America in the crosshairs

_{^{Photo by kat wilcox on Pexels.com.}}

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 31, 2022

When it comes to guns, the political calculus for the American conservative movement is very simple: Any proposal that might limit gun sales in any way, shape or form will automatically be rejected, no matter how sensible or how popular the proposed measure might be.

This is the work of two groups of Americans. One is conservative pro-gun extremists, who conceive of their Second Amendment freedom as being limitless, regardless of logic, sense or the law. Moreover, these ideologues view any concession, any form of backing down, as a sign of weakness.

The second group consists lobbyists for and executives for gun makers, who have closely aligned themselves with conservative media and conservative advocacy groups.

Cheeps and Chirps for May 11, 2019

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 11, 2019

Let’s fire up the old tweeting machine.

• Politics

Wayne Allyn Root is telling Bill Cunningham that Mexican drug cartels are paying Democrats to maintain lax immigration laws and enforcement.

No freaking joke.

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) April 15, 2019

Nixon eventually lost the support of congressional Republicans and resigned to save himself and the nation the ordeal of impeachment.

I find it hard to imagine either congressional GOPers or Trump acting with that kind of integrity today.

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) April 24, 2019

Phantom gunshots, real terror: Notes on two recent incidents in the land of the free, home of the armed (and fearful)

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 18, 2016

In Tuesday’s edition of Cheeps and Chirps, I included a tweet from Saturday that shared a breaking news alert:

This is about 20 miles from where I live. pic.twitter.com/wSzj2E0VFE

— Matt Milliken | masks on for safety | mostly @HOME (@memomoment) August 13, 2016

This was one of the lead news stories in the Triangle on Saturday, but what I didn’t realize when I was preparing the blog post was that police have yet to find any evidence that a gun was actually fired at the mall that afternoon. I deleted it from the post once I understood that there had evidently not been any kind of shooting whatsoever. Authorities are continuing to investigate the reason why shoppers thought that a firearm had been discharged, a misperception that provoked a stampede that left several people injured.

The American way of death: Assessing 2015 mass shootings in the United States

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 22, 2015

The gun massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead on Wednesday, Dec. 2, followed shootings and a five-hour-long siege at Colorado Springs, Colo., Planned Parenthood clinic that left three dead on Nov. 27. And that attack, of course followed one at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., that left 10 dead on Oct. 1.

But it’s not as if gun violence in America took a two-month holiday between Roseburg and Colorado Springs. In attempt to understand the extent of mass shooting incidents in America, I went to the Gun Violence Archive and downloaded its data on 2015 mass shootings.

The site defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are “shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” I realized afterward that what truly interested me were what the archive categorizes as mass murders, in which four or more people are “killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.”

The archive hasn’t broken out data on gun massacres (as I will call them) separately from mass shootings, but I did some number crunching using their information. I found that there had been 300 mass shootings in which 341 people were killed and 1,212 injured.

One Wondrous Sentence: Religion and slaughter

This one wondrous sentence blasts the argument by preacher, Fox News presenter and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee that lack of religion leads to mass shootings.

It suggests that somehow prayer can prevent anybody from being mentally ill, that hetero marriage cures murder, and that having a manger in the town square can stop a gunman from blasting his way into a school.

Source: Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Huckabee blames gays for the Newtown massacre,” Salon, Dec. 17, 2012.

One Wondrous Sentence: The upside and downside of gun safety measures

This one wondrous sentence notes both the difficulty in stopping mass murder and the unintended benefits such measures can bring.

The irony is that some of the proposed gun control measures that would have been useless for preventing either Columbine or the other mass school shootings of the late 1990s might be perfectly reasonable measures for preventing ordinary gun violence.

Source: Gary Kleck, “Mass Shootings in Schools: The Worst Possible Case for Gun Control,” American Behavioral Scientist, as quoted by Tom Jacobs, “School Shootings and Gun Control,” Pacific Standard, Dec. 14, 2012.

On firearms and firearm fatalities

Author’s note: This entry was initially posted on the afternoon of Dec. 20. It was extended and re-posted later the same afternoon. Slight edits were also made to the original text. Thank you for reading! MEM

***

The 117-page report compiled by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control provides detailed breakdowns by age, race and sex for more than 100 different causes of death in the 2009 calendar year.

The nation tallied 2,437,163 deaths that year, with a number of predictable causes leading the way. Heart disease was the top culprit, claiming nearly 600,000 people. Malignant neoplasms, or cancers, finished in second place by ending just shy of 568,000 lives. Chronic lung disease and various ailments that stop or limit blood flow to the brain respectively notched 137,353 and 128,842 deaths.

Accidents or unintentional injuries were responsible for 118,021 fatalities, ranking fifth on the list. Eight of the next 10 causes are diseases, except for suicide (No. 10, 36,909) and assault or homicide (No. 15, 16,799).

Incidentally, the government’s catch-all category, covering all but the top 15 causes of death, accounted for 469,367 deaths, or around 19.3 percent of the total.

These rather dry tables drew my interest because of the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six staff members. They were all killed by multiple gunshot wounds, like victim No. 27, the shooter’s mother, who was slain in her own bed. (The suspect also dispatched himself with a bullet.)

This horrific event has prompted Americans to begin debating gun safety with a fervor that has perhaps never been matched. It’s resuscitated a great deal of argument over this old saw: “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

Yet a superficial reading of government statistics indicates that guns do in fact kill.

On the murder of innocents

There was another mass killing in the country on Friday. Having shot his mother to death at the home they shared in Newtown, Conn., a 20-year-old man drove to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School. He fired at least one bullet through a pane of glass and began shooting adults and children. Twenty youngsters and six adults were slaughtered at the school.

The Sandy Hook slaughter commanded the nation’s attention for what seemed like most of Friday. For me personally, it was the second Friday in a row dominated by news of murder. (On Dec. 6, I learned that a friendly man who owned a restaurant near my house had been shot to death.)

On both Friday afternoons, I found my life warped by pain and horror. And as hard it was to come to grips with the murder of the man I had known (although not well), it’s been even harder to dissipate the awful feelings provoked by the slayings of complete strangers in faraway Connecticut.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the Sandy Hook slaughter, while tragic, is not nearly as much of an aberration as one would hope. Already this year, according to this Mother Jones timeline, there have been seven deadly mass shootings. Seventy-nine people were killed; a similar number were injured. (MoJo defines as a mass shooting as one in which at least four people were killed by gunfire.)