Guns and What We Really Should Fear

            Nobody likes it when people die after being shot.  But, if there are going to be deaths by gunshot, the killings that took place last week in Lafayette, Louisiana are exactly the kind that gun rights advocates like the NRA like.

            On Thursday, July 23, John Russell Houser entered a movie theater showing Amy Schumer’s latest movie, Trainrwreck, and opened fire on the audience a few moments after the picture started.  Two people died and nine more were wounded as a result of the shooting spree.  Houser appeared to have had his escape planned, but before he could leave the scene, police appeared.  Rather than surrender, Houser committed suicide.

            Everyone agrees that Houser was suffering from mental problems and shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a gun. Even the NRA has supported federal legislation aimed at making it more difficult for people with mental illnesses to buy guns.  But under federal law, a person can only be prevented from buying a gun if the seller  knew or had reasonable cause to believe that the buyer “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.” 

            Houser had apparently been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in 2008, but the owner of the pawn shop in Phoenix City, Alabama, that sold Houser the .40 caliber Hi-point semiautomatic pistol he used in the shooting didn’t know about the commitment because that information is not included onthe federal database used to determine a person’s eligibility to purchase a gun.

            All the same, Houser did apparently have a record of bipolar disorder and depression, and his wife had previously made allegations of domestic violence against him.  Under federal law, those aren’t grounds for denying a person the right to buy a gun.  It was enough, though, for the Alabama county where Russell lived to deny him a concealed carry permit.

            This tragic scenario plays almost directly into the basic gun rights meme.  Houser was a lone wolf. The shootings were random violence perpetrated by a stranger against innocent, law-abiding citizens who did not know him.  Had the theater not been a “gun free zone” where patrons could not bring their own weapons for self-defense, somebody might have been able to stop Houser from perpetrating some of the mayhem.  The factor outside of the basic meme is that Houser obtained his gun legally. 

            The lesson the gun rights advocates probably want people to take from this tragedy is the same one that they probably wanted people to take out of the shooting at the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina: Be afraid of random violence. Be afraid of criminals who will think nothing of taking your life.

            That’s why, for example, the NRA is currently urging its members to contact the Los Angeles County City Council to register opposition to proposed ordinances that would ban magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and require gun owners to keep handguns under lock and key.

            “Remind the City Council that a criminal, by definition, does not respect and obey the law.  Criminals will certainly not respect and obey these flawed ordinances.  The only people who will be affected by these misguided anti-gun ordinances are the law-abiding gun owners whose Second Amendment rights and inherent right to self-defense are being infringed by them.”

            However awful and dramatic shootings like the ones that have occurred in Lafayette and Charleston, they are atypical and a distraction to making good public policy on guns.

            USAToday just published aninvestigation of the mass murders that took place in the United States between 2006 and 2011.  USAToday defines “mass murder” as any incident in which at least four people (excluding the perpetrator) were killed.  It found that there were over 280 of them, about one mass murder every two weeks.

            The chilling statistic is that, contrary to the meme, “about 57% of the victims knew the killer, even if they weren’t the main target.”  The largest share of these were immediate household members and close relatives. A third of the victims were children.

            Just 15% of the murders were public killings like the ones in Charleston and Lafayette, and another 11% occurred during robberies.  Over 52% were family killings while another 21% couldn’t be classified.

            In 75% of all cases, the victims died of gunshot wounds.  And in almost 73% of these gun deaths, the weapon of choice was a handgun.

            Human beings are notorious for their inability to evaluate risk.  We tend to exaggerate the dramatic and underestimate the likelihood of the mundane.  As President Obama noted last week in an interview with the BBC, “if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100.  If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.”

            Gun rights advocates would like to keep you petrified of the stranger or  the thug you don’t know who, at random, is willing to take your life.  But they never want to talk about your friend, parent, lover, neighbor or acquaintance who, in an episode of uncontrolled rage, changes his status (and according to USAToday’s report, it is overwhelmingly “his” status) from “law-abiding” to “criminal.”

            The USAToday report makes it clear that the big problem we need to address is not random, but rather, the huge number of deaths visited upon innocents by enraged people they know who are armed with handguns.

            Getting anything done about the plethora of handguns available to people who could snap is not likely to happen any time soon.  It’s in the interests of the gun manufacturers (who gun rights advocates like the NRA really represent) to keep us focused on the wrong problem for as long as they can.

             Fear, after all, is good for business.