Mark Small

The word “domestic,” in a legal context, usually indicates a category of cases with issues that evoke extreme emotions. The cases and issues include divorces, child custody, child support and domestic violence. 3/15

Court security is greater because of domestic cases than it is for criminal cases. I say this based on over 30 years of experience as a lawyer and conversations I’ve had with judges, bailiffs, and deputies. Guns nuts might say such assertions are anecdotal. 4/15

Of course, those would be gun nuts with vocabularies beyond 600 words or with cue cards given out by the NRA. Then again, that would be correct about my assertion, because we lack meaningful statistics about gun violence. 5/15

Epidemiological studies - NOT sorry if that is too pointy-headed and intellectual for some people - deal “with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.” 6/15

Any such studies have been blocked, effectively, by the NRA. Since 1996 under the Dickey Amendment, CDC is prohibited from advocating or promoting gun control - even after Sandy Hook. 7/15

The Tiahrt Amendments ban “trace data” collected by the ATF from release for use by cities, states, researchers, litigants, and members of the public. If we could trace guns from source to gun deaths, we might be able to reduce numbers gun deaths. 8/15

Mechanism of death in a shooting usually is easy to discern, but cause of death can be complex. In “2017, the most recent year for which complete data [are] available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries.” Pew Research Ctr. citing numbers from CDC. 9/15

With nearly 40,000, deaths per year related to a specific thing, we should expect health-related studies. In 2017 approximately sixty percent (60%) of gun deaths were suicides (23,854). Any such studies have been blocked, effectively, by the NRA. 10/15