Old fan favorite David Frum returns to this segment. He has written one of the better pieces on gun control that I've yet read. It's comforting to know that not all conservatives are in bed with the NRA.
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Yesterday, at CNN.com, I offered two
proposals to enhance gun safety that would not require a vote of Congress:
(1) a Surgeon General's report on the health hazards of guns in the home; (2) a
congressional investigation of the safety practices of the gun industry.
Robert VerBruggen offered a substantial
reply at National Review Online.
Before responding in my turn, there's a threshold point that must be stressed
and then stressed again. At one point in his reply, Robert dismissively
describes one study of gun safety as a "tiny phone survey" "conducted in 1996."
And of course … he's right! A lot of the most important data in the gun debate
is unsatisfactory and is out-of-date.
There's a reason for that, and the reason is that the gun advocates
themselves passed a law through Congress almost 20 years ago forbidding the use
of federal research dollars to study gun safety. It's audacious for the people
who have done everything in their power to suppress the evidence now to complain
about the poor quality of the evidence as exists. Their determination to
suppress the evidence is itself the strongest clue as to which way the evidence
points.
But let's deal with what we have.
The core of Robert's case comes down to two claims:
Claim 1: There isn't much of a safety problem with guns. Or,
in Robert's words: "The fact is that gun accidents are statistically very rare —
and even this information isn’t all that helpful without an estimate of armed
self-defense to compare it with."
How rare is "very rare"? In 2007, the United States suffered some
15,000-19,000 accidental shootings. More than 600 of these shootings proved
fatal. Is that "very rare"?
The total number of Americans killed and wounded by gun accidents exceeds
the total number killed or injured in fires.
The number killed in gun accidents is 20% higher than the total number killed in all U.S. civil
aviation accidents.
In 2011, the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted
to ban drop-side baby cribs because these cribs have been blamed for "dozens" of
infant deaths over the entire previous decade. The 600+ accidental gun
deaths in any single year amount to 50 dozen.
Back when the Centers for Disease Control were allowed to do gun research,
they found
that American children under age 15 were nine times more likely to die of a gun
accident than children in other advanced wealthy countries.
The Centers for Disease Control reserve the term
"very rare" for accidental deaths from vaccines, the number of which is zero, or
close to it. If more than 600 people a year were dying from vaccines, we'd have
a national uproar, if not a revolution.
Instead, we have a lively YouTube category of "funny gun
accidents"
Of course, guns in the home are also associated with higher rates of suicides
and suicide attempts, not to mention homicides and assaults as well. About 200
Americans go to emergency rooms every day with gunshot wounds. On present
trends, by 2015 more Americans will die from firearms - homicide, suicide, and
accident - than from automobile accidents.
"Very rare" is not the term I'd use for all this.
Claim 2: The gun industry responsibly sells safe products.
VerBruggen: "Most modern handguns - especially those designed to be carried -
are drop-safe." "Some accidents might be caused by confusion about whether
there's a bullet in the chamber." "Serial number filing isn't very
effective."
As you can see, words like "most," "some," and "very" are doing the heavy
lifting in all these sentences. Let's try this line of argument with other
products.
"Most modern aircraft don't crash due to battery fires."
"Most store-brand packaged foods are not rancid."
"Some accidents might be caused by the truck's tendency to flip over at high
speeds."
"Cigarette advertising aimed at children is not very effective."
Would Congress accept that line of excuse from any other product or industry?
Surely Congress would say, "No aircraft should crash because of battery
fires." "Stores shouldn't sell any rancid products." "Trucks should not
flip over, period." "Cigarette advertising aimed at children should not occur at
all."
Yet when it comes to the most lethal of all consumer products, suddenly
Congress becomes super-indulgent of industry fallibility. It would be a bold
pharmaceutical executive who said that we didn't need child-proof bottles
because it was a parent's responsibility to teach her 7 year old to stay away
from the medicine chest. Yet that's just the answer we hear after incidents like
yesterday's tragedy in Decatur, Ohio, when a 9 year old boy was shot
in the head by his 13 year old sister.
Nobody would suggest that better product design could prevent all gun
accidents. I'm certainly not suggesting it. But it's true that the most popular
range of handguns in the United States, Glock, is sold without a usable visual
indicator of a bullet in the chamber.
And it's equally true that again and again the industry and its
representatives lend
their clout to protect wrongdoers against the public.
Under [federal] law, investigators cannot reveal
federal firearms tracing information that shows how often a dealer sells guns
that end up seized in crimes. The law effectively shields retailers from
lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny. It also keeps the spotlight off
the relationship between rogue gun dealers and the black market in firearms.
Such information used to be available under a
simple Freedom of Information Act request. But seven years ago, under pressure
from the gun lobby, Congress blacked out the information by passing the
so-called Tiahrt amendment, named for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). The law removed
from the public record a government database that traces guns recovered in
crimes back to the dealers.
"It was extraordinary, and the most offensive thing
you can think of," said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research
Forum, a nonprofit group for police chiefs. "The tracing data, which is now
secret, helped us see the big picture of where guns are coming from."
Who pushes for laws like these? How do they justify themselves? It would be a
public service to investigate such questions under oath in the open
sunlight.
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