“Loopholes”
Building on Tom’s latest strip (which perfectly satirizes up every gun control “debate” that I’ve seen in the past week), it’s important to look beyond the conservative talking point that firearm regulations “don’t work” and ask why gun laws failed to prevent the tragedy at Virginia Tech. In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the murder of 33 people was aided by - cue the passive voice - “legal loopholes” :
When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.It didn’t.
And his slaughter of 32 people last week has raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill.
Under federal law, anyone who has been judged to be a danger to himself or others because of mental illness, as Cho was, should be prohibited from buying a gun.
His status should have been noted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a database of people disqualified from gun purchases.
But, in Cho’s case, his mental status never went in the system.
That’s because the federal government relied on Virginia to provide the information, and Virginia law disqualifies a person from buying firearms only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.
Cho was ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, but he was never committed. His appearance before the judge and his evaluation at a mental health facility did not show up when he bought the guns.
To view this disturbing news through the eyes of a second amendment zealot, Cho just slipped through the system. Whoops! There’s no way that anyone could have predicted this particular scenario. Since our best efforts to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people aren’t working, then the only logical answer is to give guns to everybody so they can protect themselves from the psychopaths who are “going to get guns anyways”.
The frustrating thing about all of this is that all of these “loopholes” aren’t accidents. They’re inserted into our laws on purpose as the result of the arduous compromises that go into every piece of gun legislation to appease the NRA. You can bet that the language in Virginia’s gun laws to prohibit gun purchases to people “only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital” was carefully worded and written in such a way that the law would apply to as few people as possible. Cho was able to buy firearms because at some point in the drafting of Virginia’s gun legislation, some gun aficionado writing the ban on selling weapons to the mentally ill decided to make a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” commitment to a mental hospital. And what we saw last week was the direct result of that decision.
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Bush Passes On Jokes At Media Dinner…
President Bush, deferring to the tragedy at Virginia Tech, passed up any attempt to be funny at the …
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator — April 24, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
That in itself is a satire of the gun debate in the last week. I read hundreds of blogs a day, mostly liberal, but with a smattering of conservative blogs and gun blogs thrown in for good measure. I have seen precisely nobody advocate anything like that. I have seen many liberal bloggers I regularly read and respect, such as yourself, incorrectly interpret other arguments into this straw man, but I have not seen any gun blogs or conservatives advocate the stance you’re talking about.
Nobody is talking about “arming students.” Nobody is advocating that we should give everyone guns. Nobody is advocating that everyone be armed (except maybe by some random wingnut Freeper).
Most students probably do not own firearms. Most students have no desire to. And since many students are 18-20, they are not legally allowed to carry firearms anyway.
All that is being said is that a student who is of legal age who already has a concealed carry permit doesn’t automatically turn into a mindless murderer when they walk onto campus. If students like Bradford Wiles aren’t flipping out and blasting their friends over drunken shenanigans or when they get a little stressed at finals when they are carrying off campus, there’s no reason to believe that they’re going to be any less responsible when they are on campus.
We’re not talking about randomly providing “kids” with guns , we’re talking about adults who attend college who have CCW permits in the first place.
If you want to argue that you don’t feel CCW permit holders should be allowed to carry on campus, fine. If you want to argue that there shouldn’t even be such a thing as CCW permits in the first place, fine. You can argue those on their merits.
But stop arguing against this invented scenario where the NRA drives through town on a flatbed truck and hands “assault weapons” to every teenager.
Wrong. It’s the federal legislation that decides that—more specifically, the 1968 Gun Control Act—this isn’t a fault of VA’s laws. Cho was able to buy his guns because the ordering of Cho into treatment should have been reported to the federal background check system and it wasn’t.
As of now, most states have minimal requirements for getting information like that into the NICS and 20 or so states have no requirement at all, so legislation is being drafted to mandate that states improve their system for reporting mental health records to the federal databases for background checks.
Comment by Guav — April 24, 2007 @ 5:32 pm
Is it just me, or has Tom Tomorrow been on autopilot for about the past three years?
Meh.
Comment by Guillermo — April 25, 2007 @ 3:08 am
It’s just you.
Comment by greg — April 25, 2007 @ 6:53 am
Greg, you make it seem so simple. But suppose you like guns and also you are feeling suicidal. Now you have a problem: do you check yourself into a mental hospital and sacrifice your ability to own a gun forever, or do you forgo mental health care?
Comment by Somebody — April 25, 2007 @ 7:09 am
I may be wrong about this, but I do not believe that a mental commitment is a thing that will take away a person’s right to own a gun forever, just like a felony conviction won’t. There are procedures in place to undo these restrictions. Every day, plenty of reformed felons go to a judge and have their civil rights restored, which grants them the ability to vote as well as the ability to own firearms again. Likewise, it should be possible for an individual who has been committed to go to a judge and get himself declared mentally fit. Such a declaration would restore all the rights he lost when he was committed, including the right to own a firearm.
What the judge in this case did was incorrect on many levels. You don’t just order a person who is a danger to himself to get outpatient treatment. That’s just stupid. If you think there is a real problem then you order a 3-day stay at a very nice mental facility, starting immediately, at the very least. After that, you let the doctors evaluate him and release him if they believe that he is no longer a danger to anyone because of his mental condition. The judge’s decision could only indicate that he didn’t believe that Cho was actually dangerous but that he did need help and was simply limited in his choice of findings by legal precedent.
Comment by hyzmarca — April 25, 2007 @ 11:00 am
A few things :
1) If you’re suicidal and like guns, there’s a good chance you might end up like one of the forty-four people who kill themselves with a gun every day. Unlike other methods of suicide, you don’t hear a whole lot about people who tried shooting themselves and surviving.
2) Is the choice between mental well-being and gun ownership is really that difficult? Foregoing medical attention to avoid giving up a gun collection is lunacy.
3) In this case, it’s not just a matter of whether or not someone is “suicidal”, since Cho was considered a danger to himself and others, had been accused of stalking other students, and had intimidated people with his writings. His rage went far beyond depression.
Comment by greg — April 25, 2007 @ 11:16 am
Greg, gun availability influences the choice of suicide method—when guns are available, people use them to commit suicide more than other methods—but it has no effect on the overall suicide rate. Where guns are less available, there is complete substitution of other methods of suicide.
The problem is not that forty-four people kill themselves *with a gun* every day, the problem is that those forty-four people *kill themselves* every day.
Comment by Guav — April 25, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
Care to back that up? A study released last week reached the opposite conclusion :
Availability of Guns Raises Suicide Rates, Study Finds
Comment by greg — April 25, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Absolutely silly. If you get a gun for your home, greg, do you think that makes you more likely to kill youself? If not, then what’s the problem?
Furthermore, you say “Foregoing medical attention to avoid giving up a gun collection is lunacy.” Well yes, greg, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the lunatics are the ones who need medical attention for their mental illness.
Comment by Somebody — April 25, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
Yes Greg, I’m aware of the Harvard study. But unless they can show that the households with firearms have higher suicide rates than households without them, comparing overall statewide firearm ownership levels with total suicide rates isn’t very useful.
To back up my contention, I give you the following: From 1972 to 1995 the per capita gun stock in the US increased by more than 50% but during this same period, the U.S. suicide rate was virtually constant—in 1972 the suicide rate was 11.9 per 100,000, and after this “arms build-up” the total suicide rate remained unchanged at 11.9 in 1995. In 2003 it was 11.0.
There are many things that cause suicide rates to fluctuate slightly—they go down in times of war, and increase when the economy is bad—but in general suicide rates in most countries (regardless of firearm availability) remain constant.
I believe we have the highest firearm suicide rate on the planet. But there are least a dozen countries with much higher total suicide rates than us—obviously lack of firearm availability is not preventing them from killing themselves, so I don’t know why it would be expected to affect our total suicide rates.
According to an abstract from the Canadian National Institute of Health:
In other words, people who want to commit suicide will do so, regardless of gun availability.
Australia is worth examining because following the the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, the government instituted sweeping gun control legislation, banning all semiautomatic firearms (rifles and handguns), including .22 caliber rifles and duck-hunting shotguns and spent half a billion dollars buying citizens’ newly-illegal guns from them.
Let’s go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. They are not pro or anti-gun control, they just keep track of things. In their summary of the report Suicides: Recent Trends, Australia, 1993 to 2003, they state:
Let’s look at Table 4 where they directed us (Page 13 of the PDF). You will see that in 1993, 435 of the suicides in Australia were with firearms. In 1997, only 330 Australians killed themselves with firearms. By 2003, that number had dropped to 194! That’s an amazing decrease in firearm suicides.
Yet in 1993, the total number of suicides in Australia was 2,081. In 2003, the total number of suicides was 2,213—it was actually higher. So although the number of firearm suicides steadily declined over that decade, the total number of suicides remained basically the same, fluctuating between a low of 2,081 and and a high of 2,720.
Remember, they basically banned firearms in 1997. And predictably, firearm suicides decreased. But more people started hanging themselves.
Judging from other countries experiences with virtually complete gun bans, there’s no indication that people who are so miserable that they want to end their lives will not do so regardless of whether or not they have easy means to do so.
Comment by Guav — April 25, 2007 @ 4:52 pm
Odd that you criticize the Harvard study for not being specific enough only to counter it with evidence that’s much more broad.
To me, the killer statistic is found at the end of the article I linked to in my previous comment :
Comment by greg — April 25, 2007 @ 5:42 pm
What I’m saying about the Harvard study is just that the methodology does not make much sense to me. If you want to know if gun ownership increases suicide rates, you compare the suicide rate in households with guns to households without guns, you don’t just say “states with high gun ownership have high suicide rates therefore the guns cause the suicides.” Is it a causative trend or merely a parallel trend? After all, you have similar if not worse rates of suicide in a lot of Northern European countries which in many cases have far fewer firearms per household—how do you explain that? Japan has a higher suicide rate than us and no civilian firearm ownership whatsoever—how do you explain that? Correlation does not equal causation.
Here’s the difference between my evidence and your evidence. Statistics can be used to prove almost anything when they are used to show cause and effect and used to draw conclusions—especially when there is an underlying agenda (the Harvard study was funded by the Joyce Foundation, which spends about $2 million a year on antigun efforts). We should be skeptical of claims made by organizations pushing a specific viewpoint based on interpretations of statistics—that goes for the Brady Campaign or the NRA.
The evidence I presented are not studies. They are not manipulations of statistics or interpretations of polls, they are raw numbers. Australia banned guns from private ownership, but the suicide rate didn’t change—just method did. Canada introduced restrictive gun control measures, but the suicide rate didn’t change—just method did. According to the Canadian National Institute of Health and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, firearm availability does not have any correlation with the overall suicide rate—when you remove guns from a population, people start hanging themselves more often. You can’t just ignore that. According to your claim, restrictive gun control should lower the suicide rate. A flat-out gun ban should significantly lower the suicide rate. But they haven’t.
Your “killer statistic” doesn’t refute any of what I showed you, but it does tell me a couple of things. If only 5% of suicides are even attempted with a gun, then obviously gun owners are the least likely to try to kill themselves (If one has access to a gun, why wouldn’t one use it to kill themself?) and gun owners are doing a pretty good job of preventing their firearms from being used by suicidal family members.
Comment by Guav — April 25, 2007 @ 8:11 pm
Speaking of straw man arguments, Guav, perhaps you can point out to me where, in this assertion, Greg even remotely implied that gun owners were more likely to be suicidal.
“1) If you’re suicidal and like guns, there’s a good chance you might end up like one of the forty-four people who kill themselves with a gun every day. Unlike other methods of suicide, you don’t hear a whole lot about people who tried shooting themselves and surviving.”
IF is a pretty important word in that sentence, which is maybe why it comes before all the other ones. None of what you’ve stated refutes that; you quickly invented an argument that guns cause suicides, which is nowhere in the above paragraph. You then produced roughly 45,000 words of an attempted rebuttal, all the while ignoring Greg’s assertion, which remains blatantly true: If you attempt suicide with a gun, you will almost certainly succeed.
Yes, when countries ban guns, people find other ways to kill themselves, and succeed in doing so. I noticed no mention of how many hanging/poisioning/asphyxiation attempts fail, versus how many succeed, but there sure is a whole lot more room for failure when you don’t have the option of painting the ceiling with your brains.
Also, in regard to this little comment …
“Statistics can be used to prove almost anything when they are used to show cause and effect and used to draw conclusions—especially when there is an underlying agenda.”
… Is this a refutation of what you claim the Harvard study is doing, or an explanation of what you’re attempting to do with the Australian statistics? With the drawing of the conclusions and the underlying agenda and the whatnot?
Comment by briantologist — April 26, 2007 @ 10:08 pm
It wasn’t a straw man argument because I never claimed that Greg implied that. I wasn’t arguing against anything he said when I noted that, I was simply making an additional observation.
As far as my “45,000 words of an attempted rebuttal” goes, it started because Greg posted his blurb and I replied that gun availability has no impact on overall suicide rates. He specifically asked me to back up my assertion, which is where the lengthy response came into play.
As far as failures vs. successes, do we know how many of those who fail try again and succeed?
Has anyone entertained the notion that perhaps different people choose different methods based on how badly they really want to die? Someone who sorta wants to die might eat an entire bottle of Aspirin or try to ashphyxiate themselves, whereas someone who really wants to die shoots themselves or jumps off the Empire State building, like happened a couple weeks ago right here in NYC. Maybe the failures vs. success rate has more to do with the actual desire to die than we’re thinking about.
As an additional side thought, do you support assisted suicide? I do. I mean, suicide is tragic, but I do think that people actually have a right to kill themselves if they want to. We’re talking about suicide as if it’s something that happens to people instead of something that they purposefully do to themselves. I don’t think we can legislate suicide away.
My comment about the stats was an attempt to illustrate the difference between interpretive studies and raw data. A study, using any variety of methodology, can lead people to believe that owning guns increases their risk of suicide. But who knows how they came by their figures? There are a lot of common numbers thrown around in this debate by both sides (”a gun in the home is 47 times more likely blah blah” or “guns are used defensively 2.5 million times a year blah blah) and quite a few of the most often-quoted statistics were arrived at by extremely questionable methods, and some have been totally refuted yet are still used by people who don’t know any better.
On the other hand, I didn’t provide a study with Australia. I’m not interpreting anything. I’m showing that removing guns from a population does not save lives when it comes to suicide. And that is relevant to note when people bring up suicide when discussing the gun debate. Because there’s no indication that guns have the first thing to do with suicide other than as a tool among many others that people use to kill themselves.
Comment by Guav — April 27, 2007 @ 3:56 pm