sense of dialogue and propriety that is essential to the process. 

But how often have I wanted simply to scream at the top of my lungs that the bill we are considering is dangerous, uncivil, ill-conceived, badly written, unpopular, and unwanted? That it puts our children at risk? That it puts a gag order on the Board of Trustees, who coincidentally have voted unanimously for two years to prohibit guns on our campuses? That it is fueled by one of the country's most powerful gun-lobbies, simply to maintain its healthy profits? 

How many times? Too many to count.

Like everyone in this campaign, I sometimes feel as though I walk around with a continual, low-grade, barely suppressed howl rumbling deep inside of me.

I needed Vedder's public howl. It was righteous, and it was right.

And it felt good to hear it. Thanks, Eddie.

Howard Zinn (and you) were right: You can't be neutral on a moving train. And what's more, you shouldn't be.

 

 

 

GUNS ON ARKANSAS CAMPUSES—AGAIN

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

I grew up around guns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Sidney Burris, Professor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

 

LIES, DAMN LIES & STATISTICS: REFLECTIONS ON GUN STATS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW INFOGRAPHIC ON MASS SHOOTINGS

Source: Security Degree Hub