Enough, Already. Just ... Enough.

On July 9, 2014, Ron Lee Haskell shot and killed four of his ex-wife’s sister’s five children, along with their parents. A fifth child, their fifteen year old daughter, was critically wounded, shot in the head, but was able to ID the shooter to the police and warn them that Haskell was on his way to kill her grandparents.

Ron Lee Haskell

This is so many kinds of fucked up I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s start with this fifteen year old girl.

Imagine that your aunt was married to this guy, see, and the relationship ended, and your parents went to Colorado to pick her up and bring her back to Texas where she would, presumably, be safe from an abusive spouse. Your uncle then shows up at the house a year later, several months after the divorce has been finalized, ties you and your siblings up and has you lie face down on the floor, then does the same to your parents when they get home. He then calmly, methodically, shoots each of you in the back of the head. They are all dead, but you, somehow, have managed to survive. He leaves, you call the police and tell them that he is on his way to kill your grandparents. You are then taken to the hospital, where you are listed in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.

Okay, so Cassidy Stay is pretty much your textbook definition of a hero. The media are going to LOVE her. She saved the lives of her grandparents, for chrissake, after her uncle shot her in the head and killed her entire family. It’s a pretty safe bet that, once she gets out of the hospital (and likely before then) she will be inundated with interview requests, invitations to appear on morning talk shows, daytime talk shows, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, 60 Minutes, Letterman, Fallon, Conan ...

Here’s hoping that whatever adults this poor girl has left in her life are smart enough to put her needs ahead of “the public’s right to know what happened”, or whatever nonsense producers might throw at her. Yes, there is a journalistic imperative to get as much information as possible, and to disseminate it, but the modern media have become so cutthroat and bleeding edge, and the need to beat your competitor to the story, even if it is only by a few seconds, has become so ingrained, that compassion and perspective often get lost in the shuffle.

Look, I want know what happened as much as the next person. However, my desire to know is outweighed by my hope that this girl gets the help she will need to deal with seeing her entire family slaughtered in front of her eyes.

Which brings me around to my favorite topic of late: guns.

I know there are people out there who may read this who are gun rights supporters. I’m well aware that the vast majority of gun rights supporters are rational, reasonable people who would never even consider something as brutal as the crime that took place in Houston yesterday.

However, it is a common thread among the gun rights crowd that gun control will not work, because criminals will get guns anyway, and if you take the guns away from the good guys then there’s going to be a massive slaughter and life will look like a Tarentino movie.

I disagree, and I started doing some research to find data to support my position. After all, I am a liberal, and I don’t like guns, and I fail to see the rational need to have a weapon capable of absolutely vaporizing a duck and trying to claim it’s for hunting, and I DEFINITELY don’t see a reason to bring something like that to Chipotle, especially if you’re a fat guy wearing basketball shorts.

That's just wrong.

What I found instead was far more disturbing.

Apparently, people have less to fear from a bad guy with a gun than they do themselves. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 1999 to 2010 (the last year for which there are openly published data) the majority of firearms-related deaths came from suicides. Of the 364,483 gun deaths in this country during that time, 140,875 (a shade over 57%) of them were the result of suicides. And apparently 2010 was the worst year, with over 61% of the total firearms-related deaths being self-inflicted^[1].

In contrast, there were 140,875 homicides committed with a firearms during that time, or 38.65% of all gun deaths.

Think about this for a second, and see if you spot the irony. Gun rights advocates are very vocal about the need for guns to protect themselves against the “bad guys with guns”, and it turns out that the bad guys with guns are, more often than not ... drum roll, please ... themselves.

Conversely, a favorite argument of the left is that we need stricter gun regulations to prevents deaths by accidental discharge. However, the statistics show that this is actually not that big a problem. For the same period (1999 to 2010), there were 8,339 deaths labeled as “Unintentional” by the CDC, or 2.29% of all gun deaths -- and 0.000236% of the population as a whole.

I do not intend to discount these deaths in any way. They are tragic, and could have easily been avoided if it wasn’t for the NRA and their ilk. However, it would be a mistake to use accidental death as a rallying cry, because gun rights advocates and other members of the far right will simply trivialize the number, as evidenced by this passage from usconservatives.about.com:

"According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years in a country of over 300 million people and 250 million guns."

Where to begin.

What the right THINKS all the fuss is about ...

First, I don’t know if this 8,900 number is correct. I was unable to find anything in the CDC data set I was looking at that broke out the data according to whether the death was gang-related or not. However, an absence of data is not the same as confirmation, so I’m going to have to let that one go and take it at face value.

... and what it's actually about.

However, in the context of the larger issue, whether or not it’s gang-related is kind of irrelevant. They are still people, and they are still getting killed. Yes, gang activity contributes to the flow of illegal firearms. Yes, if gangs were brought under control, there would fewer incidents of gun violence. I get all that. The conservative viewpoint is that we need to beef up enforcement against the gangs. Lock ‘em up, and that will serve as a deterrent. However, seeing as that has worked so well, and as much as I am tempted to go off on a tangent about this, that will have to be reserved for a future rant. Moving right along ...

The thing that struck me about the conservative editorial mentioned above is that the author managed to whittle the number of homicides that, I don’t know, really matter, or something, down to 2,200 ... and then completely failed to mention anything substantive about this statistic, preferring instead to complain about how gun laws were incorrectly targeted.

I suppose it makes sense for gun nuts to complain about someone else’s aim.

Anyway, getting back to the conservative point that we don’t need more gun regulations, we need to get rid of the gangs. First off, it’s not an either/or proposition. They are two completely separate issues, that need to be tackled individually.

Second, and more importantly, there is the issue of people like Ron Lee Haskell being able to get pretty much whatever he wanted that would increase his killing power. He had already run afoul of the law and had a restraining order against him, and there was a history of domestic violence, so how in the hell did he get a gun to begin with? I mean, one look at this guy’s record would be all it took for a gun seller to be able to say, “Y’know, I wouldn't trust this guy with a burnt out match”.
Assuming, of course, that anyone bothered to look in the first place. After all, if he had purchased the gun in Colorado before July 1, 2013, there would not have even been a cursory background check. In Colorado (where Haskell had been living with his wife and four children prior to the split and moving to California), a state law requiring a background check at the gun purchaser's expense did not take effect until July 1, 2013; prior to that, I think you could get an AR15 out of a vending machine^[2].

Thirdly, a favorite tactic of the gun rights people is to dismiss any proposed gun control legislation, no matter how minor or reasonable, by proving that it will not be absolutely, perfectly, 100% effective in all situations. This ain’t exactly setting the bar very high, considering that there has been no legislation in the history of the world that has been effective in 100% of the cases. A perfect example is the case of a gun manufacturer that created an electronic trigger lock that would only allow the gun to be fired if it was within a few inches of a special watch to which it was digitally paired.

Well.

The uproar that resulted from this was astounding. A gun dealer in Maryland started offering these things for sale, and within hours was receiving death threats from gun nuts who were claiming that this violated their Second Amendment rights. It got so bad, he was forced to pull them from his shelves out of fear for his safety.

I got into a debate with a guy on this one recently, and he actually tried to make the case that a digital trigger lock like this was a bad idea because, if the hand with the watch got blown off and the watch was damaged or destroyed as a result, you wouldn't be able to fire the gun with the other hand. To which I replied, a) what the fuck are you doing in a situation where your hand is going to be blown off in the first place, and 2) if that does happen, you've got more important things to do with your free hand, like applying a goddam tourniquet so you don't bleed to death.

This is the level of discourse I have come to expect from the gun rights crowd.

Anyway, once you look at the actual numbers, and you see that of the average of 30,374 gun deaths per year, 29,107, or 95.83%, are intentionally inflicted -- either on another person, or on one’s self^[3]. This screams for some kind of regulation, if for nothing else to prevent the majority of gun deaths from suicide.

Look, it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s not like you have to worry about drive-by suicides ... they don’t work that way. Suicide is rarely an impulsive act, and by removing access to firearms we will possibly save thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to depression or overwhelming circumstances. Granted, if people genuinely want to kill themselves, they’ll find a way to do it. That doesn't mean we make it easier for them.

So it all comes back to gun rights advocates refusing to compromise, even a little. A digital trigger lock that is automatically deactivated by wearing a watch is too restrictive of Second Amendment rights, apparently, and in order to ensure that everybody can take part in the crossfire we just have to accept some murdered children as the cost of doing business, I guess. I gotta lie down.

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The entire chart is show below, as is a link to the CDC website ... for independent verification, and so on.

	Suicide			Homicide			Accidental			Legal Intervention			Undetermined
Year	Number	% of deaths	% of pop.	Number	% of deaths	% of pop.	Number	% of deaths	% of pop.	Number	% of deaths	% of pop.	Number	% of deaths	% of pop.	All intents	% of population	Population
1999	16,599	57.49%	0.005949%	10,828	37.50%	0.003880%	824	2.85%	0.000295%	299	1.04%	0.000107%	324	1.12%	0.000116%	28,874	0.0103%	279,040,168
2000	16,586	57.87%	0.005894%	10,801	37.68%	0.003838%	776	2.71%	0.000276%	270	0.94%	0.000096%	230	0.80%	0.000082%	28,663	0.0102%	281,421,906
2001	16,869	57.04%	0.005920%	11,348	38.37%	0.003982%	802	2.71%	0.000281%	323	1.09%	0.000113%	231	0.78%	0.000081%	29,573	0.0104%	284,968,955
2002	17,108	56.57%	0.005948%	11,829	39.11%	0.004113%	762	2.52%	0.000265%	300	0.99%	0.000104%	243	0.80%	0.000084%	30,242	0.0105%	287,625,193
2003	16,907	56.10%	0.005828%	11,920	39.55%	0.004109%	730	2.42%	0.000252%	347	1.15%	0.000120%	232	0.77%	0.000080%	30,136	0.0104%	290,107,933
2004	16,750	56.65%	0.005721%	11,624	39.31%	0.003970%	649	2.19%	0.000222%	311	1.05%	0.000106%	235	0.79%	0.000080%	29,569	0.0101%	292,805,298
2005	17,002	55.39%	0.005753%	12,352	40.24%	0.004180%	789	2.57%	0.000267%	330	1.08%	0.000112%	221	0.72%	0.000075%	30,694	0.0104%	295,516,599
2006	16,883	54.64%	0.005658%	12,791	41.40%	0.004287%	642	2.08%	0.000215%	360	1.17%	0.000121%	220	0.71%	0.000074%	30,896	0.0104%	298,379,912
2007	17,352	55.57%	0.005760%	12,632	40.46%	0.004193%	613	1.96%	0.000203%	351	1.12%	0.000117%	276	0.88%	0.000092%	31,224	0.0104%	301,231,207
2008	18,223	57.68%	0.005993%	12,179	38.55%	0.004005%	592	1.87%	0.000195%	326	1.03%	0.000107%	273	0.86%	0.000090%	31,593	0.0104%	304,093,966
2009	18,735	59.77%	0.006107%	11,493	36.66%	0.003746%	554	1.77%	0.000181%	333	1.06%	0.000109%	232	0.74%	0.000076%	31,347	0.0102%	306,771,529
2010	19,392	61.23%	0.006281%	11,078	34.98%	0.003588%	606	1.91%	0.000196%	344	1.09%	0.000111%	252	0.80%	0.000082%	31,672	0.0103%	308,745,538
Total	208,406	57.18%	0.005903%	140,875	38.65%	0.003990%	8,339	2.29%	0.000236%	3,894	1.07%	0.000110%	2,969	0.81%	0.000084%	364,483	0.0103%	3,530,708,204
Average	17,367	57.18%	0.005903%	11,740	38.65%	0.003990%	695	2.29%	0.000236%	325	1.07%	0.000110%	247	0.81%	0.000084%	30,374	0.0103%	294,225,684

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Notes, Addenda and Assorted Stuff

^[1]Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2010 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released 2012. Data are from the Multiple Cause of Death Files, 1999-2010, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html on Jul 11, 2014 8:53:53 AM.

The following ICD-10 Codes were used to filter the CDC data set:

• U01.4 (Terrorism involving firearms)
• W32 (Handgun discharge)
• W33 (Rifle, shotgun and larger firearm discharge)
• W34 (Discharge from other and unspecified firearms)
• X72 (Intentional self-harm by handgun discharge)
• X73 (Intentional self-harm by rifle, shotgun and larger firearm discharge)
• X74 (Intentional self-harm by other and unspecified firearm discharge)
• X93 (Assault by handgun discharge)
• X94 (Assault by rifle, shotgun and larger firearm discharge)
• X95 (Assault by other and unspecified firearm discharge)
• Y22 (Handgun discharge, undetermined intent)
• Y23 (Rifle, shotgun and larger firearm discharge, undetermined intent)
• Y24 (Other and unspecified firearm discharge, undetermined intent)
• Y35.0 (Legal intervention involving firearm discharge)

Population figures for 2010 are April 1 Census counts. The population figures for years 2001 - 2009, other than the infant age groups, are bridged-race estimates of the July 1 resident population, from the revised intercensal county-level 2000 - 2009 series released by NCHS on October 26, 2012. Population figures for 2000 are April 1 Census counts. Population figures for 1999 are from the 1990-1999 intercensal series of July 1 estimates. Note: Rates and population figures for years 2001 - 2009 differ slightly from previously published reports, due to use of the population estimates which were available at the time of release.

Don't worry, all the data for the chart is there. However, I'm still new at this Blogger thing, so formatting the table ... well, it didn't work out as well as I had hoped, and quite frankly I got tired of messing with it. Return to story

^[2]Just in case some right-winger gets his or her panties in a twist and accuses me of spreading misinformation, I will state categorically that, to the best of my knowledge, you could never buy an AR15 out of a vending machine in Colorado. However, you could get one free from Pep Boys if you bought a complete set of tires with the road hazard warranty. Return to story

^[3]This does not count gun deaths resulting from law enforcement activity ... this is actually a minute percentage, just a hair over 1%, of all gun deaths per year. It also does not include gun deaths that are classified as “Undetermined” ... again, a tiny amount, 0.81% a year. Return to story