The March for Our Lives

Today was the March for Our Lives. Over 800,000 people marched in Washington, DC, and there were sister marches in 842 other cities. I attended the sister march in Toledo, OH.

When marches for various political issues happen, politicians who support the issue will usually come out and address the crowd.

But not this time.

Today, the speakers were students. At the march I attended, they thanked the various politicians who offered to speak, but their offer was declined. Today was a march, a movement led by students. And it was students who addressed the crowd in Washington, DC, Toledo, and in many other marches around the world today.

One of the students who addressed the march in Toledo today spoke about how she has been threatened for her public stance on common sense gun reform. Yet there she was, leading the charge.

Another student spoke out against the idea of arming teachers, and the many ways that could go wrong.

Yet another pointed out that school shootings of this magnitude are disruptive well beyond the school where they happen, since they inspire copycat threats. There have been hundreds of copycat threats around the country since Parkland, FL.

They all called on politicians to put the safety of students before gun rights, and called on the voting public to hold the politicians accountable if they don’t.

And this was just our small rally of several hundred people, instead of several hundred thousand. But the voices of these kids joined with those of the students who addressed other rallies around the country.

Emma Gonzalez, who shows us the power of silence.

David Hogg, who calls out those politicians who are in the NRA’s pocket, telling them to update their resumes.

Delaney Tarr, who calls on all of us to not let this march be an end, but rather a beginning.

Ryan Deitch, who calls for arming teachers with the supplies they need to teach their students, and arming students with information and knowledge, not guns.

Sarah Chadwick, who says that a single life is worth more thank all the guns in America.

Edna Chavez from South Los Angeles, who lost her brother to gun violence.

11-year-old Naomi Wadler, who speaks for all of the girls of color who have been victims of gun violence, but who don’t make headlines.

Alex King and D’Angelo McDade from Chicago, who speak of the need for communities to come together and do what is necessary to insure this never happens again.

I have observed protests before.

There was the Occupy movement, that didn’t end up accomplishing much.

There is the annual March for Life, which has had no real impact on abortion at the federal level.

There is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has seen some success in changes to policing policies, most notably the number of police departments which utilize dash and body cameras as standard procedure.

But this feels different from all of them. This is bigger. These students are driven. They are not going away. Many of them will be voting in November. Even more will be voting in 2020. And soon, within the next few election cycles, some of them will be running for office. And gun reform will be the pillar of their platforms.

Change is coming. And, frankly, if gun rights advocates want a voice at the table to help decide what that change looks like, they better find a compromise that they can live with now, before these kids push them out and make all the decisions without them.

The clock is ticking.

A Dickey Move

So, in order to find the most effective ways to reduce gun deaths generally, and the number and mortality rate of mass shootings specifically, we need to fund and conduct research into gun violence. If we do not, then we will either be sitting around, not addressing the problem at all, or playing a game of trial and error to try to find what works.

Unfortunately, the CDC, the government body tasked with conducting and funding research into public health issues, has had its ability to study gun violence severely hamstrung since 1996.

In 1993, a CDC funded study was published. It looked into whether having guns in the home increased or decreased the likelihood of homicide in the home. The study concluded that it increased the likelihood of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

As you can imagine, the NRA did not like that study.

In 1996, Republican Representative Jay Dickey from Arkansas added a rider lobbied for by the NRA to that year’s omnibus spending bill. This rider, known as the Dickey Amendment, stated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control” (page 245). At the same time, Congress took $2.6 million from the CDC budget, the exact amount that the CDC had spent the previous year researching gun violence, and earmarked it for traumatic brain injury research, while earmarking none for gun violence research.

The CDC and any non-Government entities receiving funding from them are already prohibited from advocating or lobbying for or against any sort of legislation. So the Dickey Amendment is either a needless piece of redundant legislation, or it, along with the lack of funding earmarked for gun violence research, is an implicit threat: Fund or publish research into gun violence at your funding’s peril. The CDC took it as a threat, and has since done very little research at all into gun violence as a public health issue.

President Obama signed an executive order in 2013 to have the CDC conduct gun violence research, and in response, the CDC funded one study in 2013 and conducted another in 2015. But, as a spokeswoman told the Washington Post in 2015, “It is possible for us to conduct firearm-related research within the context of our efforts to address youth violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and suicide, but our resources are very limited.” The CDC sees that Congress repeatedly refused to earmark any part of the their budget for gun violence research, even when it was specifically requested by the President Obama, so they continue to play it safe, avoiding direct research into gun violence.

Interestingly, former Rep. Jay Dickey, the same guy who proposed the Dickey Amendment in the first place, co-authored an op-ed in 2012 with Mark Rosenberg, who had been the director at the National Center for Injury Prevention at the CDC when the Dickey Amendment passed. In it, they advocated for scientific research into gun violence, so that we can know the best way to decrease the number of gun-related deaths. They point out that, since the passage of the Dickey Amendment, almost no federal funding has gone into gun violence research, while, during the same period, about $240 million in federal funding was spent on traffic safety research annually, despite there being similar numbers of gun-related deaths and traffic-related deaths during that time.

Yet, despite the man who it is named for now supporting scientific research into gun violence, Congress still refuses to repeal the Dickey Amendment. And they still do not earmark any money for gun violence research.

If we are going to make any progress on this issue, this needs to change. We need to repeal the Dickey Amendment and fund gun violence research. Until we do, nothing else regarding efforts to reduce gun violence matters very much. These are the only legislative actions I am calling for in my posts on the topic. Let’s let the CDC do the research, then use that research to find the best ways to reduce gun violence. Regardless of whether you support or oppose gun control, regardless of whether you own guns or not, unless you value your ideology over the thousands of lives lost to guns annually, I ask you to support research into gun violence. Call your senators and representatives. Let them know that the American people want research into gun violence. Tell them to repeal the Dickey Amendment.

Until they do, we will continue to only have our political positions to guide us on how to handle gun violence. And that is getting us nowhere.

The AR-15: Assault Weapon, Sporting Equipment, or Both?

In this piece, I would like to take a look at the weapon used by the shooter in the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School massacre last week. I want to explore what it is, exactly, and ask a few questions about it, questions that I don’t pretend to have the answers to, and that I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on.

The weapon in question is the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 .223, which is similar to the AR-15.

First, I would like to clear something up: the AR in AR-15 does NOT stand for assault rifle. Nor does it stand for automatic rifle. It is, instead, a reference to the gun’s original manufacturer, Armalite, and means Armalite Rifle.

Second, I would like to point out that, while the AR-15 can be modified to be functionally automatic with a bump stock, like the ones used by the shooter in Las Vegas last year, it is designed as a semi-automatic weapon, as opposed to its military issue counterpart, the M-16. The difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic is that you can hold down the trigger and spray bullets with an automatic weapon until you release the trigger or run out of bullets, while with a semi-automatic, you must pull the trigger for each shot, but do not need to cock the gun in any fashion between shots.

The AR-15 is a specific gun manufactured by Colt in a class of guns referred to by their manufacturers as “modern sporting rifles” and by gun control advocates as “assault weapons.”

From 1994 to 2004, the AR-15 and similar guns were subject to the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which banned their manufacture for civilian use. However, because this ban had a set of very specific criteria for what qualified as an assault weapon, gun manufacturers were able to simply make certain modifications to their design and keep selling them. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that the ban still kept the number of these weapons in civilian hands down, since the number made and sold since the ban expired has continually risen.

Of course, another contributing factor to the rise in sales of AR-15s their like could be the passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, just a year after the Assault Weapons Ban expired. This law prevents gun manufacturers from being held liable for any crimes committed with guns that they have made.

Now, I have never fired an AR-15, but my understanding is that they are a lot of fun to shoot. And with the many, many ways that they can be modified and customized, they are very profitable for their manufacturers. In fact, the AR-15 has been called the “Man’s Barbie Doll“, due to all of the accessorizing you can do with it.

Also, it is important to know that the AR-15 is only associated with a small fraction of gun-related crime. Most gun crimes involve handguns. In 2012, for example, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, out of the approximately 11,000 people murdered with guns.

Still, these modern sporting rifles do offer the ability to fire a lot of shots in rapid succession with high accuracy. And they have been used in most of the deadliest mass shootings in recent years. They were the only or primary weapons used at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week, Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas in 2017, Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, San Bernardino in 2015, Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. So, with the exception of the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, modern sporting rifles have played a role in all of the deadliest mass shootings in the US since the Assault Weapons Ban expired.

So, now we get to the questions:

Apart from hobby collecting and competitive shooting, what purpose does the modern sporting serve? My understanding is that they are not nearly as well-suited to hunting as hunting rifles and shotguns, due to their small-caliber bullets, and they are not as well suited to personal protection as handguns, since their high velocity shots have the ability to pass through walls with enough force that they can injure or kill a person on the other side, increasing the possibility of hitting an innocent bystander. So is their only purpose for recreational and competitive shooting?

(And, by the way, I don’t consider doomsday preparation to be a legitimate purpose for these guns. I’m sorry.)

If they are equipment for recreation and sporting that can (and are) used to kill many people quickly, what should we do? Regulation or even bans of them will barely scratch in the gun crimes rate in this country, even if they are effective. And Virginia Tech shows that high-mortality mass shootings can be carried out without them. Still, it makes one pause to think when sporting equipment can make it scarily easy for one person to kill so many people in a matter of minutes.

So, this is my quandary:

Would bans and regulations targeting modern sporting rifles actually do anything, or just make us feel better?

If mass shooters did not have access to modern sporting rifles, would it reduce the number of high-casualty mass shootings?

And if it turns out that bans and regulations targeting modern sporting rifles would have an effect, even if it is marginal, and if, in the end, they primarily serve as sporting equipment, can we justify not using those bans and regulations?

I don’t know. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. But in the end, just as it was in my post from a few days ago, my conclusion is that we need to do the research if we are going to affect any real change. And that will be the topic for tomorrow’s post.

Is Mental Health Reform a Solve for Mass Shootings?

When President Donald Trump addressed the horrific massacre in Parkland, Florida, a few days ago, he pointed to something that he wants addressed in an effort to keep this from happening in the future: mental health.

Now, as I said in the first piece I wrote in the wake of this massacre, I suffer from clinical depression. Any reform that results in better access to help for people with mental health issues would be fantastic. But how would such reforms, or restrictions on gun purchases for people with mental health issues, affect the rate of mass shootings?

Well, first, it must be acknowledged that people who have certain mental health issues, such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder, are a little over twice as likely to commit violence than the general population¹. (It should be noted here that the vast majority of people with these disorders will still never attack another person; there are just a higher percentage who will than those among the general population.) Other mental health issues, however, such as anxiety disorders, for example, do not cause an increased risk of violence. And because the segment of the population who suffers from these disorders is so small, then reducing their violence levels to that of the general population would only reduce total violent acts by about 4%².

Okay, so people with some mental health issues can be more violent than the general population, but their numbers are such that they still only commit a small percentage of the violent acts that happen in this country. But what about mass shootings, specifically?

Well, it turns out that the shooter in Parkland was in the minority: the vast majority of mass shooters do not have a history of psychiatric treatment for major mental health issues³. Instead of that, the commonality among mass shooters is that they are very angry and resentful, and they experience real or perceived rejection or ostracization. They then nurture fantasies of violent revenge on those they resent and eventually act on those fantasies. These people are usually at least marginally functional in their lives, so they do not seek out help, whether or not they need it. In fact, it is likely that the only reason the Parkland shooter received mental health treatment is that he was a minor at the time. It seems that he stopped getting help right around the time he turned eighteen and could decide for himself if he wanted it.

So a history of psychiatric treatment and diagnosis does not make a person more likely to become a mass shooter.

All that being said, there is a strong link between diagnosed mental illness and the most prevalent form of firearm-related death in this country: suicide. Nearly two thirds* of gun deaths in this country are suicides. And, when looking at suicides as a whole, 21-44% of suicide victims have identified mental health problems, and 16-33% have a documented history of psychiatric treatment², a much higher prevalence than for mass shooting or violence in general.

So, when you pair the fact that mental health issues drastically increase the likelihood that a person will commit suicide with the fact that “household gun ownership in the United States makes a strong independent contribution to increased suicide risk”², there does seem to be an argument that something related to mental health and guns should be done. It just looks like it won’t have much of an effect on mass shootings. So while it is an idea worth looking at, it will not be enough on its own.

*Correction: This post originally said that nearly a third of gun deaths in this country were suicides. It should have read nearly two thirds. The sources I provided have the correct information, and I knew the correct stat; I just typed it wrong and didn’t catch it before I posted.

¹http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp068229

²http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/article/S1047-2797(14)00147-1/fulltext

³https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099

Another School, Another Massacre

Yesterday, the nine-deadliest mass shooting and fourth-deadliest school shooting in American history since 1949 took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The only school shootings with more deaths were those at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the University of Texas. So far, there are seventeen dead and at least fifteen wounded. Here are the names the dead, as confirmed by the Miami Herald:

Jaime Guttenberg.

Martin Duque.

Alyssa Al Hadeff.

Aaron Feis.

Gina Montalto.

Nicholas Dworet.

Luke Hoyer.

Carmen Schentrup.

Meadow Pollack.

Joaquin Oliver.

Alaina Petty.

Cara Loughran.

Chris Hixon.

Alex Schachter.

Scott Beigel.

Peter Wong.

Helena Ramsay.

May their souls, and the souls of all victims of mass shootings, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Now, let’s talk about the shooter.

First, I will not be using his name on this blog. I think it is important that we look into who he was and what he did, but I don’t need to use his name to do it. So I won’t. I will just call him “the shooter”. His name is used in the articles I link to, as well as many other news reports, so if you want to know it, you can find it elsewhere.

The shooter had formerly attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but he was expelled for “disciplinary reasons” last year. The school would not disclose the reason they expelled him, but another student said that he was expelled after a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, and a teacher said that he had been threatening other students, and that before his expulsion, he was not allowed on campus with a backpack. He had also been suspended earlier in the year for having bullets in his backpack, which may have been the reason he was not allowed to have a backpack on campus.

The shooter had been receiving treatment at a mental health clinic for a while, but over a year ago, he stopped going. From what I have read, it seems that he just stopped going for treatment at that point.

The shooter used an AR-15 that he legally purchased about a year ago at age 18, despite his history of trouble at school and mental health issues.

The shooter posted a series of disturbing posts to Instagram, mostly last summer, which included pictures of multiple guns in addition to the AR-15. No other guns have been found to have been used in the shooting or to be in the shooter’s possession at this time. He also had a history of hurting and killing animals, with one student saying that he had liked killing rats with BB guns. There were police reports from neighbors saying he had shot at one neighbor’s chickens and tried to get his dog to attack another neighbor’s pigs.

Last year, the FBI investigated a YouTube comment that read, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” At the time, they were unable to determine when or from where the comment was made, or the true identity of the commenter. The commenter used the real name of the shooter.

On November 1st, 2017, the shooter’s adoptive mother died. His adoptive father died several years ago. He and his half-brother, who had also been adopted by the same parents, went to live with a family friend. A while later, the shooter moved in with a friend of his and his family. He worked at a dollar store and was going to school to get his GED. He kept his AR-15 in a gun cabinet. The attorney for the family the shooter was living with said this to the Washington Post, “The family brought him into their home. They got him a job at a local dollar store. They didn’t see anything that would suggest any violence. He was depressed, maybe a little quirky. But they never saw anything violent. … He was just a little depressed and seemed to be working through it.”

The shooter was arrested several blocks from the school and taken into police custody. He has been charged with seventeen counts of premeditated murder.

This morning, President Trump addressed the nation about this massacre. He offered prayers, support, and Scripture quotes to the people of Parkland, Florida, and the country. He offered federal aid and support to law enforcement and local government officials of Parkland. He promised an immediate federal response to mental health issues in order to make our schools safer. He did not mention gun control at all.

Now, I have clinical depression, and many of my friends and family members also have struggled with mental health issues. If the President is going to spearhead a way for people with mental health issues to have better and more affordable access to the help we need, I will support that effort wholeheartedly. It is a worthy cause that is desperately needed in this country.

But to not even explore the possibility of gun control as part of the solution is irresponsible and negligent. I don’t think we need the government to pass sweeping gun control laws tomorrow. I just think we should make research into the best ways to reduce the number of mass shootings and and gun-related deaths generally a top priority, and then use the findings to inform our approach.

I have a lot to say on this issue. Over the next few days, I will be posting more pieces on this topic, including pieces on:

Mass shootings in America.

Mental health and gun violence.

AR-15s and other military-style weapons.

The Chicago Fallacy.

I may make even more posts if there are other aspects of this issue that I decide to explore. Please let me know if there are other aspects of this you would like me to write about.