America's Complex Relationship with Guns: An In-Depth Look at the Attitudes and Experiences of U.S. Adults
"As a nation, the U.S. has a deep and enduring connection to guns. Integrated into the fabric of American society since the country’s earliest days, guns remain a point of pride for many Americans. Whether for hunting, sport shooting or personal protection, most gun owners count the right to bear arms as central to their freedom. At the same time, the results of gun-related violence have shaken the nation, and debates over gun policy remain sharply polarized.
 

A new Pew Research Center survey attempts to better understand the complex relationship Americans have with guns and how that relationship intersects with their policy views."

View the Complete Report

 

How does the Gun Industry Live with Itself? The Psychology behind Inhumanity
"The gun industry attributes the blame for the escalating lethality of its firearms to public demand. Recall Olberg’s explanation of why Smith & Wesson was selling small lethal pistols that are easy to conceal: 'I sell the guns that the market is demanding' (Albright, Alexander, Arvidson, & Eason, 1981). As we have seen, innovative lethality was driven by sagging gun sales and the battle among gun makers for the small-gun market, not by consumer demand.

Another form of moral evasion by selective attribution of blame is to disembody the gun from the shooter in a false dichotomy that places the blame entirely on the shooter. This is apparent in the NRA’s exonerative causal slogan 'Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.' Removal of the gun from the mix of causal factors absolves guns—and by extension their manufacturers—of any role in gun violence. This causal detachment is analogous to claiming that it is people, not carcinogenic cigarettes, that are a major determinant of lung cancer. Human agency is executed through means. The gun toter is the agent. The gun industry provides lethal means to achieve desired ends."

Excerpted from "Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves"

Does "Right-to-Carry" Lead to More Crime?
"So-called 'right-to-carry' gun laws are associated with higher rates of aggravated assault, rape, robbery and murder, according to a recently released Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University study.

For decades, gun rights supporters and foes have debated whether laws that allow more people to have guns create an environment where less crime is committed.

All 50 states have laws allowing certain concealed weapons in public.

Researchers expanded on a 2004 National Research Council study that covered county-level crime data between 1977 and 2000, adding in six additional years of county information and state-level data from 1979-2010.

'Our analysis of admittedly imperfect gun aggravated assaults provides suggestive evidence that RTC laws may be associated with large increases in this crime, perhaps increasing such gun assaults by almost 33 percent,' researchers wrote.

The study also found that homicide rates increased in eight states that adopted right-to-carry laws between 1999 and 2010."

View the study
 

A Guide to Mass Shootings in America

Update (4/2/2014): A gunman went on a rampage at Fort Hood, Texas—the site of a mass shooting in November 2009—killing 3 people and injuring 16 others before taking his own life, according to the Associated Press.

It is perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado in July 2012, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that August, another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis that September—and then the unthinkable nightmare at a Connecticut elementary school that December—were some of the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 67 mass shootings across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Thirty of these mass shootings have occurred since 2006. Seven of them took place in 2012, and another five occurred in 2013, including in Santa Monica, California, and at the Washington Navy Yard. We've gathered detailed data on the cases and mapped them below, including information on the shooters' profiles, the types of weapons they used, and the number of victims they injured and killed.*

Read on...

Michigan Man Accidentally Kills Himself While Demonstrating Gun’s Safety

On Sunday evening, a 36-year-old was showing his girlfriend how safe his guns were by holding them to his head and pulling the trigger, when one of them fired, according to reports by the girlfriend to police. The victim, whose name was not released, was pronounced dead at the scene in his Oakland County, Mich., home. The girlfriend said the victim had been drinking most of the day, according to CBS Detroit.

Accidental gun deaths are alarmingly common. But they sometimes occur even while in pursuit of gun safety. Just last week, a Florida man accidentally shot himself in the leg just after leaving a gun safety class. He said he had been inspecting the new gun and had been “manipulating the slide,” according to the Palm Beach Post. Last year in Ohio, a gun safety instructor accidentally shot a student during class. And in 2012, a Virginia man accidentally shot himself and his wife during a gun safety class.

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This New Study Proves That Background Checks Save Lives

Missouri’s decision to repeal its law requiring all handgun purchasers to obtain a “permit-to-purchase” (PTP) verifying they passed a background check led to a 16 percent increase in the state murder rate, a new study from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research has found. The additional gun murders occurred as the national and regional homicide rates decreased.

State legislators eliminated the permit requirement in June of 2007, as part of a larger firearms bill granting criminal and civil immunity to homeowners who use deadly force against intruders. Proponents of the change, which included the local chapter of the National Rifle Association, boasted that the measure would streamline the purchasing process, save residents the $10 processing fee, and reduce the wait times.

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There Has Been An Average Of One School Shooting Every Other School Day So Far This Year

The tragic pace of school shootings continues unabated for another week. On January 28, authorities responded to reports of shots being fired at Roosevelt High School in Honolulu Hawaii at around 8:30am HST (1:30pm EST). One student was shot in the wrist and transported to a local hospital and is listed in serious condition, and police say they have a suspect in custody. The school was placed on lockdown immediately, and students were sent home shortly after the situation had been resolved.
This brings the total number of school shootings to nine in just 18 school days so far this year.

Last year was supposed to be a year of action to curb gun violence in our schools. But three weeks into the new year, statistics suggest that the problem could actually be worsening.

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Unlearning Gun Violence

In 1995, an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin returned to the United States from Africa where he had spent the previous decade helping Africans stem the spread of diseases like tuberculosis, AIDS and cholera. “I was exhausted,” he said in a TED Talk earlier this year. “I wanted to come home and take a break.”

Once back in Chicago, however, friends kept telling him about the epidemic of violence in inner-city neighborhoods. As he began to study the problem he came to the view that gun violence in poor neighborhoods did indeed resemble the epidemics he had treated in Africa. Maps that charted gun violence showed clustering — just like maps tracking infectious diseases. The greatest predictor of violence was a prior violent incident, which also mirrors epidemics. 

In 2000, he founded CeaseFire (now known as Cure Violence), a Chicago-based organization that treated violence in one such local cluster — in West Garfield, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city — as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue. Shootings dropped dramatically. 

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Largest Gun Study Ever: More Guns, More Murder

The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released Thursday afternoon, confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic.

The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.

Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.

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Mass Shootings Are Not the "Shock" or Aberration the U.S. Media Reports

Tom Diaz's new book shows how changes in the gun industry are killing Americans and what it will take to stop the daily death toll.

Nobody knows what happened within Michael E. Hance’s interior life between 1978—his senior year of high school, when he was chosen Most Courteous because of his “consideration and good manners toward everyone”—and about eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, August 7, 2011, when he took deliberate aim with his recently-bought Hi‑Point 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol and shot eleven-year-old Scott Dieter below the terrified boy’s right eye. Scott Dieter was the last of seven people whom Hance, armed with two handguns, calmly hunted down and shot to death in the archetypical white, middle-class suburb of Copley Township, Ohio. An eighth victim, Rebecca Dieter, Hance’s longtime girlfriend and Scott’s aunt, was severely wounded; she was hospitalized but survived. A policeman shot Hance dead moments after he killed young Scott Dieter. The entire episode from first shot to last took less than ten minutes.

 

“Unclear in all of this is the motive for these killings,” Summit County Prosecuting Attorney Sherri Bevan Walsh noted in her report clearing the police officer of wrongdoing in shooting Hance. What is not “unclear” is that in spite of Hance’s long-term and increasingly bizarre public behavior, his angry interactions with his neighbors, the judgment of several members of his family that he had severe mental illness, and a 2009 incident report by Akron police that concluded he was a “signal 43,” or, as a police lieutenant later explained, “basically . . . crazy,” Hance was easily and legally able to buy from a pawn shop the two handguns with which he fired more than twenty rounds at his fleeing family and neighbors. In addition to the Hi‑Point pistol, which he bought five days earlier from Sydmor’s Jewelry, a pawn shop in neighboring Barberton, Hance used a .357 Magnum revolver that he bought in 2005 from the same store. He also bought several ammunition “reloaders” that he carried with him. 

 

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