Shooting Ranges Believe in Gun Control

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Here at Atwell's Shooting Range in Painesville, Ohio, people don't want just anyone walking around with a loaded gun. Because, you know, that would just be dangerous, even if the person with a gun is a responsible, law-abiding citizen.

What if the treatment is worse than the symptom?

So the House Democrats unveiled their proposal to reform our nation's gun safety laws. As usual, the other side cried foul, save for some vague promise to provide better mental heath services.

We've seen this play out before. After a mass shooting rampage, the NRA and its cohorts express sympathy for the victims, express that guns are not the problem, and we as a nation must work on providing mental health for those who need it.

You'll take away my right to lose insurance from my cold, dead hands!

I have two problems with this single-minded, overly simplistic, vague solution to the scourge of mass shootings and everyday gun violence that plague America today.

First, when Barack Obama called on Congress to pass the Affordable Health Care Act, aka "Obamacare," these same assault-rifle wielding, bed-wetting, "Tea Party" types were carrying guns to health care rallies and calling for armed insurrection if insurance companies were to be forced to provide services that customers paid for. Oh, the humanity!

The second problem cuts right to the core of the gun culture. These "Second Amendment Enthusiasts" don't view treatment from mental health professionals as the solution to gun violence in America. No, they think that guns are the solution! That's right. If you hear voices in your head, don't see a psychiatrist ASAP, go to the shooting range and pop off a few rounds.

Think I'm being naive? I wish I were, but I'm going off of the information that we have concerning Adam Lanza at this time. This was reported by the Associated Press, and it cannot be repeated often enough:

"Friends told NBC's Today show on Monday that Lanza was a devoted mother, especially to her son Adam, and that shooting guns was simply a hobby for her. Russell Hanoman said Adam Lanza was 'clearly a troubled child.'

"Hanoman said Nancy Lanza told him she introduced guns to Adam as a way to teach him responsibility. 'Guns require a lot of respect, and she really tried to instill that responsibility within him, and he took to it. He loved being careful with them. He made it a source of pride.' Hanoman said."

In less time that it takes Wayne LaPierre to say,"But wait! That was an isolated incident!" We can examine the murder of ex-Navy Seal Chris Kyle. Yes, he did take Ray Routh, a person who described his own behavior as "psychotic," to a gun range. Yes, Kyle was trying help Routh with his mental ailments.

And if we do get mental health care, we're gonna shoot up the place!

And no, this isn't a recent development. Before Sandy Hook, and even before Columbine, high school sophomore Kip Kinkel murdered both his parents, drove to Thurston High School in Springfield Oregon, and unloaded 50 rounds of ammunition on his classmates, killing four and wounding another 24.

Kip's father had taken the boy off Prozac and had allowed his son to collect guns as a mature hobby. Seriously. Just a reminder that medication has more stopping power than a Glock.

Super Bowl Myth: Busted!

Didn't you hear? Today, Super Bowl Sunday is allegedly the biggest day for spousal abuse. In fact, more women are victims of spousal abuse on this day than on any other day of the year, with domestic violence centers reporting an increase of 40 percent.

Except problem: It isn't true. Not in the slightest. Snopes.com does an excellent job detailing the history of this whopper from its origins.

Must . . . Attack . . . Women??

It's also important to examine one tremendous flaw with this logic: In football, players are hitting other men. They are not hitting other women. If the object of a football game were to have the male players attack the female cheerleaders of the opposing team, this argument might have some merit. Then again, if a football game really were played with men routinely attacking women, the NFL would have a serious problem attracting fans. Most people would find such activity abhorrent.

If people really were that impressionable, wouldn't Call of Duty video games have sparked a massive increase in U.S. military enlistment? Behavioral psychologists know better.

And yet the fact the a statistic so absurd could gain such widespread currency for so long is a reminder that our brains are programmed to take mental shortcuts. As humans, we have cognitive process that is designed to filter out garbage and decide whether something makes sense based on what we already presume to be true. Psychologists call this confirmation bias.

Are we doomed, then to eternal suffering based on our own mental shortcomings? I think not. I think we can do better. In the last half century, the American public has endured a seismic shift on equal rights based on race, equal rights based on sexual orientation, and automotive safety. Can the tackling of today's gun culture be far behind?

John Lott's Myth Busted

Has a "good guy" with a gun ever lowered the crime rate? John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, answers strongly in the affirmative. Ironically, the biggest critic to Lott's research, is Lott none other than Lott himself.

Before we delve into statistics, it is important to analyze the evidence pool from which Lott and other concealed carry proponents draw from. The story is always the same: a good guy had a gun, you just didn't hear it because the "liberal media" didn't tell you. Somehow, John Lott got his hands on the information.

One such story, told from the prospective of a "law-abiding" gun owner, is actually perfect at illustrating Lott's logical fallacies.

From the Hartford Courant's write-up of Tuesday's legislative hearing on the Newtown massacre:

Gun owner Andrew Starczewski of New Britain testified against the magazine restrictions by relating a harrowing story about thugs surrounding him and his fiance years ago in a Hartford parking garage.

"They were all young men, and all looked thuggish and dressed that way. … They had at least two bats and two guns, all deadly weapons. We would be overwhelmed by the thugs in seconds. Luckily I was armed, a very small handgun with only six rounds of minor caliber ammunition. … I would have given an eye, an arm, my teeth for a 15-round magazine," Starczewski said.

"When I released the safety of the gun … while it was still in my small-of-the-back holster … it made a click … and the lead guy did an about-face and waved off the other guys" and they ran off, Starczewski said later.

There are several problems with Starczweski's story. Let's start with the setting: a parking garage in Hartford, Connecticut. Fair enough. But according to Starczweski's account, there are several young men, dressed "thuggish," and carrying "at least two bats and two guns." 

Stop right there. First of all, how many thugs are there? Are there just two thugs, each armed with a bat and a gun? Or two thugs, one with two guns, the other with two bats? Four people, each with either a bat, or a gun? Perhaps there were so many people, that Starczweski was simply unable to estimate, solely because he was trained to look for danger, and saw only the bats and guns that were presumably pointed in his direction. And there must be a lot of people, because Starczweski says he would forfeit a limp for the use of a 15-round magazine.

In any case, how did a group of people, armed with baseball bats and guns, bypass the gate attendant and the security cameras of the parking garage? A handgun can be concealed, but baseball bats?

Any willing suspension of disbelief goes out the window when Starczewski concludes his story. He had a gun. The "lead" guy called off his attackers. Think like the thief for a minute. You are about to rob someone. You find out he has a gun. Are you going to just walk away and give him a chance to shoot you in the back?

Even we assume that this highly dubious story is true, in spite of it incredulity, there is no evidence that Starczewski actually prevented a crime from being committed. Why? Well, for starters, he never reported this incident to the police. Stalking somebody with a deadly weapon is against the law, and by his own admission, Starczewski let them go unharmed. Now, this group of thugs is free to terrorize the next person they say in the parking garage.

The steering-wheel lock, known universally as the "club," is analogous to the aforementioned situation. The club does not reduce aggregate car theft, because a would be thief could simply walk past the "clubbed" car and steal the next one. Or, if the "clubbed" car was new model Mercedes/Audi/BMW, etc, the thief could just cut the club with a hacksaw in about two minutes, or slice right through with an angle grinder in about ten seconds. If a good citizen were to witness the thief and probe his actions, all he would need to do is smile and say, "I forgot my key."

But that's just me talking. What about Lott? For over a decade, Lott insisted that law-abiding gun owners were responsible for "preventing 2 million crimes per year." He said these were FBI statistics. Unfortunately, no one from the FBI has ever validated this claim. Lott now says that the number is somewhere "between 1.5 million and 3.4 million crimes every year."

That's right. 1.5 million to 3.4 million. By his own admission, Lott has a margin of error of 1.9 million crimes. If we hold that margin up to his original calculation of 2 million, we can conclude that Lott's margin of error is 95 percent. If we accept Lott's lower estimate of 1.5 million, we can conclude "more guns" translates into an increase of 400,000 crimes per year.

But hey, those are his numbers. And whatever model he is operating is completely at odds with basic statistical calculation. More guns and less crime? Using Lott's own research, let's consider this myth busted.

Post script: I decided to investigate Lott's claim that England's handgun ban, instituted in 1997, had caused murder rates to "double" by 2003.  So, I checked. England and Wales recorded slightly under 800 murders in 1998, and slightly over 1,000 in 2003. Hardly a double, but an increase, right?However, 176 of those "2003" murderers were due to the conviction of serial killer Harold Shipman, a sick doctor who killed his patients. After his conviction, 176 previous "accidental deaths" were subsequently recorded as homicides. So, in 2003, the murder rate was about the same. Until the next year, and the year after, in which England and Wales recorded progressively lower murder rates, with 2012 being the lowest on record. It took me all of two minutes to this look this up.