Let's throw the guns out
Dear Leading Ladies,
“Mass shootings are now so frequent that it is hard to remember them all,” commentator Scott Pelley said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” earlier this month. Many of us can recall a time when we had never heard of a mass shooting, let alone a rash of them targeting people of all faiths and colors. Yet, here we are, facing a summer that many fear will bring a spike in senseless killings.
On Saturday, June 11, three different shootings in three different states killed two people and injured 30 others. Austin, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; and Savannah, Georgia, were the sites of these recent spates of violence. Experts are trying to understand the relationship between the violence and pent-up stress from the pandemic (which led to an uptick in gun buying), or the recent easing of pandemic safeguards, or the rising temperatures that usually coincide with increased violence, but there is no clear explanation. The rates are still higher than in pre-pandemic years. “There was a hope this might simply be a statistical blip that would start to come down,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, was quoted in the Boston Globe. “That wasn’t where we will see a reversal of 20 years of declines in these crimes.
“It’s worrisome,” the Globe also quotes criminologist and Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox. “We have a blend of people beginning to get out and about in public. We have lots of divisiveness. And we have more guns and warm weather. It’s a potentially deadly mix.”
Over the past several years, mass shootings have been attributed to mental illness, video games, and gun laws, as well as entrenched hatred, perhaps born of frustration and lack of good communication and social skills. But the evidence is in. The strongest correlation is between the number of deaths by guns and access to guns. Mental illness and video games play minor roles, according to a recent study by Columbia researchers in the British Medical Journal.
This information is startlingly simple. “States with more permissive gun laws and greater ownership of firearms had higher rates of mass shootings than states with more restrictions on gun ownership,” according to the Columbia study. Another study, from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia, also showed that using laws to restrict the purchase of guns in other countries was associated with fewer gun-related deaths.
Who loves AR-15s?
Still, here in the United States, it is remarkably easy to own a gun. And not just any gun, but the mass shooter’s gun of choice: an AR-15. The good news is that the AR-15 is illegal to buy, sell, or own in Massachusetts. Not so in many other states.
The AR-15 specifically refers to the guns first developed by ArmaLite and called ArmaLite Rifles. ArmaLite sold its design to Colt, who developed the fully automatic M16 for military use. After that success, Colt marketed the semi-automatic AR-15 for police and the public to use. When the Colt patent ran out, other manufacturers started making the same rifle with new names, but the old name AR-15 has stuck as a generic title.
AR-15 style rifles are rarely used in crimes other than mass shootings, when they are valued for operating at three times the speed of sound. While a handgun shoots at 800 mph, an AR-15 is three times faster with twice the force. In addition, it can fire quickly, particularly with an added bump stock. Magazines with 100 rounds can be replaced in less than five seconds. And, as has been seen all too clearly at Sandy Hook, Parkland, Las Vegas, and at other sites of mass shootings, the wounds inflicted by AR-15s are devastating to organs and flesh. In fact, EMTS have begun stocking military-style tourniquets and bleeding kits to be better prepared for the ravages of these attacks.
Smith & Wesson AR-15 rifles were for sale at a gun show in Loveland, Colo. A version of the military-style gun was used in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Florida, which left 50 dead in 2016.NYT
Supporters of the AR-15 claim it is good for hunting, target practice, and gun competitions. Detractors see no reason why the public should have access to such incredibly destructive weapons. They point to the way these guns tear apart organs and savagely rip through bodies. In 1994, former president Bill Clinton signed an assault weapon ban. For the next decade, there was a decided decline in mass shootings. The ban expired in 2004 and has not since been renewed. Whenever there is talk of it, there is a flurry of buying because gun owners fear they may no longer be able to get the desirable weapons.
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has bragged that he owns an AR-15. “I own an AR-15. If there’s a natural disaster in South Carolina where the cops can’t protect my neighborhood, my house will be the last one that the gang will come to because I can defend myself.” And Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), along with Sen. Pat Toomey, (R-Pa.), has introduced a bill that would allow private sales of firearms with no background check.
Add that to the fact that President Biden will need 60, not 50, votes in the Senate to pass any bills banning assault rifles again or even calling for increased background checks, and it is easy to get discouraged. This all makes it very hard for President Biden to fulfill his campaign vow to enact serious gun control measures. It is a little reassuring to know that the president could issue an executive order to require background checks for “ghost guns,” those guns that can be made from kits at home, and he may be able to roll back the law that said that if the FBI cannot do a background check within three days, a dealer is free to sell a firearm to the customer in question.
What can we do?
What can we do? Especially those of us who live in the bubble of Massachusetts?
Not surprisingly, Massachusetts, with its strong gun control laws, has one of the lowest mass shooting rates in the country. It isn’t legal to buy an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle in this state.
But guess what? They are manufactured here – by Smith and Wesson in Springfield – to be sold in other states.
So, it’s okay to put these killer weapons in the hands of people who present a threat to residents in other states, as long as they aren’t Massachusetts residents? To whom does that sound just?
Luckily, not to some Massachusetts Democratic state lawmakers, who are proposing HD.4192, a bill to ban the manufacture of certain kinds of firearms, including assault rifles, unless they are intended for sale to the military or law enforcement. “The same kinds of choices we make to protect people here in Massachusetts, we’re going to make those choices to protect people across the country,” Representative Marjorie Decker, one of the bill’s authors and a Cambridge Democrat was quoted in the Boston Globe. “We are really recognizing and honoring the loss of life of people across the country whose loved ones have been murdered at the hands of assault weapons manufactured in this state, knowing that we won’t tolerate that for our own residents in Massachusetts.”
Other state leaders supporting the bill are Representative Frank Moran, a Lawrence Democrat; Senator Cynthia Creem, a Newton Democrat; and Representative Bud Williams, a Democrat from Springfield.
Please write to your state representatives and senators and ask them to support this bill to stop the manufacture and export to other states of the AR-15 style assault rifles. Find your legislators and how to contact them by email or phone here.
This week, we recommend
you watch NRA Under Fire, the 2020 documentary from PBS’s Frontline.
Stay well,
Therese
Judy
Mary
Beth
Leading Ladies Executive Team
ladies@leadingladiesvote.org