The Last Gun
Page 9
What about the microcosm of bucolic Lebanon County? The record there also demonstrates just how toxic guns are to families in America. A review of news stories reporting the autopsy findings of Dr. Jeffrey Yocum—the Lebanon County coroner—reveals a deadly contour remarkably similar to that of the nation as a whole. In addition to the Hain (2009) and Bixa (2008) murder-suicides, Dr. Yocum conducted autopsies in a 2005 murder-suicide at a chicken processing plant, in which a common-law husband shot his wife to death with a small handgun.85 In 2010 there was another murder-suicide, when a thirty-five-year-old woman shot to death her thirty-nine-year-old boyfriend and then killed herself with the gun.86 In 2011, a thirty-three-year-old mother was shot to death by her husband, who briefly took the couple’s ten-year-old daughter hostage before state troopers subdued him.87
As of March 2012, there were no reports of any shooting in self-defense at soccer fields or anywhere else in Lebanon County.
But there were plenty of other shootings in Lebanon County, demonstrating the toxicity of the American domestic arms race. Dr. Slocum’s annual report to the county commissioners details another scourge: suicide by gun. Over the five years from 2007 through 2011, the percentage of all suicides in Lebanon County committed by gun has rocketed from 45 percent in 2007 to 64 percent in 2011.88 This data is shown in table form in figure 7 and graphically in figure 8.
Figure 7. Suicides in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 2007–2011
“Suicides Up by 1 in 2011,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 3, 2012; “Coroner Reports on 2010 Deaths,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 27, 2011; letter dated Jan. 18, 2010, from Jeffrey A. Yocum, coroner, to Lebanon County commissioners, summarizing coroner’s cases for 2009, in files of Violence Policy Center; “Coroner: County Suicides Up in 2008,” Lebanon Daily News, Jan. 23, 2009; “Report Profiles ’07 Coroner Cases,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 1, 2008.
In spite of all of this evidence, the gun lobby continues to pitch its deadly products to women. The reason is simple. “When it comes to buying strength, women are no longer a niche market,” Shooting Industry, the premier gun trade magazine, advised its readers in 2009.89 The industry and a network of “shooting sports” groups see women as a key to profiting from the sale of firearms and related products to the whole family. “If you teach a man to hunt, he goes hunting. If you teach a woman to hunt, the entire family goes hunting,” said the director of an Alabama program oriented toward women.90
Figure 8. Gun Suicides in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 2007–2011
The “effort to get more women shooting is a collaborative effort for all within the firearms industry”91 Trade associations, manufacturers, the “gun press,” and local gun dealers and shooting clubs are locked into a nationwide daisy chain to get a gun in every woman’s hand in America. “We believe that a meaningful percentage of recent firearm sales are being made to first time gun purchasers, particularly women,” the Freedom Group, a consolidated group of firearm manufacturers assembled by Cerberus Capital Management, stated in its annual report for fiscal year 2011.92
The NRA has a full clip of interlocking programs it aims at women.93 The NSSF, which has women in the sights of its own programs, collegially reinforces the NRA’s pitch. For example, NSSF’s website boosts the NRA’s “Women’s Wilderness Escape” program. “Launched in 2008,” the NSSF blurb gushes, “this eight-day camp is led by some of the nation’s most experienced instructors and is dedicated to introducing women, ages 18 and older, regardless of experience level, to the countless forms of outdoor recreation awaiting them, all of which relate directly or indirectly to our shooting and hunting traditions.”94
Gun manufacturers have their own lures for women. A number—including Taurus, Charter Arms, and Smith & Wesson—make handguns in pink colors. According to one gun dealer, this hits women right where their dollars are. “Women get all excited about pink guns, even if they don’t buy one,” he said. “Women will come in and buy a Beretta pink visor. They might not even have a gun; they just think the visor is cool.”95 Glock—the maker of Meleanie Hain’s “Baby” Glock 26—sponsored a “GLOCK Girl Shootout, the first ever ladies only match,” in Reevesville, South Carolina. Not coincidentally, Lisa Marie Judy, whose “vision” the GLOCK Girl Shootout was, is also the owner of B.E.L.T Training, where the event was held in 2011.96 “Just because I am a girl, it doesn’t mean I can’t Rock out with my GLOCK out!” Judy was quoted as saying in a Glock media release.97
Gun dealers and shooting ranges also sponsor special “ladies days” and classes, billed as introductory training, but actually designed to generate buying traffic.98 “Work with a local range and hold an introductory event,” Shooting Industry advises gun stores. “NSSF’s First Shots program is specifically designed to build customer traffic at shooting ranges. That traffic will transfer to your store when those participants need equipment.”99 Apparel and accessories for women have also become an important follow-on market for the gun industry. “The growth is with women,” Shelah Zmigrosky, owner of Foxy Huntress, told Shooting Industry. “Men have their toys and clothes, and now women want their own.”100 A website devoted to women’s shooting accessories is called GunGoddess.com. “Move over boring black and olive drab green, because the shooting range is about to get a lot more colorful! At GunGoddess.com you’ll find ladies’ shooting accessories, apparel and gifts in fun, feminine fabrics and colors.”101 Shooting Industry has another idea, suggesting that “dealers have a new venue for offering women’s hunting clothing that doesn’t take up one bit of their sales floor—the Camp Wild Girls Home Hunting Party.”102
The gun industry’s obsession with women has another, seamier side. While on the one hand the industry is trying to lure women as customers, often arguing that guns are empowering, on the other a number of its denizens exploit women as cheesecake. Unabashed examples abound, some distributed on the floor of the NSSF’s annual SHOT Show extravaganza. Ads in Shotgun News—a widely circulated national gun advertising tabloid—regularly feature women in provocative dress and poses. In the June 1, 2012, edition, for example, the importer American Tactical Imports posted an ad for its FX45 Thunderbolt semiautomatic pistol. The ad features a buxom young woman clad in a brassiere, midriff bare, holding a pistol in each hand. The tagline reads, “Enhanced For Your Pleasure.”103 In the same edition, a full-page ad for European American Armory Corporation (EAA) displays another young woman with a bare midriff and cocked hips, clad in tightly fitting clothes and holding a Baikal shotgun. Below the woman appears the phrase, “XOXO Candy!” and to the side, the logo “See It All.”104 EAA also sells pinup calendars, displaying guns and women in titillating poses, for current and past years, from its Internet website.105
In spite of the industry’s strenuous efforts to promote guns and its intermittent revival every few years of the entirely specious canard that gun sales to women are soaring, the hard fact is that female personal gun ownership remains relatively rare. It fluctuates within a narrow range, with no recent signs of increase. In 2010, only one out often American females reported personally owning a gun. Female personal gun ownership peaked at 14.3 percent in 1982. In 2010, the female personal gun ownership rate was 9.9 percent.106
The industry just as cynically targets children as its future consumers. It has ginned up “youth-oriented” campaigns for girls, similar to those for women but aimed at a younger demographic. The first “National Take Your Daughters to the Range Day,” for example, was scheduled to be held on June 9, 2012. “This event will be an opportunity for gun ranges throughout the nation to introduce many young women to a sport that may just become a life-long hobby, or even a profession,” one promoter claimed in a leadup to the event. “Boys learn to shoot in Scouts or with their Dads,” Lynne Finch, National Take Your Daughters to The Range Day co-founder and firearms instructor, was quoted as saying. “Often, the girls are left behind because shooting isn’t ‘girly’ Well, we can, and do shoot, and well.”107
The National Shooting Sports Foundation,
U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, National Wild Turkey Federation, Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, and the National Rifle Association sponsor a program called Families Afield: An Initiative for the Future of Hunting.108 The reason for this national “initiative” (marketing campaign) is simple. The number of kids who are drawn into hunting has been shrinking dramatically for years. Hunting is one of the prime ways that long-term future buyers are introduced to guns. Fewer young hunters equals fewer future gun buyers.109
The gun industry coalition attempting to reverse this trend has manufactured a nationwide lobbying campaign to pressure state legislatures to lower the legal hunting age. “Studies show that children’s interests and leisure time are set by age 12. We wanted to get to them before soccer, hockey and other organized sports,” a Michigan Department of Natural Resources employee explained about the purpose of the younger-hunter programs.110
It is no surprise that the gun industry’s goal is to lower safety standards to the cellar in pursuit of profits. “Our goal is to have all fifty states in the least restrictive category,” a Families Afield report stated.111 The “least restrictive” category means states that have “regulations or laws that 1) permit youth hunting largely at the parents’ discretion and 2) hunter education requirements that largely permit youth participation before passing hunter education tests. None of these states have a minimum hunting age.”112
Can this feverish marketing of guns to kids be good in the long run for America’s children? The answer is clearly no. This book has already described several stories of children who were killed or maimed by guns in America. One of them was the four-year-old boy in Hampton, Arkansas, who found a loaded handgun in a living room cabinet and shot his five-year-old sister to death on the day the Supreme Court handed down its wisdom in Heller.113 The tide of tragedy continues without ebb.
On March 14, 2012, a traveling family stopped for gas near Tacoma, Washington. The father put his pistol under the seat and got out to pump gas. The mother went inside the station. A three-year-old boy in the car climbed out of his child seat, found the gun, and shot himself to death. “It is incredible in light of the other ones,” said Tacoma police officer Naveed Benjamin. “You would think people would take more care, not less.”114
The “other ones” to whom Officer Benjamin referred were two other children who had been shot within a month’s time in Washington State. On February 22, 2012, an unidentified nine-year-old “75-pound boy with the buzz cut and blue eyes” brought a loaded 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol in a backpack to his third-grade class in Bremerton, Washington. When he dropped the pack on his desk, the gun fired. A bullet struck eight-year-old Amina Kocer-Bowman near her spine, causing serious injuries. As of March 2012, she had undergone five surgeries and remained in serious condition. The boy had taken the gun from the home of his mother and her boyfriend.115
The third shooting gives the lie to the gun enthusiasts’ tired argument that such tragedies happen only to people who lack, in Josh Sugarmann’s words, “the temperament, training or personal fortitude to own a gun.”116 On March 10, 2012, seven-year-old Jenna Carlile, the daughter of a Marysville, Washington, police officer, was playing with her three younger siblings in the family’s silver Volkswagen van. The parents were nearby. Jenna’s younger brother found a loaded gun in the glove compartment and accidentally shot her in the torso. She died of her injury the next day.117
It was not the first time the child of a law enforcement officer—a class of persons society presumes to have the proper training and temperament to be trusted with guns—was killed in Washington State by a sibling. Neighbors of Clark County Sheriff Sergeant Craig Randall complained for fourteen years about the lax handling of guns around the family home and about incidents involving some of the six Randall children and guns. Among other things, Sergeant Randall kept his semiautomatic pistol at home and unlocked. On January 13, 2003, ten-year-old Emilee Joy Randall, the youngest of the children and only daughter, whom the family called Princess, was shot in the head and killed by her older brother, Matthew. Her brother, who was already on probation for a gun-related conviction, had picked up his father’s gun from a bedroom dresser.118
Sadly, these few anecdotes from a single state reflect the national data. A 2002 study at the Harvard School of Public Health found that “children 5–14 years old were more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries, suicides and homicides if they lived in states (or regions) with more rather than fewer guns.” Other types of violence against children—specifically nonfirearm homicides and nonfirearm suicides—were “not significantly associated with the availability of guns.”119 The relationship between more guns and shattered children’s lives was true regardless of state-level poverty, education, and urbanization. The study’s authors concluded that “where there are more guns children are not protected from becoming, but are rather much more likely to become, victims of lethal violence.”120
The gun lobby does not let the lives of children get in the way of its resolute opposition to even the most tepid laws or regulations restricting access to guns. In Washington, State Senator Adam Kline sponsored legislation to simply require owners to have trigger locks and safes for their guns. “The NRA gets up in arms and says, ‘Oh my God, this is the end of the Second Amendment. This is total violation of everything that Western civilization stands for.’ The fact is it would’ve saved this girl’s health and it would save the lives of kids,” Kline said, referring to the shooting of Amina Kocer-Bowman.121
It may be that gun enthusiasts believe, as the gun industry and its front groups cynically pretend, that by mixing kids and guns they are continuing a historical ethic of self-reliance and promoting traditional values. If that is so, they are blind to the consequences, which are thrown into high relief by looking at the rest of the world.
In contrast, children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns. Compared with children 5–14 years old in other industrialized nations, the firearm-related homicide rate in the United States is 17 times higher, the firearm related suicide rate 10 times higher, and the unintentional firearm-related death rate 9 times higher. Overall, before a child in the United States reaches 15 years of age, he or she is 5 times more likely than a child in the rest of the industrialized world to be murdered, 2 times as likely to commit suicide and 12 times more likely to die a firearm-related death.122
The obvious question is, why is the gun industry doing this to America, and especially to its women and children? The next section answers that question, going beyond the motivation of mere greed to explain the method behind the industry’s dark madness.
4
TWO TALES OF A CITY
Murfreesboro, Tennessee—another all-American town—lies 745 miles southwest of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where gun rights activist Meleanie Hain was shot to death.1 The seat of Rutherford County, Murfreesboro is in the exact center of Tennessee,2 about 30 miles from Nashville. A comparison of the lives of two of Murfreesboro’s famous sons casts into relief the choice America faces. Save lives by using proven public health and safety methods? Or knuckle under to the gun industry’s aggressive marketing of militarized death under the false flags of Constitutional “right” and faux patriotism? The choice is no less stark than that.
Rutherford County, like Lebanon County, has its share of routine gun violence inflicted by otherwise law-abiding citizens on themselves and each other. The day-to-day shooting is pretty much like the shooting elsewhere in America.3 As in other places, suicide and murder-suicide are prominent. A recent cross-state study—controlled for poverty, unemployment, urbanization, mental illness, and drug and alcohol dependence—found that “in states with more guns there were substantially more suicides because there were more firearms suicides.”4 About 63 percent of the suicide deaths reported in Tennessee in 2010 involved firearms.5 The overall suicide rate in the state has increased significantly in recent years. In 2008, the rate rose by 14.6 percent.6
As tragic as the need
less deaths in Rutherford County are, they are not extraordinary. Identical stories occur every day, all over America. But in recent years, Murfreesboro and Rutherford County have grappled with another species of gun violence, fed by the deliberate design and marketing decisions that the magnates of the gun business have made—and continue to make—to keep their industry alive.
In 2012, this plague touched the upscale community of Amber Glen, described by a local real estate broker as a long established Murfreesboro neighborhood “of beautiful manicured lawns and well-maintained homes.” Prices asked for homes listed on another broker’s website in March 2012 ranged from $ 129,900 to $250,000.7 The ethnicity of the neighborhood elementary school’s children is 66 percent white, 21 percent black, 9 percent Asian-Pacific Islander, and 5 percent Hispanic.8
At about five ten P.M. on Presidents’ Day, February 20, 2012, gunfire broke out on the elementary school’s basketball court. Fourteen-year-old Taylor Schulz fell, shot twice in the leg. As many as a dozen children were playing on the school grounds at the time. Schulz required multiple surgeries. Two fifteen-year-old boys were arrested and charged with the shooting. Three other youths and one adult were charged with conspiracy.9 The accounts of witnesses and the accused youths agree that the conflict involved rivalry over a girl. The conspirators allegedly arrived at the school armed with two pistols taken from a parent’s gun cabinet. The cabinet was locked, according to police, but the youths knew where the keys were. Rude gestures and words were exchanged. Shots were fired.10