The Mentality of the Gun in America
By an Australian writer who’s lived in four states. An appeal to average gun owners, for so many of whom family comes first.
With every Nashville, Uvalde, or Parkland, I think of the families of the 20 six-and-seven-year-old children and 6 staff killed in Sandy Hook. The 19 children killed in Uvalde were aged nine to eleven. I know what it’s like to unexpectedly lose someone you cherish. My wife Briggs died of medical errors just as we were turning around her cancer. Birthdays, anniversaries of deaths, and year-ends become times to think of decades lost.
Well before Sandy Hook, Briggs and I moved out to L.A. on the back of an Off-Broadway play of ours. It was about a journalist and a suffragette poet going up against a corrupt presidential aspirant in 1917. It was set in New York on the eve of America entering World War One, and guns had figured in prominently.
I directed and played the journalist. One night as the antagonist entered in the final scene, a woman called out, “Shoot him!” I was faced upstage, already ‘dead’. I remember my eyes popping open, thinking I might need to do something. When the actress playing the suffragette then did shoot, as in every performance, the woman called, “Thank you.”
It was funny but it was disturbing, too, that her vicarious access to the gun, more real for her in that moment than in any movie, could bring that out in her. It also probably wouldn’t have happened in, say, London, where I’ve lived twice.
We’d written what we called a ‘pacifist actioner’ before leaving New York, and a management company we’d signed with made a $20-million offer to an A-list star after his agent read it and said to get an offer made.
What happened next was a Hollywood story unto itself but as things had looked good we began writing a thriller about a San Francisco columnist who ends up becoming a front-page story in his own paper. We were trying to take the debate on guns to a new level. After one of our managers read it, he had a dismayed look on his face as he told us it was “powerful” but there would be no “appetite” for the subject matter at the studios. A line in it, said in a heated argument between two seasoned, opposite-minded detectives, was, “It’s the mentality of the gun we can’t handle. It’s cultural.”
The “we” was poetic license but as a generalization it’s also cultural for at least twenty to thirty other countries. Worldwide estimates vary considerably but the U.S. surprisingly ranks within the range of 20th to 32nd in gun deaths per capita. America’s size in and of itself combined with that rate per 100,000 people has put it into the top three countries for total gun deaths but the numbers have worsened dramatically over the past decade. According to the Gun Violence Archive, deaths and injuries rose from 12,347 and 21,862 in 2014 to 44,348 and 38,595 in 2022.
America also has by far the world’s highest number of suicides by firearm for women as well as men. A study of handguns and suicide in California published in 2020 noted, “Suicide attempts are often impulsive acts, driven by transient life crises. Most attempts are not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide.”
Drug overdose, the most widely used method, has a fatality rate of 3-5 percent. For attempts with a firearm, it’s around 85 percent.
A few weeks ago, I came across this tweet: “My husband took his life with a gun. He was 22. Those left behind-me (20) & our son (1) -suffer”.
When U.S. veterans and active-duty service members commit suicide it’s most often with a gun. A Veterans Affairs report in 2019 found that there were around 6,000 veteran suicides every year from 2005 to 2017. Prior to 2006, veterans were less likely to commit suicide than adult civilians. After 2001, the rate began steadily increasing to the point that by 2014 veterans were 22 percent more likely to die by suicide.
Briggs and I lived in Japan for 18 months. The yakuza aside (or bōryokudan, “violent groups,” as the police prefer to call them), we were surprised to find that cops in Tokyo mostly gave directions, they deal with so little crime. We’d be out late at night and I never had the feeling of needing to look over my shoulder. Its population is over a third the size of America’s but the process for getting and maintaining a gun permit is rigorous, including a written exam, a shooting-range test, mental-health and drug tests, comprehensive, personalized background checks, and more. There are usually no more than 10 firearm-related deaths there per year. The gun used in the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe on July 8, 2022 was hand-made. As a result, the police are trained more in dealing with knives and self-defense techniques than pulling a gun.
Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka, who lives in the Los Angeles area, wrote in 2022, “I used to love going to the movies, now on the rare occasion I do go I always feel my heart clench and my palms become sweaty every time I see a person enter the theater while the movie is ongoing.” She also wrote that she was moved to tears after reading “about how bulletproof backpacks are selling more and more.”
According to one analysis of murder victims in the U.S. in 2022, “knives or cutting instruments” were used in 1,630 of the homicides. That prevalence is often used to counter the focus on deaths-by-firearm but in the figures they gave from “participating law enforcement agencies” 7,936 victims were killed with handguns and 5,704 with “firearms, type not stated.”
Personally, I’ve had a knife pulled on me twice, one from three or so feet away by the leader of five gang members in New Orleans, and the other in Amsterdam. I’ve also had two AK-47s aimed in my direction from six feet away with their safety catches off on a tarmac in a remote hotspot in Pakistan. The manager of the airport and I were engaged in an escalating disagreement that shut down all flights after the tower staff took my side. In retrospect, given I wasn’t authorized to be there, it was pure luck that one of the guards didn’t have a nervous trigger finger or the manager didn’t say to shoot. He was wound up enough. A few minutes later, in the terminal, he tried to throw a punch at me.
(In Amsterdam, one of two guys in a car got out with a knife. I was crossing the road to fill a 5-gallon metal jerry can with water. When I raised it and said, “Come on,” he got back in the car. If he’d had a gun, and again, he was mad enough to act on impulse, I might not be writing this article. In America in 2022, there were 141 road-rage shooting deaths and 413 injuries; an average of someone shot every 16 hours.)
Thirty-five people including four girls aged 3 to 17 were killed in Tasmania’s Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Within 12 days, acting on recommendations made by the Australasian Police Ministers’ Council, the National Firearms Agreement between the federal and state governments was passed.
Provisions included a national registration system, a 28-day waiting period, a safety course, locked storage of firearms, and of ammunition in a separate location, gun sales restricted to licensed dealers only, a ban on the importation, ownership, sale, resale, transfer, possession, manufacture or use of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns, a reason for owning a gun other than self-defense, and a permit for each firearm, to be renewed every five years, and revocable due to mental-health or concerning behavior.
Some of those and other provisions have since been relaxed in various states, with no state fully compliant, and the perpetrator of the massacre had in fact managed to buy his guns without a license. He said he told the local dealer he had the cash on him and the dealer said, “That’s all right.” When asked if he blamed him, he said, “I got one out of the paper, don’t forget. So you can blame the [newspaper] for the advertising. If they don’t advertise ’em, it wouldn’t have happened.”
The biggest change may have been in the national mindset. Australia now has more firearms than before the Port Arthur massacre but data points to them being mostly in the hands of seasoned owners/collectors rather than a new generation of owners. Allowing that in two buy-back programs, followed periodically by uncompensated amnesties, many of the guns were inherited, out-of-use, or spares — but which still means guns being less widespread to be accessed in anger or for suicide, lead to accidents, be potentially stolen, or used in a mass shooting — the number of households with at least one gun has declined by 75 percent.
This is from an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2018: “13 mass shootings (homicides in which at least 5 persons died, not including the perpetrator) took place in the 18 years preceding and including the Port Arthur massacre; none has occurred in the 22 years since.”
That’s even as Australia’s population has grown by over a third. A poll in 2018 found 62 percent of Australians think the laws are “about right,” 25 percent “too weak,” and only 7 percent “too strict.” Outside of crime families, gun-related incidents in major cities are so generally uncommon that illegal firearms make the news. On July 7, 2022 three men in the Sydney area were arrested, allegedly part of a syndicate supplying them to criminal networks. Pre-pandemic, Australia’s total number of deaths by firearm in 2019 was 229. 180 of those were suicides.
A new era in guns in America won’t come from more breaking news of “the worst mass shooting since,” and stringent state laws, even though now favored by a majority of voters, can be undermined by weaker laws in surrounding states. The extent of current ownership makes school shootings in particular almost insurmountable, when over 80 percent of shooters use firearms owned by family members.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence recently introduced one new approach, as reported in Variety, a pledge to “model responsible gun ownership” and “show characters locking their guns safely and making them inaccessible to children.” It’s been signed by 200 writers, producers, and directors. It’s a positive step but can only go so far.
In the Portland, Oregon area in 2014, a 15-year-old boy broke into his brother’s locked, hard gun case containing a “military-style rifle” and a locked room in which his father’s semi-automatic pistol was stored. He had nine loaded magazines with him when he killed a 14-year-old student at his school, grazed a PE teacher in the hip, exchanged gunfire with officers, then fled before killing himself. He’d shown no signs of being a risk.
A Washington Post investigation published on October 10, 2023 reported that in the last school year 1,150 guns were discovered in “bookbags, lockers, trash cans, bathrooms, cars, pockets, purses, bulging behind waistbands and hidden above bathroom ceiling tiles.” Undisclosed seizures resulting from a survey of 51 of the largest school systems pointed to the actual number being over twice that. Beyond those that had been un- or accessibly secured in the students’ homes, “a gun stolen in Las Vegas found its way into the hands of a 16-year-old at a Lawrence, Mass. high school; another 16-year-old brought a gun stolen in Georgia to his Manchester, Conn. high school; in Columbus, Ohio, a high-schooler showed up with a gun stolen in Martin County, Fla.; and in Nashville, a 17-year-old came to school with two loaded pistols in his backpack, one of them stolen out of Madison, Ala.”
In 2023 there were “at least 131 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 41 deaths and 90 injuries nationally.”
In another of so many instances of children/teens being able to access guns, two 16-year-olds broke into a safe, but one of the most bizarre happened in central Florida. In 2021 a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy ran away from a group home. After evading police for hours, they broke into a house while the owner was out at a supermarket. The girl emerged brandishing a pump shotgun they’d found inside, threatening to kill a sergeant. The boy later told investigators she’d said, “I’m gonna roll this down like GTA,” referring to the video game Grand Theft Auto. He meanwhile allegedly shot at deputies with a handgun and an AK-47 they’d also found in the house.
In the larger perspective of how safety measures have come to be needed, Brad Pitt, a gun owner, said in an interview in 2012, “It’s in our DNA. It’s very strange but I feel better having a gun.” Acknowledging the sincerity behind that for a lot of owners, perhaps more to the point is that he was raised around guns in Missouri, inheriting his grandfather’s shotgun when he was in kindergarten, and firing a handgun by the time he was 8.
Sixty-seven percent of gun owners say they grew up in a gun-owning household. Would the mindset of so many people with grievances resorting to guns come without their prevalence in America? The assailant who killed John Lennon in 1980 was originally from Texas, where the gun-ownership rate is 35.5%, also lived in Georgia, with 37.7%, and Arkansas, with 51.8%.
In 2007 Yoko Ono revealed that she’d just asked Lennon, “Shall we go and have dinner before we go home?” He answered, “No, let’s go home because I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep.” Their son Sean was five at the time.
In 2018, next to Central Park, Paul McCartney participated in one of the Parkland survivors-led March for Our Lives events. When asked why, he said, “One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here.” In 2020 Ono tweeted, “After 40 years, Sean, Julian and I still miss him.” It was above a photo of a pair of spectacles, the Manhattan skyline outside. One lens was cracked and bloodstained, and the text read: “Over 1,436,000 people have been killed by guns in the U.S.A. since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980.”
Lennon’s killer bought the gun he used just six weeks earlier in Honolulu, where he’d been a security guard and maintenance worker at an apartment complex. Pointing up the limits of restrictions, Hawaii has strict gun laws and the second-lowest ownership rate of 9.1%. He had a permit and no record, and the dealer would have had no reason to refuse the sale; although, dealers do have the discretion to deny someone a gun even after passing a background check if they doubt the buyer’s motive.
After Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High shooting in February 2018, the dealer who sold the shooter the Smith & Wesson M&P15 he used testified that he’d asked him, “What are you going to do with the rifle?” The reply he got was, “I go shooting with my friends on the weekends. I just want my own stuff.” A year later, at 19, he killed 14 students aged fourteen to eighteen and 3 teachers, who died trying to protect students.
The FBI had received a tip 6 weeks earlier about his “gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting,” but it wasn’t acted on. The Florida Legislature subsequently raised the minimum age for buying long guns from 18 to 21. It had already been 21 for handguns.
In May 2023, a dealer in a city north of Atlanta, deeply moved by the Nashville Covenant School shooting in March, went a step further. He told a local broadcast journalist that he was closing his shop because “for the last couple of months, you just see kids, over and over again, getting shot.” He was no longer willing to sell “even to someone who will never commit a crime,” knowing the guns could end up in the wrong hands and potentially be used on his own children.
On April 28, 2023 a 38-year-old man in Greater Houston’s Cleveland area shot and killed three women, two men, and a 9-year-old boy, all “believed to be from Honduras.” He was allegedly intoxicated and firing an AR-15-style rifle in his yard. The murders happened after he was asked to shoot on the other side of the property because a baby was sleeping. Would it have happened without the mix of alcohol and acceptance of guns? Another neighbor said, “Every weekend you hear gunshots. People shoot in their backyards after they drink. Men take out guns at house parties and shoot the ground.”
Ten months earlier, the shooter’s wife had attempted to file a protective order against him, saying he’d assaulted her, threatening to kill her, and that she had sustained a broken nose, broken rib, skull fracture, and a black eye. The local sheriff said deputies had also previously spoken with him about shooting in his yard. According to CNN, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement source later stated that he was a Mexican national and had entered the U.S. illegally and has been deported at least four times. How was he able to buy the rifle and ammunition? If he could, who can’t?
With regard to crime being deterred when more law-abiding citizens carry guns, 26 states now have ‘permitless’ right-to-carry laws. The director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center says there’s been no direct cause-and-effect reduction in the crime rate: “What guns do is make hostile interactions — robberies, assaults — much more deadly.” He says there’s some evidence that having a gun reduces property loss “but the evidence is equally compelling” for “having another weapon, such as mace or a baseball bat.” He added that a commonly cited statistic, 2.5 million people using guns each year to defend themselves or their property, “is based on faulty analysis from a 1990s study. A more reliable source of information, the National Crime Victimization Survey, pegs the number of people who use guns in this manner at roughly 100,000.”
When guns are bought for protection, will owners actually be able to go through with using them, whereas the sight of a gun may push a burglar to use his. Petty criminals, especially, get scared and nervous too.
(As do police, for that matter. Beyond the danger of guns in the line of duty, they can be held accountable for the actions of other officers. In Dallas in 2016, five officers were killed for nothing more than being in uniform. One was a newlywed, another the father of a 2-year-old daughter. Ten days later, three more officers were ambushed and killed in Baton Rouge. A deputy who had multiple complications from his injuries died 6 years later. Not to in any way justify the emphasis on force currently taught in many academies, including aggressive tackling and handcuffing that can provoke otherwise-manageable suspects, but from 2010–20 an average of 53 officers a year were killed. That rose to 64 in 2022. Of those, “11 were ambushed, 10 were attempting to make an arrest, nine were handling domestic disputes, eight were investigating suspicious circumstances or people, six were killed making traffic stops, and five were killed handling disturbance calls.”
With all the divisiveness over who kills whom and why, including resisting arrest and possible bias, the complexities of shootings by officers have defied consensus in analyses by experts in various fields, but of those whom officers killed in 2019 355 were White, 122 Black, 23 Asian, and 20 Indigenous. Among the U.S. populace in general, an FBI breakdown for 2019 recorded that of the offenders in 3,299 White homicides, 2,594 were White and 566 Black. By ethnicity, 739 were Hispanic or Latino. Of offenders in 2,906 Black homicides. 2,574 were Black, 246 White, and by ethnicity 95 Hispanic or Latino.)
An often-cited sample analysis of home invasions from the 1990s, excluding incidents involving cohabitants and sexual assaults, concluded that a minority result in injury. They added, “Although firearms are often kept in the home for protection, they are rarely used for this purpose.” Another analysis of three cities in particular found that by comparison with the number of times a gun was used in self-defense or a legally justifiable shooting there were 4 unintentional shootings, 7 assaults or homicides within households, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.
For anyone living in a particularly troubled area or current situation in which they wouldn’t feel safe without a gun at hand, I touch on a possible less-lethal alternative, and link a video, further down. For generations to come, less firearms in circulation in America would mean less need to own a gun for self-protection. In incidents that recently drew national media coverage, involving victims ringing the wrong doorbell and being in the wrong driveway, two home owners who used deadly force were arrested and charged, one with first-degree assault, the other with murder.
Robberies and violent crimes including homicides and rape are also regularly committed with stolen guns. According to FBI data, 1.2 million guns were stolen in the four years from 2012–15. According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, more than 1 million were reported stolen between 2017 and 2021. One of the two handguns used in the Super Bowl parade shooting in Kansas City in February, 2024 had been reported stolen. As for how many aren’t reported beyond that 1-million figure, as of December 2023 only fifteen states and some cities have enacted mandatory reporting laws.
The Super Bowl parade shooting brought to mind an incident in October exemplifying how widely, how commonly guns are left unsecured. At a football practice in Florida, an 11-year-old boy was chased by two 13-year-olds after an argument over a bag of chips. He reportedly got his mother’s gun from an unlocked box in her car and fired, hitting one of the boys in the back, the same bullet wounding the other in the arm.
As to safety measures by law ever being able to make guns manageable in a country of America’s size and complexity, gun theft significantly includes home burglaries and from owners’ vehicles. On May 9, 2024 the Associated Press reported that the rate of guns stolen from cars has tripled over the past decade, making them the largest source of stolen guns. In 2020, an estimated 40,000 were stolen from cars; in 2022, almost 60,000, most of them from cars parked in driveways or outside people’s homes.
Things are potentially headed in an even worse direction with the first vending machines for ammunition now installed in supermarkets in Texas and Alabama. More are due in Colorado and Oklahoma, and there are plans for California, Florida, and Hawaii.
That’s not to say gun control doesn’t matter, when, for example, 6 out of every 7 guns used in crime in New York State have been traced to states with less-restrictive gun laws; and arrested suspects are increasingly carrying “ghost guns,” weapons with no serial numbers assembled from components sold online without background checks. A study by the San Diego Association of Governments saw a 400 percent increase in ghost guns from 2019 to 2021. “The San Diego Police Department, which created a Ghost Gun Apprehension Team in 2021, reported that around one-quarter of guns seized during its investigations that year were ghost guns.” Between February and May of 2023, “90 separate law enforcement operations were conducted,” leading to the seizure of “165 firearms — including 82 ghost guns — and the prosecution of nearly three dozen people.”
One glimmer of hope is that focused intervention/outreach has shown promise in helping to transform America’s most-plagued cities. In Oakland, California, 0.3% of residents have been found to be involved in 60% of the city’s murders; in New Orleans, 1% in more than 50% of fatal incidents; and over a 6-year period in Chicago, “70% of non-fatal shootings and 46% of gun homicides happened within a sprawling social network that included just 6%” of the total populace.
In 2011, during a Congress on Your Corner event with constituents, former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head by an assailant using a semi-automatic pistol with a 33-round magazine. Six people died including a 9-year-old girl, and twelve others were wounded. In 2013, following Sandy Hook, Giffords co-founded an organization to prevent gun violence with her husband Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who’s now a senator. Among the programs it promotes is violence intervention, in which “credible” residents work with law enforcement and/or local government agencies to engage with groups or individuals to interrupt the cycle of violence. That can include street outreach, conflict mediation, or a “teachable moment” when a wounded gang member is hospitalized.
It’s a fairly straightforward equation that if people felt safer, many would feel less need to own a gun. In a Gallup survey in 2019 almost two thirds of respondents said they own a gun for personal safety/protection. Hunting was a strong second, a 40 percent overlap. With the pervasiveness of guns resulting from that combination, around 4.5 million women have been threatened with a gun and nearly 1 million “shot or shot at by an intimate partner.” A “woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.” Rarely discussed is that men over 50 are also more likely to be threatened or intimidated with a firearm.
Vulnerable women’s and children’s fear every day, and, by extension, non-violent American men’s constant need for watchfulness, can only be meaningfully, lastingly mitigated by gun owners by default of their upbringing voluntarily choosing to end the predominance of guns in America’s culture. In 2019, 1,732 children and teens died by firearm. As has been widely reported, in 2020 firearms became the leading cause of death in children and teens. Representative of non-fatal injuries, there were over 11,000 gun-related emergency-room visits that year. A study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in August, 2023 estimated that by 2021 the number of firearm deaths was 4,750 — 2.75 times 2019’s fatalities.
Yes, the older subgroups are more prone for a variety of reasons, such as gang involvement or exposure, drug-related incidents, and, notably, suicide, but does that make it any less of a social issue? No-one is born wanting to be a gang member. Less arguable is that for a considerable number of younger children and women, protection-of-family has turned into endemic endangerment within families. “The vast majority of kids are killed by guns in smaller, day-to-day incidents.” From 1999 to 2016, 184 infants died from a gunshot wound, 223 1-year-olds, and 294 2-year-olds. All told, 1,678 children aged 5 and under.
In Ohio on June 15, 2023, three boys aged 3, 4, and 7 were shot and killed by their father. He had lined them up. When his eldest son fled into a nearby field he “hunted” him down. He also wounded their mother as his stepdaughter ran down the road screaming that her father was “killing everyone.” Four months earlier in the same county, a woman whose family was facing eviction following foreclosure on their house fatally shot her 13-year-old son, husband, and 74-year-old father before killing herself. Her critically wounded 20-year-old daughter, a university student, was the lone survivor.
In a study of unintentional firearm deaths from 2005–15, “playing with” a “gun was the context in 63.8% of the incidents for the youngest group (ages 0 to 9) and 42.8% for the older children and teens (ages 10 to 19).” Is sport shooting, which 53 percent of gun owners say they engage in often or occasionally, worth not trying to root those statistics out of daily life in America?
No matter how many gun owners do act responsibly, the stats in those paragraphs above come from guns being accepted as part of everyday life.
When I was a boy, my best friend lived directly across the street. His brother was older and got a pellet rifle for Christmas one year. My brother and he were the same age and we went over to watch him try it out with a makeshift target he’d hung in their backyard. When a bird flew past, he suddenly swung the rifle up and fired. The bird dropped a few feet then kept flying but erratically, struggling. He wouldn’t have gone looking for a bird to shoot but he had a rifle in his hands and there it/he/she was. The mentality of the gun.
With the impact of the pellet having stayed with me all these years, I’ve just now looked up what kind of wounds it can cause in animals. They include internal bleeding, acute blood loss, intestinal perforation, broken bones, and spinal injuries that can lead to paralysis or prolonged death.
If he’d missed, on the other hand, the pellet might have struck someone in a neighboring backyard when it descended. Sure, it would have been a freak accident, but still, a child playing could be hit, and if looking up at the time, in the eye. In New York City’s Queens borough, an Army private on leave after basic training fired a 9mm pistol into the air while out drinking with friends to celebrate. As a 28-year-old mother of two went to the window of her fifth-floor apartment to look, one of the bullets came down through it, striking her in the eye and killing her. When the soldier saw a news report the next day, he realized what he’d done and turned himself in. He was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 4-to-12 years. The judge invited the woman’s husband to speak but he was too distraught.
Bullets fired into the air at an angle can travel up to 2 miles. Over an 8-year period in one particularly prone area of Los Angeles, 118 people were treated for random falling-bullet injuries. Thirty-eight of them died.
I was curious if BB guns have been developed to a point where they could satisfy the urge to target-shoot at gun ranges. This video was illuminating, to say the least, on not only how powerful the top end of the range has become but the sobering difference between a long-range BB rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun in damage to a ballistic dummy head. The potential for their use in less-lethal self-defense is also discussed.
Nonetheless, that rifle is still not in any way a toy. Average gun owners, for so many of whom family comes first, could help lead the way in breaking the cycle of guns from one generation to the next. As Robert F. Kennedy famously said a few months before he was killed, paraphrasing playwright George Bernard Shaw, “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.”
One justification I’ve read of for 18-year-olds being able to purchase an AR-15 is that it’s “best for hog hunting.” For children under nine, an estimated 3.6 percent of unintentional firearm deaths are related to hunting. For all other age groups it’s between 9.3 and 22.5 percent. Alcohol is considered to play a role in 14.9 percent of cases involving 10 to 19-year-olds and 46.8 percent of 20 to 29-year-olds. Farms, ranches, and remote rural living aside, with hunting more often a choice than a necessity in modern America, is being able to kill an animal more important than taking a step toward preventing those deaths as well as injuries?
It can happen during loading, unloading, or cleaning, but dropping a weapon or falling, if less so, can be factors. For instance, in Oklahoma a 12-year-old boy was hospitalized after his 10-year-old brother tripped and fell with his gun in hand. As for fatalities, there’s always the off-chance of such tragic deaths as a 16-year-old boy in California shot while hunting with family and friends when he wandered in front of the others; a 14-year-old boy shot in the chest in Colorado while hunting in a national forest with his father; a 10-year-old boy in Utah hit when a rifle fired as it was being taken from the front of a four-wheeler; and a 17-year-old girl shot in the back by her foster father in South Carolina as they hunted deer.
Hunting accidents don’t generally make for more than local news, if reported at all. One of the most widely covered was in 2006 when then-Vice President Dick Cheney shot a 78-year-old fellow hunter during a quail shoot. The man was hit in the face, neck, and upper torso, resulting in a collapsed lung and a non-fatal heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to birdshot lodged in or near his heart. Doctors decided to leave around 30 pellets lodged in his body rather than try to remove them.
To take just two states as examples of what we don’t normally hear about, in Iowa on November 11, 2023 a 26-year old man was fatally shot in the face while hunting waterfowl. The month before, a 53-year-old man died after being struck by a single rifle-shot while hunting coyotes with friends. In neighboring Minnesota, a 40-year-old man was shot on November 5. His hunting partner was checking if his firearm was unloaded, when he fired a round into the man’s leg. And during the youth opener of Minnesota’s deer-hunting season in October, two men were shot by children in separate incidents. Those accidents all happened within one 5-week period.
In an interview in 2017, Robert Redford told a story about a deer and his hunting and family: “I remember raising my kids in New York when they were little, because I was in the theater. I had a place out West, this cabin in the mountains. I wanted to be completely free of any civilized stuff, and I wanted my kids to understand both worlds. I hunted in those early years because I started when I was a kid. We were sleeping outside in sleeping bags and I woke up one morning and the two kids I had at that time were there. I looked up and there was a deer that put its nose down at the foot of one of my children’s sleeping bags. I said, “That’s it.” When I saw that and I saw their reaction to it, I put the two together and said, “That’s it. There’s no more hunting. It’s over.”
Executives at gun manufacturers could also step up by no longer marketing guns to kids. The author of a 2016 study titled “Start Them Young” says, “Few Americans are aware that there is an ongoing, coordinated effort by the gun lobby and firearms industry targeting America’s children and teens. Imagine the public outcry if the alcohol or tobacco industries introduced child-friendly versions of their adult products.” That includes “pink rifles and pistols intended for girls” and youth rifles “that come in crayon-box colors that include red, yellow, orange, and blue.”
There are any number of unpredictable situations in which having a gun won’t be enough to pre-empt or cut short an attack by so many people planning or more than willing to use one. Even someone as experienced with gun use, safety, and evading death as Chris Kyle, the Iraq War Navy SEAL portrayed in “American Sniper” by Bradley Cooper, couldn’t avoid being killed at a gun range with his own gun. He had taken a Marine Corps veteran to the range to “work with him” at the request of the veteran’s mother. The man used two of Kyle’s guns to shoot him six times and a friend of Kyle’s seven. In his jail cell 4 months later, he told a sheriff’s deputy, “I shot them because they wouldn’t talk to me. I was just riding in the back seat of the truck, and nobody would talk to me. They were just taking me to the range, so I shot them. I feel bad about it, but they wouldn’t talk to me. I’m sure they’ve forgiven me.”
With the pandemic, a record-shattering 19 million guns were bought from March-December, 2020. Police recovered almost twice as many as usual with a short “time-to-crime,” meaning they were purchased with criminal intent. Police and the armed forces aside, a safer society in America can only come from less guns not more.
We certainly won’t see global disarmament in our lifetimes but America isn’t in a dire, ongoing conflict with a neighboring country as many nations are. Along with the U.S.’s vast military arsenal — which would quickly come into play if citizens were to ever, as sometimes mooted, take up arms against an ‘oppressive’ government — surely ardent gun owners, more likely than average owners to repel an oft-mooted, logistically less-than-probable, foreign invasion, have that covered?
In October, 2023 in Maine, which has a 47.7% ownership rate, were “good guys with guns” able to stop a gunman from killing seven people including a 14-year-old boy at a bowling alley during a youth-league event, then eight more at a bar-and-grill four miles away? Sixteen others were wounded, three dying later at a medical centre.
How about 376 “good guys with guns” versus 1 “bad guy with a gun”? That’s how many officers descended on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, some within minutes. They included 25 Uvalde police and 16 sheriff’s deputies, 91 state police, 95 U.S. marshals, county law enforcement, and DEA officers, and 149 Border Patrol agents. The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety said the attack should have been ended in 3 minutes: “The officers had weapons, the children had none. The officers had body armor, the children had none. The officers had training, the subject had none.” A Texas House report determined first responders “failed to adhere to their active shooter training” and “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.” The gunman wasn’t killed until an hour and seventeen minutes after he fired his first rounds into two classrooms.
Briggs and I lived in Southport, Connecticut for two years, an hour or so by train from NYC, in the same county as Adam Lanza. His mother began teaching him to shoot at age four and often took his brother and him to gun ranges. As a law-abiding citizen, she bought the guns he used at Sandy Hook Elementary and to kill her, shooting her four times. A 12-gauge shotgun with 70 rounds was also found in the car, his mother’s, Lanza drove to the school.
The FBI said that Lanza “was considered by one person they interviewed to be a ‘shut-in’ who played Call of Duty and other video games.” Six years earlier, doctors at the Yale Child Study Center had offered to treat him for what they identified as profound emotional disabilities, saying that they could “lead to a deteriorating life of dysfunction and isolation.” His mother refused. By the time of the shooting, his condition had deteriorated to the point where he hadn’t left his bedroom in three months and would only communicate with his mother by email. His father and she were divorced, and at Lanza’s request his father hadn’t seen him for two years.
Despite those, if not warning, surely troubling, signs, when police searched the Lanza house they found a “brown gun safe, unlocked, with no indication that it had been broken into,” 1600 rounds of ammunition, several more guns including “an Enfield bolt-action rifle” and “a .22-calibre Savage Mark II rifle,” and a birthday card with the message, “Adam, Happy Birthday — Send me an email when you want to go hiking or shooting. Love, Dad.”
Three days after the Robb Elementary shooting, the father of the shooter who would kill 7 and wound 48 at the 2022 4th of July parade in Chicago’s Highland district reportedly ‘liked’ a tweet that read: “Protect the Second Amendment like your life depends on it.” He also sponsored his son for a state firearm owners identification despite his son having threatened to “kill everyone” in his family in September 2019.
Over 2023’s July 4 long weekend, 20 people were killed and 126 injured in 22 mass shootings across the country, from Massachusetts to New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, District of Columbia, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Louisiana, Texas, and California.
Apart from what feeling comfortable with a gun in hand can lead to, for children themselves less parental ownership means less chance of a child having an accident, or accidentally killing, with one. Another line in the “mentality of the gun” thriller was, “Our reality is, if you raise kids with guns you lose kids to guns.” In doing research for it, we turned up an accident in which a two-year-old boy shot and killed his sister. On May 26, two days after Uvalde, a two-year-old boy in Orlando accidentally killed his father with a gun kept in “a bag near some dirty laundry.” His mother was arrested, charged with “manslaughter by culpable negligence,” her three children, including an infant, left without parents.
Uvalde-born Matthew McConaughey, an average gun owner, had made a statement the day before that included this: “The true call to action now is for Americans to take a longer and deeper look in the mirror, and ask ourselves, ‘What is it that we truly value?’”
In December 2022, Teen Vogue published an article titled “Youth Gun Violence Activists Can’t Be Asked to Save the World”. It was part of a series, Beyond Thoughts and Prayers, “marking 10 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.” It was written by Parkland-survivor Delaney Tarr, one of the founders of March for Our Lives. She wrote: “After the shooting tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, in May, my phone started ringing off the hook again. Press contacts with whom I hadn’t spoken in years but still had my number were cold-calling me. They wanted to book me on a morning show or get a sound bite about how upset I was. I ignored the majority of them. Mostly, I stayed in bed and cried as I read about the victims online. I wondered, Why do these reporters even want to talk to me? What could I have to say?”
Later in the piece, she added: “In the years since the Parkland shooting, my follower count has shrunk and my tweets rarely go viral. Those of us who couldn’t keep playing the activist game got left behind.”
I know Texas a little from when I traveled around America by Greyhound bus in my early twenties, including unloading boxcars in Houston to pick up a bit of money along the way. Uvalde is 80 miles west of San Antonio. Sutherland Springs is 30 miles east. The shooter in the church massacre there in 2017 had sent threatening messages to his mother-in-law, and among the 26 people he killed, including an unborn child, was his grandmother-in-law. He was able to buy guns despite having been dishonorably discharged for domestic violence because military courts sanitize it under the broader category of assault. Senators on both sides of the aisle said that led to it not being entered in the National Instant Criminal Background Checks (NICS) system.
After the Las Vegas massacre that same year, in which the shooter killed 58 people and wounded 413 at the Route 91 Harvest music festival, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a gun-control advocate for decades who was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said no law could have stopped the shooter. Briggs and I lived in Las Vegas for a while, a few blocks from that shooting, and would sometimes walk down that part of the Strip, especially if there was an event going on such as that music festival. In modern America, you can so easily happen to be in the wrong place.
Music legend Rod Stewart posted this note: “I have proudly made the U.S. my second home for the better part of 40 years — and enough is enough! I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican. I am a father and an artist who cares deeply about the safety of my family and fans. Once again, I am utterly gutted to be grieving the mass murder of so many innocent lives.”
Japan’s containment of gun violence isn’t up against the Las Vegas shooter using a high-capacity magazine combined with a bump stock to shoot up to 100 rounds in 10 seconds, societal variables, the profit motive, and loopholes for private sellers, including online and at gun shows. Unlicensed sellers are, for instance, prohibited from knowingly selling to a convicted felon or someone from out of state but aren’t required to ask or check. The two students who committed the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado in 1999, the deadliest high-school shooting before Parkland, were both minors, 17, when they bought their firearms at gun shows. First it was with the help of an older female friend who thought they wanted them for target shooting, then with the aid of a co-worker from their part-time jobs at a pizza-delivery chain. In the latter case, both the co-worker and the seller were charged with supplying a handgun to a minor and possession of a sawed-off shotgun and went to prison.
On the other hand, Senator Feinstein introduced a new Assault Weapons Ban bill in March, 2021, over a year before Uvalde and the Buffalo supermarket shooting on May 14. It might have prevented both of those tragedies. Ten states have banned ‘assault’-style weapons (“assault weapon” is considered a political term by pro-gun opponents), and seven have raised the minimum age to 21 for buying a class of firearms that includes shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. Calls for similar legislation nationally haven’t been heeded by Congress, including in the new, limited gun-control bill it passed on June 24, 2022. The Uvalde shooter bought his AR-15-style rifle six days after he turned 18, two days before he used it. The Buffalo shooter was also 18.
There were 610 reported-and-verified mass shootings in 2020, 689 in 2021, 646 in 2022, and 656 in 2023. A Fox News poll in April, 2023 found 51 percent “of voters are extremely or very concerned that they or a loved one will be a victim of gun violence.” That included “44% of those living in a gun-owning household. Concern is higher among those under age 45 (59%), parents (59%), urban residents (65%), and nonwhite voters (65%).” There was also around 80 percent support for so-called common-sense laws.
An NPR poll in May, 2023 found 6 in 10 people think it’s more important to curb gun violence than protect gun rights. That’s the highest in a decade and included 4 in 10 gun owners.
In the long term, though, gun laws are of course reversible. In April, 2023 the Florida House passed a measure to lower the age to buy long guns from the Parkland-inspired 21 back to 18, and support for a national ban in fact appears to have fallen. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll in February, 2023, 47 percent supported a ban while 51 percent opposed it; a 9-point drop in support and 10-point rise in opposition since September 2019. An NBC News poll in November, 2023 also found that there has been a 2 percent increase in Republican households with guns since 2019, an 8 percent increase among registered Democrats from 33 to 41 percent, and a 17-point rise among Black voters from 24 to the same 41 percent.
Beyond new sales of ‘modern sporting rifles’ (AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles), the effect of state bans and age restrictions is limited, too, by the number already in circulation. As of 2020 there were 19.8 million, up from 8.5 million in 2004 when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 expired.
Further enjoining a national reassessment is that a review of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 found 77 percent of shooters bought at least some of their guns legally; and handguns, not semi-automatic rifles, were used 75 percent of the time, as in the Gabby Giffords attack.
Where does the thought come from that the life of someone who has done nothing to you is disposable because of something done, or perceived as done, to you by someone else? This new way of life has become disturbingly accepted. If mass shootings at schools and stores, or a night club, theatre, church, parade, festival, party, or political event have become part of America’s makeup as it’s evolved over time, along with a father shooting and killing his three young sons, a wife and mother shooting and killing her family when faced with eviction, a man shooting and killing his neighbors including three women and a 9-year-old boy because of a noise complaint, millions of women threatened, injured, or killed by abusive partners, the world’s highest number of suicides by firearm for women as well as men, and thousands of children a year being killed or wounded in gun violence and accidents, isn’t it time to begin reshaping the culture itself?
(If you share this article, could I ask you to please use the hashtag #BreakTheCycle.)
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Paul Sanderson is the author of “Briggs: Love, Cancer, and the Medical Profession”. His related petition has been signed by 35 stars, legends, and professors, and a challenge to get signatures taken by 20 tennis and squash greats. He has written articles on that subject for Fortune, HuffPost, and the Medical Journal of Australia’s MJA InSight. He is currently finishing up an in-depth piece proposing a U.S.-UK-Australia alliance on a new era in cancer and writing the final draft of an action-thriller in which the female lead has a hidden agenda aimed at Washington and the issues in his campaign. Guns also feature, and are questioned, in it.
