Mark Small

The past few days parking lot of a gun store/shooting range I pass going to the post office has been full. On-line and on the news, lines outside gun stores have been long. We have a pandemic - guns aren’t effective against viruses. What’s the deal? 1/13

2nd Amendment states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Guns don’t solve, but create, problems. 2/13

The Court has recognized limits on rights - even freedom of speech. “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Schenck v U.S., 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). 3/13

First, there are the number of guns. Too many people own too many guns and too few know a damn thing about gun safety. That explains why the mechanism of death for so many people is a firearm. 4/13

Second statistics on gun deaths are important. We know how many people die: bullet in head can be pretty clear as reason why a person became “decedent” on State form. There are statistics that might help reduce gun violence. 5/13

Pew Research Ctr summary of gun deaths, in “2017, the most recent year for which complete data [are] available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. according to the [Centers for Disease Control].” 6/13

Third, Jay Dickey, Arkansas Congressman, sponsored budget prohibitions in 1996, result of NRA lobbying: CDC cannot advocate or promote gun control. Despite mass shootings, CDC has not performed any such studies since 1996. 7/13

Most of the research into deaths from guns has been conducted by economists, sociologists, or criminologists. See “Firearms Research”, Scientific American, updated from 496 Nature 412-415 (2013). 8/13