How we let the NRA create a climate of fear and other lessons from Berkeley’s gun violence series
At an Arcade Fire concert in Oakland last fall, three weeks after the shooting in Las Vegas and months before the Parkland shooting, our three teenagers sat on the opposite side of the expansive arena from my husband and me—a happenstance of ticket purchasing. On a night that should have been entirely carefree, I strained to see my kids, worrying about how I would get to them if a shooter opened fire. Would I exit and run around the arena? Would I try to cross the stage? Should we have planned a meeting point? Did I remind them to stay down? (But what should they do if a shooter is in the rafters?)
What’s crazy is that this thinking no longer sounds crazy. This is how we think now—after Orlando, Vegas, Parkland.
The toll of the National Rifle Association’s stranglehold on legislators — in defiance of the sane gun laws that 8 out of 10 Americans actually want — is not just on the mothers and fathers who will, until their own deaths, grieve the loss of a son or daughter. It’s not just on the 150,000 students who have experienced a school shooting since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. It’s not just on the people whose lives have been so brutally cut short — like the murdered Parkland student named Alyssa whose rabbi said she “filled the room with light and love.”
The toll is also on the countless millions of Americans who now live in a climate of fear while once doing once normal daily activities. We’ve let the NRA change our way of life, adapting to this insanity.
At the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, where I am fortunate to work, we hosted a series of events related to Gun Violence in America last year. We brought experts in from varying disciplines to help us shed light on the history and politics of this crisis.
As the Parkland shooting feels like it could possibly be a tipping point on policy with incredibly articulate students standing up and speaking out, here are some of the salient facts, analysis, and through lines from our series—information that we hope will explain how we got here and where we should go.
What we learned from our series
In conjunction with the Human Rights Program, Graduate School of Public Health, Graduate School of Journalism, Henderson Center for Social Justice, and Social Science Matrix, we brought nationally acclaimed researchers like Garen Wintemute, frontline implementers, such as Reygan Harmon, policy minds like Robyn Thomas, noted linguist George Lakoff, and lawyers like Adam Winkler, and many more to Berkeley’s campus. Below are some of the themes, quotes, and stats that animated the series. More on all of these points, plus video and Q&A, can be found on our Gun Violence in America site.
Stats from the series
· 36,000 people die from gun violence in the U.S. each year.
· We’ve lost more American civilians to firearm violence in last 10 years than we lost as combat casualties in World War II.
· In last 15 years, we have made no progress in slowing the overall rates of suicide and homicide due to firearms.
· It’s estimated that 500,000 people per year die of firearm violence globally and for every one person who dies, four end up in the hospital.
· 90 percent of people in the United States and 70 percent of National Rifle Association members support legislation to impose universal background checks, despite the failure of the legislation.
“I wouldn’t want to suggest that you tell the story of gun violence through numbers, but the numbers make you think.” — Peter Aldhous, Science Writer, Buzzfeed
On data
In 1993, the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) conducted a study on the risk of having a gun in your home. Robyn Thomas, of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said the study definitively showed that you are 10 times more likely to have someone in your home die from a gun if you have a gun in your home — either by suicide, accident, homicide, or some other way.
The findings were so dramatic and potentially devastating to the NRA and other gun rights advocates that Congress quickly passed a measure preventing the CDC from conducting research on politically sensitive issues, including gun violence. This halted the flow of federal funds to researchers to leading universities, prompting UC Davis researcher Garen Wintemute, an ER doctor, to fund research with his own money.
“The NRA and its allies saw these results coming out from credible sources and they freaked out. They knew immediately that this was not going to go well for them and that the more data and research we had on this issue the less likely they could make specious arguments that you need a gun to protect your family.” — Robyn Thomas, Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence
“What we know is strikingly little given the burden of the problem.”
— Magdalena Cerda, UC Davis researcher, at the Firearm and Public Health event
On mass shootings
The number of people killed in mass shootings since 1966 totals 1077 (updated in Feb. 2017 ) — a low number when compared with the 13,500 people who die annually from homicide and 22,000 from gun-induced suicide in the United States.
Mass shootings represent less than 1 percent of the people killed in incidents of gun violence in America each year. Then why does public debate focus on mass shootings and peak after events such as Newtown and Orlando, Vegas and Parkland?
“Mass public shootings don’t happen to people who aren’t like me. They happen to people just like me. We can’t write ourselves out of the story.”
— Garen Wintemute, Firearm Violence and Public Health event
“Mass shootings…make up a small percentage of the overall gun deaths in this country, but they do shock people and cause action.” — Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, whose organization was formed by lawyers after the 101 California Street shooting in San Francisco in 1993. The organization is now called the Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The second amendment and beyond
Our series explored what the second amendment does and does not entail. The Giffords Center Robyn Thomas explained that the amendment, until the District of Columbia v Heller decision in 2008, did not actually recognize an individual’s right to bear arms. Rather, it pertains to the right to “a well regulated militia” to “keep and bear arms.”
UCLA Law’s Adam Winkler discussed the Heller case, which stuck down a ban on handguns in the nation’s capital. He said gun rights advocates thought this would be a watershed decision that would lead to the fall of other gun control laws. Winkler explained that the Heller case did prompt a tidal wave of judicial decisions on gun control policies, but that the courts have, by and large, upheld those laws — including laws on background checks, assault weapons, and ammunition regulation. Winkler points out that although federal law may not have guaranteed an individual’s right to bear arms, state constitutions have explicitly given individuals that right. He also emphasized that gun control laws are as old as gun rights, even dating back to the “wild West.”
“If you go back to the 1820s and look at these cases, hundreds of cases on the constitutionality of gun control over the course of American history, by and large the courts do what they are doing now under the second amendment: they recognize an individual right but uphold reasonable regulations on that right.”
— Adam Winkler, UCLA Law
On race and ethnicity
Researchers in the series reported that both the risks and the toll of gun violence falls disproportionately on black men due to homicide and on white men due to suicide. Although fewer African American men overall fall to gun violence in comparison to white men, the risk to this population is more concentrated and much greater because there are smaller numbers of African American men in the population overall. In our event on “framing” the gun violence debate with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, communications expert Makani Themba talked about how racism contributes to the nation’s inability to address urban gun violence.
Winkler discussed the long history of racist gun control laws—laws meant to enable continued violence against and subjugation of African Americans. He also talked about one of the intentions of the KKK was go into the homes of African Americans to take their guns away.
“There are very few problems in medicine and public health where risk is so concentrated as it is here. As somebody who doesn’t just do research but also policy development and policy work, this really matters because the people at greatest risk can be put at social demographic distance by the people who are making policy decisions. And anyone who doesn’t think that’s relevant should go back to school.” — Garen Wintemute, UC Davis, Public Health event
“The issues of Black fragility in our lives in this country are fully manifested by the scourge of urban gun violence. One of the most troubling things I have learned in the last four or five years at an organizing, policy, and community level is that most people expect the worst conditions of black people should be solved by black people alone. To know that you’re alone in a real life sense is one of the most frustrating things to come to grips with.” — Pastor Mike McBride, Urban Gun Violence event
Interventions
An untold story that emerged from our series is the incredible success of local programs that use data to implement effective policies—programs that require consistent funding (and cost far less than policing and incarceration) but are are often underfunded. At the Urban Gun Violence event, Reygan Harmon, from the City of Oakland, discussed Ceasefire. She explained how the city partnered with data analysts to dig into Oakland’s numbers about who engages in gun violence and what prompts shootings, including homicides — an analysis that had never been done. Researchers found that gun violence in Oakland was not primarily driven by juveniles, as they had thought, but rather by men in their late twenties.
Harmon said they also found that significant numbers of shootings, including homicides, involved 53 gangs and or groups — only 4 to 7 of which were active at any one time. The analysis showed that the number of people likely to perpetrate gun violence in Oakland is relatively low.
In Richmond, a similar program called the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship also uses data to determine who is most at risk for committing gun violence and works to ease the cross-town rivalries that drive many of these crimes. Individuals are recruited to join a mentoring program and work with a life coach. They are given stipends if they meet their goals and also have opportunities to travel nationally or even internationally — with a counterpart from different neighborhood, a potential rival.
Since the program was implemented, the homicide rate in Richmond dropped 50 percent.
“Really, in the city of Oakland, you have 300 people who are active with gun violence. Three hundred people. That’s something we can [tackle].” — Reygan Harmon
Challenges ahead
After President Donald Trump was elected, speakers discussed the likely NRA offensive and policies that might be put forth, such as the concealed-carry reciprocity laws that would compel states with more stringent laws, like New York and California, to honor gun permits from other states. For example, people buying guns in Idaho where concealed carry is legal, for example, would be able to bring their guns—and concealed carry rights—to California. [The US House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 in December 2017].
Even as this type of national legislation unfolds, California remains out front on gun control legislation and is one of the few states that does keep records of firearms that are bought and sold. In Fall 2016, California passed Proposition 63, which requires background checks for buying bullets, outlaws the possession of high capacity ammunition magazines that enable shooters to fire relentless without reloading, and makes it a crime not to report lost or stolen guns, among other strict gun violence prevention rules.
“What are the guns that civilians just shouldn’t have because when they are used for evil, they are just devastating?” —Robyn Thomas, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
“It cannot be solved in ivory towers nor can it be solved in the spaces or places of policymaking, but it requires a guerillla army of people who are willing to be in the neighborhood doing hand-to-hand peacemaking work.”
— Pastor Mike McBride
Action
UC Davis researcher Wintemute opened our first event at UC Berkeley last fall with the quip that in the not-so-distant past the number of panelists at an event about firearms would often exceed the number of audience members. Not so anymore. He said Americans are finally thinking hard and talking about one of the biggest public health crises of our times, which claims the lives of 36,000 people a year and injures more than 120,000. “I have been doing this for 35 years and I have never seen anything remotely approaching this sustained level of intolerance for this situation as it now stands,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the Parkland massacre will be a tipping point for action. At this writing, students are powerfully speaking out and action is being planned—including a nationwide school walkout on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Made apparent by our series on gun violence, there is no shortage of facts and analysis to inform reasoned debate and no dearth of smart, fearless, and articulate leaders to effect change. The question is whether and when we can impact policies that have led to us accept the many tragedies of gun violence in America, including this persistent climate of fear.
