PREFACE
The characters I’ve played, especially Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, almost never use a gun, and they always try to use their wits instead of their fists.
-James Garner
There was a high deck of wispy clouds, with bits of bright blue sky cracking through, and it was bitterly cold, two days before Christmas 2008, in Lansing, Michigan. The wind cut right through you. A little less than a foot of crystal-white snow covered the ground, most of it accumulated over a few small storms during the past two weeks.
Two of my brothers, one of their kids, and one of mine all drove out to the small nearby town of Mason, where one of the area’s larger shooting ranges was located. My brother Steve has collected guns for years and even built a small shooting range behind his rural house on the Grand River. When my wife, Louise, and I visit Michigan, we usually stay with Steve and his wife, and during the summers we target-shoot competitively on his backyard range. (Steve is not a hunter; he’s mostly a vegetarian, in fact.)
Inside the shooting range, there were numerous paper targets for sale; they included black-outlined Muslim men in turbans, depictions of big men with nappy hair, and the usual round bull’s-eyes.
The store attached to the range was huge—from the outside it looked like a one-story warehouse with a few windows clustered around a bumped-out entrance with weather doors in the center of the long building. Inside, long rows of glass cases held many of the more than 2,000 guns they boasted of having in inventory.
Behind the glass cases were long stretches of shelves for ammunition, which I was pretty sure from previous visits were usually full. Today they were nearly empty.
I rented a .40 caliber semiautomatic pistol (wanting some practice with something that could kick) while my brothers and our kids were making their selections. The guy taking my money was tall and thin, his pale skin highlighted by wispy facial hair.
“I’ll take two boxes of 40s,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” he said. “One box per customer.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’re nearly out of ammunition,” he said, waving at the shelves as if it should have been obvious to me.
Wondering if there’d been a Christmas run on bullets (this was rural Michigan, after all), I said, “Why’s that?”
He snorted as if I were mentally defective. “You noticed that black guy1 who just got elected?”
“Obama?”
“There’s another?” He squinted at me.
“What’s he got to do with your ammunition?”
“He’s going to take away our goddamn2 guns and ban ammo. People are stocking up! Where the hell3 have you been?”
“I didn’t know Obama wanted to take away my guns,” I said tentatively.
He snorted again and then pulled a cellphone from his back pocket, poked the screen, and scrolled down for a moment. “Look,” he said, holding the phone in front of me where I could read it. It was an email titled, in bold screaming type, “Obama is coming for your guns in January!”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Can’t you effing read?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t make it true. There’s lots of crap on the internet.”
He shook his head. “It’s true, I seen it on Fox, too. And you can only buy one box.”
I sighed and handed him my driver’s license and credit card. You can’t challenge Fox News in this part of the country.
The great ammunition shortage of December 2008 was the first of two—the second, coincidentally, was in December 2012, right after President Obama was reelected. An explosion of hysterical emails and widespread coverage of Obama’s “coming gun extermination program” preceded both. Which is pretty ironic, given that the only gun effort Obama had undertaken was to allow them in national parks. Nonetheless, these were such large, nationwide events that there’s even a Wikipedia page about it all.4
Between the weapons manufacturers and right-wing pundits trying to whip up fear and increase donations and listenership, a black man in the White House was a huge boon for the death industry. Earlier in the year, as Barack Obama and Joe Biden were gaining on John McCain and Sarah Palin, Nancy Lanza got a divorce from her husband and, with her son Adam (who was to become the Newtown, Connecticut, shooter), began collecting guns.5
It was a fateful year.
While the United States has a long and sordid history of violence against both indigenous people and enslaved people, it’s largely in the past 40 years that we’ve seen an explosion in something virtually unknown in the rest of the world: school shootings.
Tracking that outburst of school-based violence, the past 40 years have also seen an actual decrease in all crime, violent crime, and gun-related violence. The three most likely factors causing this decrease are the aging of the baby boomer generation (people in their 20s and 30s are the most likely to engage in criminal activity); the legalization of abortion in 1973, leading to fewer unwanted children (unwanted children are more likely to grow up antisocial); and the removal of lead from gasoline in the 1970s (lead damages the brains of children in ways demonstrated to make them more likely to grow up violent).6
That said, with our nation awash in guns, the rate of gun violence on a per capita basis in the United States, at 120 killings per 100,000 people, is massively higher than in any other fully developed nation in the world.7 In Japan, the odds of a person being killed by a gun are the same as those of being hit by lightning: one in 10 million. In England and Poland, it’s one in a million; and in countries with widespread (although reasonable) levels of gun ownership, like Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, it’s one in two million.
In the United States, there are 96 gun-based deaths a day, every day of the year.8
This book examines the sources of this proclivity for gun violence that’s so deeply embedded in the American psyche. By learning and understanding our history, we can begin the process of recovering from it. Finally, you’ll find clear, simple, and effective solutions (that work within the boundaries of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court) to our gun-violence crisis.