Nobody knows what happened within Michael E. Hance’s interior life between 1978—his senior year of high school, when he was chosen Most Courteous because of his “consideration and good manners toward everyone”—and about eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, August 7, 2011, when he took deliberate aim with his recently-bought Hi-Point 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol and shot eleven-year-old Scott Dieter below the terrified boy’s right eye.1 Scott Dieter was the last of seven people whom Hance, armed with two handguns, calmly hunted down and shot to death in the archetypical white, middle-class suburb of Copley Township, Ohio.2 An eighth victim, Rebecca Dieter, Hance’s longtime girlfriend and Scott’s aunt, was severely wounded; she was hospitalized but survived. A policeman shot Hance dead moments after he killed young Scott Dieter. The entire episode from first shot to last took less than ten minutes.3
“Unclear in all of this is the motive for these killings,” Summit County Prosecuting Attorney Sherri Bevan Walsh noted in her report clearing the police officer of wrongdoing in shooting Hance.4
What is not “unclear” is that in spite of Hance’s long-term and increasingly bizarre public behavior, his angry interactions with his neighbors, the judgment of several members of his family that he had severe mental illness, and a 2009 incident report by Akron police that concluded he was a “signal 43,” or, as a police lieutenant later explained, “basically . . . crazy,”5 Hance was easily and legally able to buy from a pawn shop the two handguns with which he fired more than twenty rounds at his fleeing family and neighbors.6 In addition to the Hi-Point pistol, which he bought five days earlier from Sydmor’s Jewelry, a pawn shop in neighboring Barberton, Hance used a .357 Magnum revolver that he bought in 2005 from the same store.7 He also bought several ammunition “reloaders” that he carried with him.8
In the days between the time he bought the Hi-Point pistol and the morning that he unleashed his fury on his family and neighbors, Hance visited a local shooting range several times to familiarize himself with his new gun and practice shooting it.9 Hi-Point asserts on its website that it “offers affordably-priced semi-automatic handguns in a range of the most popular calibers,” and that its guns “are very popular with recreational target shooters, hunters, campers, law enforcement and anyone seeking an affordable, American-made firearm.”10
Events like that Sunday morning in Copley Township have become quintessentially American. They are damning proof that modern guns not only kill people, they kill many people quickly. Variously called a “shooting spree,”11 “shooting rampage,”12 “mass shooting,”13 “mass killing,”14 and “mass murder,”15 such carnage has become so common that a pattern of breathless but ultimately feckless ritual emerges from the news media’s reporting.16
The ritual starts with a “breaking news” alert (that often misstates both the circumstances and the actual number of deaths and injuries).17 “And, as we deliver the information to you, it is quite shocking,” said a CNN news reader on the afternoon of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which thirty-two victims were shot dead and seventeen wounded. “Because, when we first started reporting this, this morning, it was simply a shooting on campus. We didn’t know if anyone had been injured.”18
After police gain control of the shooting scene, high-ranking police officials and politicians give interviews and press conferences, ostensibly to assure their constituencies that the event in question was an aberration, the horror is now over, and the community is safe. Mayor Buddy Dyer, for example, told reporters after a mass shooting in an Orlando, Florida, office building, “The gunman has been apprehended so the community is safe.”19 Bill Campbell, then the mayor of Atlanta, “took an accustomed role Thursday after a shooting rampage left nine dead in two midtown office buildings, briefing the media and updating the city on the police’s investigations in press conferences that were carried live nationally,” the Associated Press reported, adding that “Campbell took the role usually handled by at best a chief of police and normally just a normal spokesperson.”20
Other events at this stage include such ironic gestures as both houses of the U.S. Congress observing a “moment of silence” after news broke of the slaughter at Virginia Tech—as if the Congress has in recent years been anything other than silent on gun deaths, gun injuries, and gun control.21 Perhaps even more bizarre was U.S. Representative J. Randy Forbes’s pronouncement to CNN on the afternoon of the Virginia Tech shooting that “the state [of Virginia] has done a wonderful job in terms of dispatching plenty of police officers, state troopers and other people to make sure everyone is [sic] there can have a degree of safety and feel safe while they are on campus.”22 The presence of “plenty of police officers” after the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, a student, had committed suicide, must have been small comfort to the thirty-two other dead and seventeen wounded he left in his wake. Not incidentally, Forbes is a hard-liner on “gun rights.” He enjoys a coveted A rating from the NRA. In a press release announcing the gun lobby’s endorsement of Forbes, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox, praised “Forbes’ unwavering commitment to preserving our Second Amendment rights.”23
Even before the numbers of dead and injured are confirmed, the media scramble for “color” in column inches and broadcast time through interviews of neighbors, survivors, and random acquaintances of the shooter or his victims. This reportage invariably includes statements of surprise that a mass shooting could happen in the community involved. “Well, we of course all see things happen on the news and think that we live in a safe and quiet community and nothing like that certainly would ever happen here,” a witness to a shooting in Binghamton, New York, told CNN after thirteen people were shot to death and four others wounded in a community center. “So everyone is shocked and amazed and still trying to grasp the whole import of it.”24
There are also frequent observations that the shooter never seemed dangerous. “Mike was strange,” a neighbor told a reporter about Hance, but added, “I wouldn’t think he’d go to this extreme.”25 Judy Gren, described as a “longtime friend” of another mass shooter, Carey Hal Dyess, said he was “a very nice man, very kind. He loved animals. He helped you with anything you needed. We used to go horseback riding together.” This “nice man” Dyess shot to death his ex-wife, her lawyer, and three of her friends, wounded another of her friends, and then shot himself to death.26
The next ritual station is a ponderous exploration of “why?” This inquiry typically ignores almost entirely the looming significance of the single objective fact that is common to all “shooting sprees”—the use of an easily available and almost always legally obtained gun, usually a handgun. Rather, the media pick speculatively through the mysterious lint of the shooter’s alleged, possible, potential “motivation” or likely mental illness. “Fighter Pilot Murder Mystery; Did Elite Navy Pilot Snap?” ABC’s Good Morning America asked after a navy pilot shot to death his roommate, the roommate’s sister, and an acquaintance of the two, then shot himself to death.27 What neither ABC in this case, nor other media in other cases, seriously address is whether the ubiquitous presence of guns makes a crucial difference in the outcome when someone like a highly trained, elite “Top Gun” pilot “snaps”—in this case, in a jealous rage.
In fact, much of this speculative reporting looks more like a puppet show than a newscast: badly informed television personalities voicing idiosyncratic theories through compliant talking-head guest experts. CNN network host Jane Velez-Mitchell, for example, just before pronouncing that guns are “a minuscule part of the problem,” purportedly probed the cause of a mass shooting in Orlando with this fatuous question to an “expert” guest, “OK. I want to go right now to Alex Katehakis. She is an addiction specialist. She’s also a sex specialist. Let’s face it: a gun is a phallic symbol, Alex. What do you make about the fact that it’s males primarily committing these kinds of, basically, revenge fantasies come to life with a squeeze of a trigger?”28 According to the website of the Center for Healthy Sex in Los Angeles, of which Katehakis is the founder and clinical director, she “has extensive experience in working with a full spectrum of sexuality from sexual addiction to sex therapy, and problems of sexual desire and sexual dysfunction for individuals and couples. Alex has successfully facilitated the recovery of many sexually addicted individuals and assisted couples in revitalizing their sex lives.”29 There is no evidence that Katehakis has any expertise at all in the study of violence generally, much less gun violence. Notwithstanding Velez-Mitchell’s peremptory assertion that “a gun is a phallic symbol,” there is no reason to believe that she brings an informed view to the subject of mass shootings or gun violence prevention.
On the same CNN segment, former FBI agent Don Clark ventured to say cautiously, “I know some of my friends are going to beat me up about this, but I’ve been in law enforcement and the military. And I’m just tired of these guns.” Velez-Mitchell firmly brushed Clark back in this exchange, which would be amusing if it were not so insidious:
VELEZ-MITCHELL: And let me tell you something. I agree with you 100 percent. From a psychological perspective, I’m not talking gun control. I’m talking psychology.
CLARK: No, neither am I.
VELEZ-MITCHELL: It takes an entire complicated situation, and it boils it down to one action. It takes a revenge fantasy in your head, and it makes it real.30
This exchange was not the first time former FBI agent Clark—who appears often in the CNN lineup as a utility expert on a range of subjects, including the custody of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s body, hate crimes, and the proper investigation of repeat sex offenders31—had mentioned guns on CNN as a factor that just might possibly be relevant to mass shootings. The result of his earlier assertion (during an interview to discuss the Virginia Tech massacre) was strikingly similar in outcome. The flow of the dialogue—expert guest’s tentative assertion, host’s firm brush-back, subject dropped—provides telling insight into the self-censorship of the news media about the “hornet’s nest” of gun control:
CLARK: And Tony, let’s just go back even to the gun purchases. You know? And I don’t want to get on that political hot potato about the guns . . .
[CNN host Tony] HARRIS: It is, you are right. It is.
CLARK: . . . but I want to say that there has to be a little bit more strenuous background investigations into people picking them up. Perhaps if there had been some opportunity to talk about the mental attitude of this—to search about the mental attitude of this person, maybe this person would not have been sold a weapon.
HARRIS: Yes. Boy, you’ve just stepped on the hornet’s nest, and there they go.
CLARK: Yes.32
The exchange ended there, without further discussion of Clark’s timidly advanced point.
In later stages of the ritual, 911 tapes are released and broadcast. It’s possible that these grisly moments are broadcast not simply for their shock value. But one is then left with the curious proposition that the media’s producers must think that the answer to the “puzzle” of why mass shootings happen might be found in the sound of terrified, frantic, and sometimes dying voices pleading for help.33
The sad final act of the mass shooting ritual is a public event or makeshift memorial involving candles and teddy bears, to show “support” for the victims and help “bring closure” to the survivors.34 When CNN anchor Roland Martin asked Mayor Matthew Ryan of Binghamton, New York, to “give us a sense of the healing process in Binghamton tonight,” the mayor’s reply was typical. “Already churches around our city are having vigils. Tomorrow we’re going to plan a big vigil for our city. This is a city that really comes together in time of crisis.”35
Determinedly clutched throughout this ritual is the studied premise that the latest “gun rampage” is an aberration, something akin to the sudden appearance of a spaceship that spews death randomly for ten or fifteen minutes, and then just as suddenly disappears. But the cold fact is that mass shootings can no longer accurately be called aberrations in the United States. They are here, now, and everywhere—in our homes,36 our schools,37 our churches,38 our places of work,39 our shopping malls,40 and even our military bases.41
This ritual of studied avoidance of this product of the gun industry and the so-called “gun culture” inspired the writer Dahlia Lithwick to pen this scathing paragraph for Slate magazine:
It says so much about this country that we respond to Bernard Madoff with outrage and to mass shootings with teddy bears and candles. Frustrated columns are written and written and written and written. But we collectively refuse to connect one killing spree to the next or to accept that these events aren’t random; like falling meteors from the sky. These events are the outgrowth of legal and policy choices we make every single day and the choices we avoid making year after year. We’re willing to roll the dice with our children and our neighbors—because we want to think it only happens to other people’s children and other people’s neighbors—on the principle that guns have nothing to do with gun deaths. The American debate about gun regulation begins and ends with a tacit agreement that the occasional massacre is the price we pay for freedom. No wonder teddy bears and candles are the only national gun policy we have.42
Unfortunately, even if mass shootings were aberrations, even if they suddenly stopped happening entirely, the toll of ordinary Americans killed and injured by guns every single day would remain staggering, a bloodletting inconceivable in any other developed country in the world. Firearms are the second leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States and are the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages fifteen to twenty-four. Since 1960, more than 1.3 million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides, and unintentional injuries.43
More than 90 percent of American households own a car.44 Fewer than a third of American households contain a gun.45 Yet as motor vehicle-related deaths have gone down, firearm deaths have not. Gun fatalities exceeded motor vehicle fatalities in ten states in 2009.46 And, as is explained in more detail in chapter 9, the nationwide trends of these two forms of death are on a track to intersect.
This gory march of our daily gun dead, however, is virtually invisible. It is invisible because it is grossly underreported in the news media, suppressed and distorted by the gun lobby, and poorly documented by the federal government and most state governments. The news media glide around the elephant-in-the-room of guns as the common denominator of mass shootings. But they flat-out ignore tens of thousands of other, more “routine” gun deaths and injuries every year in the shooting gallery that America has become.
As part of the research for this book, the author tracked shootings in the United States that were reported in the news media for the week of Monday, August 1, through Sunday, August 7, 2011. Two sources of comprehensive data were used: a Google alert for news stories that mentioned “shootings,” and a similar alert through the commercial database Nexis.com. Several supplemental searches were made to track down shootings that were mentioned in stories originally captured, and to update the shootings that were found. The result was a list of fifty-two shooting incidents reported during that week. Appendix A contains a description of each of these shootings and the sources from which they were obtained. Figure 2 summarizes by category the seventy gun deaths and twenty-two nonfatal gun injuries that were reported in news media during this period.
This survey is by no means a complete inventory of shootings in the United States during the week in question. On the contrary, quite clearly it is not complete. It is offered only as a good-faith search effort, as exhaustive as possible, to document what Americans could have seen or heard about gun death and injury in the news media during that week. Many of these incidents were reported only in local media, so even the most assiduous newshound in any given place would not in the ordinary course of events have seen or heard about all of the shootings listed in appendix A.
That being said, how does this list compare to comprehensive national data collected by public health authorities documenting the level of gun violence in America? Figure 3 shows the number of gun deaths, gun injuries, and total people shot for the first nine years of the current century in the United States. (These are the latest years for which comprehensive national data on gun deaths and injuries was available at time of analysis. There is no realtime database of gun death and injury.)
Figure 2. Summary of Deaths and Injuries in Shooting Incidents in the United States, August 1–7, 2011
See appendix A for sources.
What emerges from this data is that the number of human beings killed and injured by guns in the United States during an average week is much greater than the number that an extraordinarily curious person could possibly find by diligently combing the news media. A total of 272,590 people were killed by guns between 2000 and 2008 inclusive. This is an average of 30,288 a year, for an average of 582 gun deaths a week in the United States. This is more than eight times the number of deaths that the survey found to have been reported in the news media during the first week of August 2011. An estimated total of 617,488 were injured by guns in the nine years but did not die, for an average of 1,319 gun injuries per week. This is just shy of sixty times as many gun injuries as were reported in the media during the week in question.
Clearly Americans live in a bubble, an information vacuum, unwittingly ignorant of the reality of the carnage howling around them. This virtual invisibility of firearms death and injury goes a long way toward explaining why Americans appear to be so complacent about gun violence. It sheds light on why the gun lobby can thumb its nose at gun violence, twist gun violence to its own ends by mischaracterizing its nature, and fob off folksy pabulum about guns on both the public and uninformed policy makers. It helps explain why politicians get away with avoiding the perceived “third rail” of gun control at the same time that their constituents are dying.
Figure 3. Gun Deaths, Injuries, and Total Shot in the United States, 2000–2008
Data on gun deaths and injuries is from the WISQARS database of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, both of whom have devoted much of their professional lives to studying gun violence, have zeroed in on the fault line of fact-free policy making—the history of public health shows that people do indeed change their minds and move away from culturally taught beliefs when they learn key facts. Cook and Ludwig have explained that “we know that people’s attitudes and behaviors about smoking and unprotected sex have changed dramatically over time. The changes have occurred, in part, in response to a growing body of epidemiological research about the health risks associated with each of these activities.”47
The history of public health abounds with similar examples of factual investigations and resulting fact-based policies saving millions of human lives, flying in the face of what everybody thought they knew. In 1900, the Washington Post dismissed the idea that mosquitoes carried yellow fever—one of the most dreaded diseases of the era—as “silly and nonsensical rigmarole.”48 In 1900, the “culturally grounded understanding” of even the educated elite, including many in the medical professions, was that yellow fever was caused by dirt and filth. “I’m your friend, Gorgas, and I’m trying to set you right,” Major General George W. Davis, governor of the Panama Canal Zone, advised Dr. William C. Gorgas, the surgeon general of the army whose eventually successful campaigns to control mosquitoes in Florida, Cuba, and Panama dramatically reduced malaria and yellow fever infections. “On the mosquito you are simply wild. All who agree with you are wild. Get the idea out of your head. Yellow fever, as we all know, is caused by filth.”49
The news vacuum about the facts of gun death and injury is a boon for the gun lobby. The absence of facts is precisely what makes it possible for many patently foolish perspectives on guns and gun control to survive in the United States. Among these perspectives, the most insidious is the one relentlessly promoted by the gun lobby, which not only deliberately exploits ignorance about the nature and extent of gun violence in America but also works vigorously to keep the facts about it sealed from view. At the other end of the spectrum, some “commonsense” solutions advanced by well-meaning advocates rest on the sands of an equal absence of relevant facts. The gun lobby, its facilitators, and their misguided “commonsense” ideas will be examined in detail in later chapters, but a brief overview of the gun lobby’s propagandistic approach here may help put the problem of understanding gun violence in perspective.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) is “the trade association for the firearms industry.” It sponsors the annual industry trade event, the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show, popularly known as the SHOT Show. NSSF defines its mission as “to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports.”50 Blending a down-home style with corporate PR sensibilities, NSSF works hard at making guns seem a lot like bowling balls—harmless objects the whole family can enjoy in an atmosphere of glowing happy faces. In fact, the NSSF has made the claim that hunting is safer than bowling, a laughable proposition easily eviscerated:
The NSSF makes no effort to evaluate the lethality or seriousness of different types of injuries in each activity it claims is less safe than hunting with firearms. A bullet to the chest and a sprained ankle are both counted as one injury in their statistics, and that’s the basis of their claim that hunting with guns is safer than all but the least strenuous activities. According to a 2004 Good Morning America report, the International Hunter Education Association (IHEA) estimated that hunters were accidentally shooting more than 1,000 people a year in the United States and Canada.51
Gun deaths and debilitating lifelong injuries simply don’t exist in NSSF’s glossy world, where assault rifles designed for war are transmogrified into “modern sporting rifles,”52 poisonous environment-degrading lead ammunition becomes harmless “traditional ammunition,”53 and shooting ranges are family-values venues—places where terrorists,54 mass shooters, and assassins55 never hone their shooting skills, but frolicking sport shooters have a “memorable and fun experience.”56
When NSSF talks about guns killing and injuring people, it sticks to a script promoting the rosy view that “the firearms accident rate among all groups has dropped more than 60 percent during the last twenty-five years to a century-long low, with such accidents now comprising less than 1 percent of all fatal accidents nationwide.”57 But as Figure 4 graphically demonstrates about gun deaths in America, accidents are not the problem. Unintentional shootings have always comprised a tiny part of gun death and injury. The problem is people deliberately shooting other people and themselves.
Figure 4. Gun Fatalities in the United States, 1981–2010
The NRA—the gun industry’s political front—takes a harder line. Its style combines a vehement “patriotic” meanness with a ruthless willingness to say or do anything to defeat even the most modest proposal to regulate guns. According to a well-informed former insider, this is largely cynical play-acting to whip up gun owners and raise funds by “the senior leadership and consultants of the NRA [who] have morphed the organization into this grand fundraising operation for the power and glory primarily of themselves.”58 The NRA’s chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, reportedly “is making around a million dollars a year.”59 The NRA’s specialty is “argument by assertion,” an endless emission of statements it cannot prove and quite likely knows are false. LaPierre is often the orifice through which these assertions are vented. For example, the St. Petersburg Times in its PolitiFact fact-checking series found to be false LaPierre’s assertion at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011 that “across the board, violent crime in jurisdictions that recognize the Right to Carry is lower than in areas that prevent it.”60
One of the more spectacular examples of LaPierre’s assertions is his claim that the Obama administration has a “secret plan” to “destroy the Second Amendment by 2016.” In an article published in January 2012 in the Web edition of America’s 1st Freedom—which the NRA calls its “pure news magazine”—LaPierre lets gun enthusiasts in on the conspiracy. Before getting into the thoroughly undocumented details, LaPierre makes a blatant fund-raising pitch by telling his readers that the best way that they can fight the evil Obama plan “is by carrying your new 2012 membership card . . . in your wallet as a symbol of your commitment—and by renewing or upgrading your NRA membership or making a contribution to defending freedom today.” LaPierre then pulls out the stops on the NRA propaganda organ:
Think about it: Before moving into the White House, Barack Obama spent his entire career proudly, publicly advancing the most radical anti-gun positions you can imagine. . . . So what happened after they won the White House? Did Obama, Biden and the anti-gun extremists who soon filled the West Wing suddenly completely reverse their positions? No! In an act of pure political calculation, they plotted to keep their gun-ban objectives concealed.61
Get it? By not doing what the NRA spent millions of dollars during the 2008 campaign promising they would do if they won the election,62 the Machiavellian geniuses in the Obama White House set up the American pro-gun voter for a cunning takedown of the Constitution in a second administration.
LaPierre cynically ignores the role of the NRA itself in suppressing any action on gun control. “With annual revenue of about $250 million,” according to the Washington Post, “the group has for four decades been the strongest force shaping the nation’s gun laws.”63 Had he cared to do so, LaPierre might have gotten a reality check from his co-worker, Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist. Cox bragged in an NRA political report—published both online and in print in parallel with LaPierre’s screed—that, thanks to a “great deal of effort” by the NRA, “the most recent spending bill to pass the Congress and be signed by the president contained a dozen policy victories for gun owners.”64
The NRA never lets the facts get in the way of its fund-raising stories. It ignores the truth of gun violence in America, spinning gun death and injury as a problem of criminal control, not gun control. It frames gun death and injury as the result of (too often coddled) rampaging violent criminals and not ordinary people owning guns. “When it comes to violent crime, NRA’s 4 million members and America’s 90 million gun owners stand for what works,” LaPierre recently wrote, conveniently inflating his voice to speak for every gun owner in America. “Strong interdiction, swift arrest, tough prosecution and certain incarceration to remove violent criminals from our society.”65 If ever there were occasion to recall the injunction of the biblical metaphor about focusing on a speck in another’s eye while ignoring the beam in one’s own, it may be found in the NRA’s and the NSSF’s hypocritical propaganda about gun death and injury66
But, as John Adams wrote, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”67 And no matter what may be the greedy passions and self-interested wishes of the gun industry and its highly paid mouthpieces, one stubborn, bloody fact looms above all of their false assertions, impossible to avoid or erase: the United States stands alone in its high level of gun violence, a shocking contrast to other developed nations.
Two detailed cross-national comparisons of firearms deaths among comparable nations of the world—published in 1998 and 2011—arrived at similar conclusions. The 1998 study found that “the US is unique in several aspects. It has the highest overall firearm mortality rate, a high proportion of homicides that are the result of a firearm injury, and the highest proportion of suicides that are the result of a firearm injury.”68 The 2011 study reported that “the United States has a large relative firearm problem; firearm death rates in the US are more than seven times higher than they are in the other high-income countries. Firearm homicide rates are 19 times higher in the US compared with the other 22 countries in this analysis, firearm suicide rates, and unintentional firearm death rates are over five times higher. Of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the United States.”69 This gun carnage is so, even though “our rates of crime and nonlethal violence are not exceptional.”70 In sum, a mugging or argument that goes wrong in Hamburg ends up with a few bruises. In Baltimore or a Denver suburb, it may likely end up with someone being shot.
As a consequence of all this, the United States also stands far and away above other developed nations in its homicide rate, as illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5. World Homicide Rates
How can this be? A closer look at the week of gun violence documented in figure 2 and appendix A provides some powerful clues. The first six deaths—in fact, the only gun deaths reported on the first two days—were suicides and murder-suicides.
On Monday, August 1, 2011, in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a U.S. Army sergeant was found dead in his quarters of a gunshot wound. Base officials would not say whether he committed suicide. However, he had been arrested and escorted back to his quarters by military police the same day for bringing his personal handgun to the base’s headquarters.71
The following day, Tuesday, August 2, in Lee, New Hampshire, Andrew Hubbard, twenty-seven, killed himself with a shotgun after being involved in a car crash. Neither driver was seriously injured in the head-on collision, but Hubbard grabbed a shotgun out of the back seat of his car, then fatally shot himself behind the premises of a nearby business.72 In Hillsboro, Wisconsin, Joseph C. Satterlee, fifty-five, rammed his wife’s car on a street with his own vehicle, climbed into her car, and shot her to death with his .357 Magnum revolver. He then shot himself to death. Satterlee fired a total of eight rounds from his six-shot revolver, pausing to reload it once. His wife, Anita K. Satterlee, had filed for divorce on June 20, 2011.73 And in Kensington, Maryland, a quiet, upscale suburb of Washington, D.C., police officers found the bodies of Margaret F. Jensvold, fifty-four, and her son Ben Barnhard, thirteen, in their residence. Investigators concluded that Jensvold, a psychiatrist, had shot her son to death and then killed herself. The son had a number of special needs, and Jensvold was reportedly distressed that the local public school system would not pay for his attendance at a private school.74
These deaths aptly illustrate a fact that most Americans are surprised to learn. Most gun deaths are not homicides, but preventable suicides. Even in the case of homicide, the most common scenario is not—as the NRA prefers to imagine—a rampaging criminal, but an argument between two people who know each other.75
In this context, the human cost of the gun lobby’s meddling in public policy becomes clear. For example, as is explained in the introduction, the NRA convinced Congress to forbid the armed services from collecting any information about personally owned guns among members of the military and its civilian employees. This law has had tragic yet entirely foreseeable effects. Between 2001 and 2008, 1,531 active-duty members of the military died from self-inflicted wounds.76 (This number does not include suicides among former members of the military, which are also known to be numerous.) The military has not escaped the infection of suicide that accompanies the widespread availability of guns. But the new law has cut off an important avenue of suicide prevention among both active-duty and former military personnel.77
In the civilian context, “the empirical evidence linking suicide risk in the United States to the presence of firearms in the home is compelling.”78 The link is no less compelling among the military, serving and former alike. According to Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, who recently retired as a high-ranking army psychiatrist directly involved in the issue, “approximately 70 percent of Army and Pentagon suicides are by guns.”79 According to a study released in October 2011—ominously titled Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide—48 percent of military suicides in 2010 were accomplished with privately owned weapons.80 In spite of this, Dr. Ritchie noted, although the army is “committed to lowering the rate of suicide . . . there’s a curious third rail that is seldom publicly discussed: the risks of suicide by firearm.” She also notes that Army Post Exchanges—“basically government-owned Walmarts on major posts”—are increasingly selling guns and asks whether this is “sending the troops the right message.”81
The media’s reporting vacuum and the gun lobby’s distortions have obscured another fact: the number of shootings in the United States is going up, not down.
The number of Americans killed by guns has remained fairly constant in the nine years for which complete data is available in the twenty-first century82 But the common focus on gun deaths as a marker to illustrate America’s gun problem obscures an alarming trend. The number of persons who suffer nonfatal gunshot injuries—that is, who are shot but do not die—has risen over the same period. As graphically demonstrated by figure 6, this means that more people are being shot by guns every year in the United States. In other words, America’s gun problem is getting worse, not better. More guns means more shootings.
Figure 6. Total Shootings Rising in the United States
Figure 6 shows that between 2000 and 2008 a total of 617,488 people suffered nonfatal gunshot injuries in the United States. This averages about 68,610 persons per year. In 2008, however—a year in which gun deaths totaled 31,593, only slightly above the period’s average—another 78,622 were shot but did not die, a figure markedly above the period’s average. Most striking, the total number of people shot in 2008 totaled 110,215—the highest total recorded during the nine-year period.83
These civilian deaths and injuries may be put into further perspective by comparing them to the experience of the U.S. armed services during the same period. The total of U.S. active-duty military deaths, from all causes, in the years 2001 through 2008 was 12,390.84 The total deaths caused by hostile action during the same eight years was 3,811, while the number of deaths from self-inflicted wounds among active duty military personnel was 1,531.85
Why have gun deaths remained fairly constant even though the total number of people shot is increasing? The answer is that improved emergency services and better medical care are saving lives that would otherwise be lost to guns.
The authors of a landmark study in 2002 on the relationship between murder and medicine concluded that advances in emergency services—including the 911 system and establishment of trauma centers—as well as better surgical techniques have suppressed the homicide rate. They concluded that “without these developments in medical technology there would have been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually the past 5 years instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000.”86
That finding is confirmed by anecdotal observations from law enforcement officials and the medical community. “It would be fair to say gunshot wound victims, if they suffered the same injury 25 years earlier, their chances of survival would be much less,” Major Pat Welsh of the Dayton, Ohio, police said in April 2011. “It’s a credit to the advances in medical technology and procedures.”87 In Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Loring Rue, chief of trauma care at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Trauma Center, said in commenting on the fact that while the number of violent crimes was increasing in Birmingham, the number of resulting deaths was falling, “I am convinced that not just our hospital, but all those who provide trauma care in Birmingham, make a distinct contribution to keeping the murder rate lower.”88
The bad news is that even nonfatal gunshot wounds often leave victims chronically damaged. “There have definitely been improvements in trauma care, and a remarkable job is being done in getting victims through life-threatening injuries, but we are still being left with injuries that drastically alter lives,” according to Dr. Selwyn Rogers, director of a trauma center in Boston.89
The January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was gravely injured, is a well-known, if not singular, example. Fifty percent of all trauma deaths are secondary to traumatic brain injury such as Representative Giffords suffered, and gunshot wounds to the head caused 35 percent of these.90 Gunshot wounds also account for about 15 percent of all spinal cord injuries in the United States.91
One question that remains unanswered is whether advances in care will outpace advances in gun lethality as the gun industry continues to militarize the civilian market with high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, and high-caliber sniper rifles.92 “Many of the victims now have multiple gunshot wounds,” then District of Columbia police chief Charles H. Ramsey observed in 2003. “The criminals also use high-caliber, high-powered weapons.”93 As the authors of the 2002 study trenchantly observed, “At some point in contesting the outcome of criminal assault to the body, weaponry may yet trump medicine.”94