2nd Amendment Doesn't Protect Children

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Gun rights advocates, the NRA, and Republican Party have never been serious when calling for the enforcement of the 2^nd Amendment, because they have never called for the enforcement of a child’s right of self-defense, the most vulnerable affected by gun violence, only adults’.

Otherwise, they would support U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s first-of-its-kind advisory declaring gun violence a national public health crisis and recommending it be treated as such.

SFGate

The 40-page publication from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released this week outlines the scope of firearm violence, its impact on victims and communities and a slew of policy suggestions for lawmakers, community leaders and health systems.

Dr. Murthy’s advisory said that firearm-related injury has been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents since 2020 — when it surpassed car accidents — and that ever-common instances of gun violence are taking not only a physical but also a mental toll on survivors, families and community members at large.

A recent national survey found that 54% of U.S. adults or their family members have experienced a firearm-related incident. And, linking gun violence to mental health, the advisory also notes that nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults say they worry either sometimes, almost every day or daily about a loved one becoming a victim.

Some of the advisory's recommendations — which, despite being strongly worded, are not enforceable — include increasing federal funding for gun violence prevention research, more community investment in educational programs and mental health resources and nationwide policy changes like an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

AMA President Bruce A. Scott, M.D,, immediately responded to Dr. Murthy’s advisory: “Across the country, physicians everywhere treat patients and families afflicted by firearm violence. We see the physical and emotional harm firsthand, and we dread the too-often conversations with parents, spouses, and even children in which we tell them their loved one did not make it.

“Firearm violence is indeed a public health crisis in the United States, and the data now show it touches the majority of Americans. We applaud the Office of the Surgeon General for issuing this advisory and for outlining an evidence-based public health approach to addressing firearm violence,” said Dr. Scott.

I wrote a 2016 Huffington Post piece when the American Medical Association first adopted a policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution," at their annual convention.

That was when the tide began turning in some states and a powerful new gun control group emerged called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom's Demand Action. It was when former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but because it lacked foot soldiers merged with the women’s groups and now totals 3.5 million supporters.

Maybe that is why an eight-member Supreme Court at the time allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in the massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates at the time.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were in fact enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia banned semiautomatic rifles.

Among the stark statistics: 48,204 people have died from firearm-related injuries (including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths) in 2022, after that number reached a near three-decade high the previous year, reports NPR.

The rate of firearm-related suicide grew by 20% between 2012 and 2022, with the highest increases among young people between 10 and 34 years old—our children!

And Nicholas Kristof wrote an earlier NYTimes Op-ed that said more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States -- a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

A public health approach, Murthy said in the report, can guide the nation’s strategy and actions “as it has done in the past with successful efforts to address tobacco-related disease and motor vehicle crashes.”

Our Surgeon General has now begun a national discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics--eradication of the carriers of that violence, which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons in all states.

Can we hope as much, given the Republican Party has opposed almost any form of gun regulation, given the upcoming Presidential election?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"Australians Not Like U.S."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Huffington Post

We happened to be in Australia in 2015 when this Sydney journalist voiced his reaction to another mass killing in America. "The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns."

And as I update this column today, there were four more mass shootings on the first weekend of summer, 2024—27 injured or killed this last weekend.

We are two countries with almost identical demographics, but where the Australian minimum wage for full-time, working adults is more than $16Aus per hour and Australian's have created a health care system that pays for all normal health care costs (as opposed to catastrophic events), though hospital care is free for every Australian citizen.

Yet we cannot control the gun violence that Australians have been able to. It is a startling contrast that I first wrote about during the Obama administration.

"Australia is not like the U.S." said commentator Michael Pascoe in the Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama's remarks on the Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 8 guns at home, in addition to the 6 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours."

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. "Unlike the US," said Pascoe, "we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind."

Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

Current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in 1996. There hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since. At the heart of the new laws was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a "genuine reason" for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns," said Pasco. "It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way."

It has been known for years by those who research gun violence that more gun killings occur in households owning guns. A new survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine narrows down some of the causal relationship between guns and death by finding conclusively that having a gun in your home makes you more likely to successfully attempt suicide. The authors of the survey also found with a lesser degree of certainty that people with guns in their home are more likely to be the victims of a homicide.

According to data gleaned from State and Justice departments for the period between 2001-2011, there have, in fact, been many, many more Americans killed by gun violence than by terrorism. During that 10-year period, some 130,347 have lost their lives to gun violence, compared to the approximately 3,000 Americans killed in acts of terrorism.

"It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism," said the study

We have to be a very sick society to have allowed this to happen. We are so good at preventing foreign terrorists from attacking us, but not protecting Americans from domestic terrorists. We should understand that gun violence itself is an act of terror. And those that support unrestricted use and purchase of guns are the sponsors of domestic terrorism.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Mr. President, Please Don’t Shoot Anyone!

Financial FAQs

Mother Jones/Wikipedia

Where is President Obama and other national leaders when we need them? Where is someone to refute the neo-Nazi lies of President Donald Trump, who no longer has to brag that he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, because his followers and those who believe his lies of Jewish conspiracies and immigrant invasions are carrying out the mass shootings and violence for him; with the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooter and Florida bomber the latest examples?

Any national leader’s voice will do, as this is happening because Donald Trump has been inciting his followers to avoid impeachment from a Democratic-elected congress in the upcoming November election.

Are there not even voices from his own Republican Party who will stand up to his relentless incitements of age-old fears?

It will take a clarion call from a moral national leader to refute the lies that there is an “invasion” of several thousand Central Americans seeking asylum from their own country’s violence, and who are about to overwhelm 325 million American citizens. There is no invasion of immigrants, as even a Fox News host has said.

The number of mass shootings around the country in 2018 continues to climb.  According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a total of 293 mass shooting incidents have occurred as of October 27.

Saturday's mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with 'multiple casualties' and multiple officers injured, marks the 294th mass shooting. In 2017, the U.S. saw a total of 346 mass shootings. 

Where are our national leaders, including past presidents, who still believe in the rule of law and want to stop this President’s call to violence, a man who will do and say anything to stay in power?

Harlan Green © 2018

ollow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Is Killing Our Children?

Popular Economics Weekly

The fact that the NRA contributed $30 million to Donald Trump’s campaign is all we need to know about who is responsible for deaths of 14 high school children and 3 adults in Florida, or the 58 killed and 851 wounded in Las Vegas.

What made the NRA the killing machine it has become, from the sporting association it once was? The NRA contributed a total of $55 million to 2016 presidential campaigns.

We can thank the Second Amendment of our Constitution that enshrined gun ownership as an unalienable right, and to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller that interpreted its original wording: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” to mean every individual has the right to bear arms. But he added, that does not prevent the state from banning “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

We can also thank the gun manufacturers themselves that fund the lobbyists that keep Republican congressmen opposing all forms of gun control. We really should be talking about gun safety, rather than gun control, since gun owners aren’t required to have a license or training to own a gun, as is required for operators of other dangerous machines, like car owners.

We also know the carnage that guns can wreak. In 2016 alone there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths, according to the Center for Disease Control. Just-released autopsy reports from the Las Vegas carnage show the damage done by military-style assault rifles at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.

A military-style assault rifle bullet travels 3,000 feet per second—more than 3 times the speed of a pistol bullet because it is meant to kill instantaneously. It has such power that many bodies of the Las Vegas victims were literally torn apart by bullets that were probably tumbling by the time they reached the victims more than 500 yards away from Stephen Paddock, the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s 32^nd story shooter.

Graph: Mother Jones

Military-style assault rifles have been banned before; during the Tommy gun era of 1930’s gangster wars, and in 1994 after a series of similar mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons. But it had a ten-year sunset clause that was never renewed when Republicans again dominated Congress.

There have been 1600 mass shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children, according to Maureen Dowd.

When will American children again feel protected? When a Congress is elected that admits military-style, semi-automatic guns of all shapes and sizes are “dangerous and unusual weapons” needed only by those trained to use them—the police and members of our military.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

It's Time For 2018

Financial FAQs

We will need the 2018 elections now more than ever to vote out the greed and cowardice of those members of our national legislature who oppose all forms of gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre of innocents.  It is those who have supported gun-rights groups that need to be replaced to protect Americans from such random acts of violence.

Gun-rights groups have allowed the killing of thousands of Americans in mass shootings over the past decade, including 521 mass shootings in just the last 477 days, according to New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.

That’s also because we have to vote out supporters of the largest terrorist organization in the U.S., the National Rifle Association, that opposes any controls on military-style weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, that’s right. Military weapons, such as the AK-47 developed by the Soviets because it was cheap to manufacture and easy to use, are responsible for more American deaths than ISIS; or any other terrorist organization that has killed maybe 15-20 Americans in all, yet we spend $billions trying to eliminate them, but nothing on eliminating American terrorism.

Instead those monies are donated to the candidates that support American anti-gun control organizations, such as the NRA. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were the top recipients of monies from organizations that oppose any form of gun control in 2016, reports Marketwatch — no surprise, since they both ran for president.

Cruz raked in $360,727 to lead the way, according to OpenSecrets.org. Just two years earlier, Cruz had collected $18,300 when he was the junior senator from Texas and lacked any significant influence in the Senate.

Third on the list of recipients of their largesse is House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said of the Las Vegas massacre, “this is not who we are”. Do we really believe him when he was the recipient of $171,977 from such organizations?

Who are we when President Trump, our elected President said, “You came through big for me, so I will come through big for you,” at the NRA’s latest convention?

Graph: Marketwatch.com

That is in fact “who we are” at the moment, but not who we can become if we will take on such American terrorist organizations as the NRA that are responsible for the indiscriminate killing of so many women and children.

The big lie broadcast by gun-rights groups is that banning military-style weapons is banning the Second Amendment right to bear arms. No, that right is protected by the Second Amendment, but not the right to bear arms that slaughter so many innocents.

Harlan Green © 2017

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Trump Voters and The Drug Epidemic

Popular Economics Weekly

Why should so many rust-belt citizens vote for President-Elect Donald Trump, who is patently against the interest of working class voters? I am speaking of his promise to revoke Obamacare, which will make the 20-30 million dependent on it poorer and sicker. And his selection of Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt to run the EPA, who we know wants to roll back environmental regulations, making everyone warmer, or House Speaker Ryan, who really wants to abolish Medicare as we know it and turn it into a voucher plan.

A recent Penn State study tells us why so many of the poorest and displaced white, blue collar workers voted for him. It was the desperation of depressed families and communities rampant with drug and alcohol abuse, in part from the loss of jobs and the identities that went with holding a decent paying job, who would trust a strong white male with authoritative tendencies who made enough pie-in-the-sky promises more than a female President.

One can say that such desperation leads to an irrational kind of anger, against anything that looks like the old order. Yet it was the old, white male order that created both the Great Recession—because GW Bush’s trickle-down economics cut regulations as well as taxes of the wealthiest, frittering away the budget surpluses of President Clinton’s last 4 years in office—and obstructed a robust recovery by opposing almost any stimulus spending, even shutting down the government in 2011.

The Penn State study showed how hopeless was the situation to the inhabitants now isolated from the modern multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-national economy. Most of those industrial, high-paying blue collar jobs are gone, replaced by high tech machines and little effort was made to replace them or rebuild those communities.

Graph: Econoday

The factory sector has been contracting since October 2014, but has recently shown signs of strength. Factory orders surged 2.7 percent in October. Both commercial and defense, were major positives, but the strength was well distributed with the monthly gain excluding all aircraft at a very strong 0.7 percent.

Donald Trump got significantly more votes in areas with high rates of drug addiction, alcohol abuse and suicide, according to the study done by Shannon Monnat, a Penn State researcher who specializes in rural issues.

"I think Trump's anti-free trade message resonated in these places and his rhetoric was very simple -- Make America great again," Monnat said. "And you have to understand that in some of these places that have experienced widespread decline in manufacturing and extraction and the types of jobs that pay livable wages, people there really feel like America is not so great anymore. I think the message that he was the change candidate really resonated with people in these places."

According to Swayne's article, the mortality rate from drugs, alcohol and suicide is 36 deaths per 100,000 people in the least economically distressed parts of the country. The rate is 49 deaths per 100,000 in the most economically distressed areas.

There is now some hope for the rust belt if Trump can carry through on his infrastructure rebuilding promise. After two years in contraction, factory orders year-on-year rates are again positive, at 1.3 percent, and for shipments, at 0.4 percent. October details included a useful 0.4 percent rise in shipments and a 0.7 percent jump in unfilled orders that ended a long run of contraction for this reading.

We hope the factory sector and manufacturing in general can recover in those areas most affected by high addiction rates.  The CDC reported in a 2007 report that more people now die from heroin overdose that gun homicides in those same rust-belt areas. And opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Please Protect US, Mr. President!

Popular Economics Weekly

What has happened to our gun laws—especially the assault rifle ban that expired in 2004? Australians had the courage to pass tougher gun regulations—Australia’s Prime Minister in particular, at the time. It takes political courage, in other words, something U.S. politicians seem to lack.

Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a close ally of George W. Bush, faced political and public resistance to the laws. After just three months as the country's leader, Howard wore a bulletproof vest as he addressed a hostile 3,000-strong crowd opposed to the reforms.

How did he do it? The current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania.  The shooter was able to buy his assault rifle, even though later he was later determined by authorities to have an IQ of 11. There hasn’t been a mass shooting in Australia since then.

Twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, the Australian prime minister, John Howard, announced a sweeping package of gun reforms in a country where firearms had long been considered an essential prop in the national mythology of life in the bush.

“At that stage the gun lobby was the ruling lobby in Australia,” says Philip Alpers, associate professor at the University of Sydney. “What happened at Port Arthur is that they were outpaced, outflanked and outwitted by a man who had the power to move in 12 remarkable days.”

Tim Fischer was leader of the National party and Howard’s deputy prime minister in the Coalition government, charged with persuading skeptical country voters to support, or at least accept, reforms. “Port Arthur was our Sandy Hook,” he says. “Port Arthur we acted on. The USA is not prepared to act on their tragedies.”

It was called the National Firearms Agreement — legislation that outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns. At the heart of the new law was a massive buyback of about one-fifth—640,000—of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense could not be a reason.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The laws had widespread public support but faced fierce opposition from some rural supporters … because they believed they were unfairly paying a price for the misdeeds of others," Howard told NBC News in a statement. "This resentment assisted the rise of a new political party which damaged the government at the following election."

Howard persisted with introducing the laws, and went on to win that election and lead the nation for more than a decade. He considers the reforms as a key part of his legacy. An article published online in July by the NRA claimed there was "growing consensus" that the laws hadn't made Australians safer.

Howard acknowledges that "major cultural and historical differences" make it difficult to draw comparisons between the gun cultures in the U.S. and Australia. "Although I had not anticipated the need to act on this matter so early in my term of government, I had always believed there was a clear link between the ready availability of guns and gun-related death," Howard said.

"The national gun control laws enacted after the Port Arthur massacre remain one of the major social reforms ... of [my] government," he added. "All the credible research both in Australia and elsewhere shows that the gun control laws have markedly reduced gun-related deaths."

Graph: The Guardian

Total intentional gun deaths fell by half in the decade after the 1996 restrictions were put in place, even as Australia’s population grew nearly 14 percent. The rate of gun suicides per 100,000 people dropped 65 percent from 1995 to 2006, and the rate of gun homicides fell 59 percent, according to a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University.

“Australia is not like the U.S.” said commentator Michael Pascoe in the  Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama’s remarks on last year’s Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 7 guns at home, in addition to the  8 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours.”

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. “Unlike the US,” said Pascoe, “we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind.”
Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

“The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns,” said the Sydney Morning Herald’s Pasco. “It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way.”

We do not at present have a leader or leaders with enough courage to stand up to the gun lobby, as Australia’s John Howard was able to do. Their most important job should be to protect our citizens, regardless of creed or color.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen