Tag: gun owners

New Zealand gun lobby backs government ban after mosques massacre

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Vincent Thian/AP Photo

❝ New Zealand will crack down on firearms ownership this week after the Christchurch mosques massacre that killed 50 people.

In stark contrast to the United States, where even the most minor curbs on gun ownership meet ferocious opposition led by the National Rifle Association, New Zealand gun owners agree action is needed.

❝ “We want to support our government in any changes to prevent a terrorist attack from happening in New Zealand again,” said Nicole McKee, secretary of the Council of Licensed Firearm Owners.

❝ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government announced an immediate ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles after the shooting and will put laws to parliament formalising its action on Tuesday…

Finalising such legislation can often take months but Ardern said the matter was so urgent it will be done by April 11.

❝ Further curbs – potentially including a gun register, tighter vetting and stricter gun storage rules – are set to be passed by the end of the year.

It’s not as difficult as you might think to have responsible, thoughful legislation passed in a nation where politicians are likely to count voters as taking primacy over donors and corporate flunkies.

Supreme Court turns away California gun case — state limits on concealed weapons stands

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❝ The Supreme Court has rejected a major 2nd Amendment challenge to California’s strict limits on carrying concealed guns in public.

The justices by a 7-2 vote turned away an appeal from gun rights advocates who contended that most law-abiding gun owners in San Diego, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area were being wrongly denied permits to carry a weapon when they leave home.

The justices let stand a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which held last year that the “2nd Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public.”…

Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch earned their love from the NRA lobby.

❝ It is the latest of several actions by the court that suggest that although the Constitution protects an individual right to “bear arms,” the scope of that right is quite limited.

RTFA for the gory details. In truth, most gun owners – and that includes me – agree with rulings like this one and support gun safety over the nutballism of Trump types and pimps for the gun industry like the NRA.

There is a Long History of Self-Defense on the Left

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❝ The Trump era has, so far, been a violent one. Since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in the summer of 2015, assaults of pro-Trump and anti-Trump protesters, as well as journalists covering the 2016 campaign, have made headlines. Meanwhile, Federal Bureau of Investigation data has found that hate crimes against Muslims increased by 67 percent in 2015, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations reports that those same crimes increased by 44 percent in 2016. In response, leftist activists and minority groups have turned to a form of activism that some might not typically expect from liberals: to counter and prevent violence, they are heading to the gym to learn self-defense.

❝ The list of these new self-defense initiatives is long…the company Trigger Happy Firearms Instruction holds firearms lessons for women in several cities across the United States with the ultimate aim of teaching a million to shoot. And in April, the Chicago-based group Haymaker Collective formed—and is currently raising funds—to open a sliding-scale fee gym where anyone (except politicians and police officers, who the collective does not trust to keep them safe) can take self-defense classes and work out regardless of income, gender, sexuality, race, ability, or religion. Their end goal is to help people “learn the skills they need to stay safe in Trump’s America,” …

❝ In American culture, self-defense is usually associated with conservative policies that aim to preserve (and/or broadly interpret) the Fourth Amendment and national security. Consider Stand Your Ground laws, which allow residents of some states to use lethal force in self-defense against intruders without first attempting to flee; or the language of protection that Trump and members of his administration have used to promote the administration’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. Nevertheless, leftists have long prepared for violent, politically divided times too — albeit with a very different approach. While conservatives have often organized measures that ostensibly help keep everyone safe but ultimately serve to preserve a status quo, leftists have historically practiced and taught self-defense techniques to empower marginalized communities.

Interested read, worthwhile for folks who haven’t grown up around guns or hunting or – for that matter – armed self-defense. Various times, I’ve been around all three, individually or collectively. Growing up in the “Arsenal of America” mine was the first generation in my family that didn’t spend time working for one or another firearms manufacturer in Connecticut.

Still armed. Still a good shot.

3% of Americans own half the guns in the country

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AP Photo/Danny Johnston

In the past two decades, Americans have added approximately 70 million firearms to their private arsenals. There are more gun owners, but they make up a slightly smaller share of the population. Handguns have surged in popularity, and the era of the super-owner is here: roughly half of all guns are concentrated in the hands of just three percent of American adults.

These are among the key findings of a sweeping new survey of gun ownership, provided in advance of publication to The Trace and The Guardian by researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities. Our two news organizations are partnering to present a series of stories this week based on the survey.

There have been other evaluations of American gun ownership in recent years, but academics who study gun-owning patterns and behavior say the new survey is the most authoritative and statistically sound since one conducted in 1994 by Philip Cook, a researcher at Duke University.

Roughly 100,000 Americans are injured by a gun every year, with a third of those incidents resulting in death. But research into the causes of the violence, methods of prevention, and its toll on families and communities is almost entirely conducted by academics and other private groups.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the government entity that studies other public health issues, virtually ignores gun violence, owing to legislation widely interpreted as preventing such research.

Otherwise known as chickenshit Congress.

The responses reveal a fundamental shift in gun-owning attitudes. Whereas most owners once considered their firearm primarily a hunting or sports shooting tool, a majority now say they keep guns to protect themselves, their families, and communities.

Accurate reporting on what these people believe. Whether evidence-based facts provoke those beliefs is another question.

Your political party lies in your choice of weapons: words or guns

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An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs. What are the chances that his family keeps a gun in their home?

The probability is considerably higher than residents of New York and other big cities might expect: about 40 percent of married households reported having a gun in their home, according to the exit poll conducted during the 2008 presidential election.

But the odds vary significantly based on the political identity of the child’s parents. If they identify as Democratic voters, the chances are only about one in four, or 25 percent, that they have a gun in their home. But the chances are more than twice that, almost 60 percent, if they are Republicans.

Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics…

In 1973, about 55 percent of Republicans reported having a gun in their household against 45 percent of Democrats, according to the General Social Survey, a biennial poll of American adults…Gun ownership has declined over the past 40 years — but almost all of the decrease has come from Democrats…Unfortunately, the question on gun ownership was dropped from the 2012 national exit poll…

White voters were substantially more likely to own guns than Hispanics or blacks. But white Republicans were more likely to own guns than white Democrats…And based on demographic inertia, the differences seem likely to grow over time…

It might seem strange that ownership of a single household object is so strongly tied to voting behavior and broader political attitudes in America. But America is an outlier relative to other industrialized nations in its gun ownership rates. Whatever makes this country so different from the rest of the world must surely be reflected in the differences in how Democrats and Republicans see the nation.

Did you grow up with cowboy movies as the most important entertainment in your life? Or did you read Mark Twain? Did you grow up with parents who believed heroes were more important than teachers? Was a weekly visit to the library as important as the Saturday afternoon serial at the neighborhood movie theatre?

As television took over more entertainment from movies – and became every family’s babysitter – did first-person-shooters establish ethical standards overruling Mr. Rogers or the Science Guy? One of the smallish factoids in Nate Silver’s post is that gun ownership rates are inversely correlated with educational attainment.

I don’t pretend to know the whole answer. I grew up with both sides of this dialectic. I do know that I came to a turning point before I was twenty years old and walked away from the gang that owned half of my few friends. I returned to time spent with books and music, reflective thought, conscience – and independence from a society I considered corrupt and intellectually lazy.

A decision worth making.