Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns From: [l v c] at [cbvox1.att.com] Subject: Vogue Magazine Anti-Gun Article Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 02:42:21 GMT SOURCE: VOGUE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1993 ISSUE AUTHOR: STEVE FISHMAN TITLE: UP FRONT: WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT GUNS CAN KILL YOU SIDEBAR: THE FAMILIAR ARGUMENT SAYS GUNS DON'T KILL, PEOPLE DO. BUT SCIENTISTS NOW SEE VIOLENCE AS A DISEASE, GUNS AS DANGEROUS IN THEMSELVES-AND WOMEN ESPECIALLY VULNERABLE. STEVE FISHMAN REPORTS. SCANNED AND UPLOADED BY: MICHAEL R. GRIMLER, NRA MEMBER #BLS7415N (while care was taken for accuracy, not responsible for errors) ARTICLE: Last year, among the American Classic recipes for cherry pie and chicken wings in a major women's magazine, there was a full-page advertisement for the Colt All American Model 2000 and Colt 380 Compact pistols, featuring a mother tucking her child into bed. "Self-protection is more than your right...it's your responsibility," the ad read. By this logic-increasingly used by gun manufacturers to sell their products to women-guns are more than just slim-handled, short-barreled, redesigned-for-women accessories. They are that intangible thing, safety. Sharon Kendall heard the crime reports every day. In her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, crime seemed to have escalated, even taken new forms. Now it was carjackings as well as burglaries. "I used to sleep with a hair-spray can on my pillow," she says. "People said that's no good. I listened and thought about it, and I was convinced. I was going to get a gun. Just in case." A 52-year-old single parent with 11-year-old twins and a 13-year- old at home, Kendall talked to a neighboring 16-year-old, a responsible kid, one who'd grown up around guns and who'd been to a gun school to learn how to handle them. He said he'd bring a gun over just to familiarize her. The weapon was a.38 semiautomatic. He said it was loaded with blanks. The neighbor had the gun aimed at one twins who reached over to turn the barrel away from him. The weapon fired accidentally, and Kendall's 11-year-old boy took one shot in the chest. He died at the hospital during surgery. "An inanimate object is nothing to fear," says Donna Rogers, executive editor of the magazine Law Enforcement Technology, "but the criminal mind is frightening." It's a familiar argument: Guns don't kill people, people do. Rogers presents an essentially moralistic view of the world, where people are either good or bad and use guns for good or bad. According to this viewpoint, the dominant problem for our society is making sure that criminals do not have access to guns. Sharon Kendall, naturally, disagrees. More surprisingly, so does James Mercy, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's violence division. In the CDC building where Mercy works-where the halls are decorated with posters urging bicyclists to wear helmets and kids to fasten seat belts-things are not so simple. There, violence is a public-health issue, and guns an object of scientific study. Since 1982 Mercy has conducted or, through his post at the country's premier preventive-health agency, paid for most of the influential studies on firearm violence. Ten years ago he remembers being warned that violence was for criminologists, that he should stick to studying how infectious diseases spread. But Mercy and a handful of colleagues have quietly transformed the way we look at the seemingly intractable social problem of gun violence. In the research they've conducted, guns have their own status as "pathogens" or "causative agents." And though accidental gun deaths are not the epidemic, "lethality" is now seen to originate not only (and maybe not even primarily) from the bad-guy shooter but from the inanimate gun. Thirty-nine years old, Mercy is trim, has equal amounts of hair on face and head, and sticks to a science-speak guaranteed to keep him off TV. "Causal associations" are what he talks about, or, if pushed, "strong associations." (A plaque hanging on the wall of his office cites him for excellence with statistics.) Get him to say an argument is "oversimplified" and you've cut pretty near his emotional quick. Yet when he saw the new crop of print advertisements linking guns to women's safety-"He's followed you for two weeks," read an NRA ad, "he'll rape you in two minutes"-Mercy was beside himself. "I was offended," he says. "It's so public. It's in magazine ads. Playing on fear to market a product." Mercy looked at the assumptions behind the ads and asked a series of questions: Where was the data to show that the 120 million guns already in American homes did more good than harm? Did women truly face more danger from vicious strangers than from other threats? What was the threat that guns were most often used against? "I felt women needed to know what the reality was," Mercy says. Before he finished, some scientists would conclude that guns bore a strong causal association not to safety but to increased violence. Every two years more Americans die from firearm injuries in the United States than died during the entire Vietnam War. To find out why, Mercy worked with Arthur Kellermann, then chief of emergency medicine at the University of Tennessee, pored over eleven years of FBI reports on gun homicide-215,273 in all. They wanted to offer a risk-benefit analysis of gun ownership. The results, published in The Journal of Trauma, were surprising: Men tended to be killed by strangers, but, news reports to the contrary, the killing of a woman by a stranger was rare. Murder is often thought of as an unfortunate add-on to another crime, like robbery or rape. Research shows otherwise. The United States has the highest murder rate of any Western industrialized country, yet more than 80 percent of the time, homicide is an exclamation point at the end of an argument. And that argument usually starts at home. "The home can be a dangerous place," says Kellermann, "but evidence suggests that the danger comes most often from within." Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women: One in four will be beaten by an intimate, which accounts for more visits to emergency rooms than car crashes, muggings, and rapes combined. To some, this may be an even stronger reason for a woman to arm herself. "It's a very bad strategy," says Joan Sculli of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Hempstead, New York. Sculli says that the experience of her group, which runs battered women's shelters, is that a woman is very likely to have her own gun used against her. "A weapon never improves a situation, and it increases the risk that an even greater tragedy is going to happen," she says. What Sculli has witnessed in her program's shelters is borne out in the CDC-sponsored research. In Atlanta, when a gun was involved in domestic violence, death was twelve times more likely. Mercy learned that, overwhelmingly, it was the woman who died. But what if a woman-or any potential victim-does manage to turn a gun against an attacker? Gun ads imply that at the right moment, a firearm could be an unrivaled self-defense tool. (Even Mercy agrees. "I would never argue that a gun would never be valuable under any circumstance.") So Mercy funded Kellermann and Donald Reay to scan six years' worth of Seattle-area police records to find out who got killed every time a gun caused a death in a home. Self-defense, it turned out, accounted for a tiny percentage of deaths by gun. Indeed, as the researchers reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, almost everywhere guns were used there was trouble. For every case of justifiable homicide with a gun, there were 43 murders, suicides or accidental deaths. The most important risk, one that gun manufacturers didn't suggest and perhaps didn't even suspect, was to the person using the gun. "There are more firearm suicides than firearm homicides in the United States-about 18,000 a year compared to about 16,000 a year," says Mercy. "And yet we continue to debate the problem around the crime issue. We always fall into that." At the Seattle Police Department, Mercy's view jibes with the day- to-day experience of the cops. "A gun is much more frequently used for suicide than justifiable self-defense," says Vinette Tichi, a police spokeswoman. (She stuck to this despite a recent , prominently covered Seattle case in which a woman with a handgun held a rapist at bay in her home until police arrived.) In a follow-up study, Kellermann discovered that just having a firearm around the home raises the chance of suicide five times. That risk appears to fall disproportionately on people under the age of 24. Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in America. For those aged 15 to 24, whose suicide rates have tripled in the past 40 years, it is the third leading cause of death-and guns are now their favorite method. Gaps do exist in the data Mercy has so far assembled. The research has focused on murder, for example, where statistics are relatively easy to come by. But what if someone wings an assailant or scares him off by merely waving a gun? (Or keeps him prisoner in the bath room until the cops show, which is what that Seattle woman did.) The NRA claims that guns are used one million times each year in self-defense, but there appear to be no firm statistics to back this up. (Mercy says that's one of the next research goals.) For the moment, the hardest data come from Duke University's Philip Cook, who studied violence and guns for the National Academy of Sciences. "In practice," he says, "it's very rare that someone who does have a gun will be able to use it in self-defense." The idea that guns are themselves a cause of violence is perhaps less satisfying than the idea that violent crime is caused by violent criminals. But consider an experiment in which Kellermann and colleague John Henry Sloan took the same types of criminals and, in effect, gave guns to some and withheld guns from others. They did this by selecting two cities, Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, cities with similar histories, geographies, climates, socioeconomic strata, and TV programs, as well as similar rates of burglary, robbery, and assault. In Vancouver what is strikingly different is that it's much tougher to come by a gun. What the researchers concluded is that guns don't change how much crime occurs, but they probably do influence how violent that crime becomes. In Seattle, as the study showed, the homicide rate is 60 percent higher than in Vancouver. Other research has demonstrated that criminals aren't particularly enterprising or industrious. Deprived of guns, they generally go about their business with what's at hand. In Washington, D.C., a tougher gun law actually reduced homicides by gun by 25 percent and suicides by gun by 23 percent through the mid-eighties. And all other death rates stayed the same. Criminals didn't, in other words, kill with a knife if they couldn't find a gun. Paul Blackman, director of research for the NRA, dismisses all this out of hand. "Most of the research (the CDC) comes up with is fairly crummy," he says. He claims there is no convincing evidence, not with homicide, not with suicide. But Cook, the National Academy of Sciences researcher and about the closest you'll get to an objective observer in this debate, says, "Paul's a smart fellow, but he makes his living saying things like that." Cook is prepared to make a statement that, for a researcher of the Mercy ilk, sounds dramatic enough to get him on Oprah. "The benefits of having a gun at home for self-protection are outweighed by the risks by a wide range," he says. The car-crash analogy is a favorite of health researchers. Bad drivers, it was once argued, cause accidents. By the 1980s public- health researchers had successfully shifted our focus from the driver to the car. Safer vehicles with automatic seat belts and air bags have helped reduce injuries. The campaign against death- by-car has been so effective that lately death-by-gun has surpassed it as the leading cause of lethal injury in two states, Texas and Louisiana. (And the rest of the country isn't far behind.) Last year former surgeon general C. Everett Koop explicitly applied the logic of car safety to guns. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, he suggested that gun owners ought to pass tests, get licenses, and meet minimum requirements. Call it sneaky or just blatantly commercial, but the mounting data aren't changing the way guns are marketed. No doubt you'll see more ads like this one in Women & Guns magazine: "2:00 A.M. is no time to wish you'd bought a Colt." But is the campaign to sell guns to women working? Around the time Mercy saw his first gun ad, Time and Newsweek reported that women were indeed rushing to bear arms. The figures quoted jumped from six million to twelve million to as high as seventeen million supposedly new female gun owners. Elizabeth Swasey, director of the Office of Women's Issues and Information at the National Rifle Association, still repeats to callers, "From 1983 to 1986, there was a 53 percent increase in the number of women who owned guns: It jumped from six million to just over twelve million." Never mind that her math is off (a 53 percent increase over six million is not twelve million, it's closer to nine million). Swasey's source-a Gallup poll paid for by gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson disavows the figures entirely. Further, research sponsored by the National Science Foundation shows that in the past decade, there's been no increase at all in how many women own guns. "An increase of that size" - 53 percent in just three years - "is an incredible behavioral change in anything, even in gum chewing," says Tom Smith at the National Opinion Research Center out of the University of Chicago. "It is not believable." The National Opinion Research Center found no change in the percentage of women who owned guns from 1980 to 1991. What is more likely behind the emotional appeals to the women's market is a general trend of stagnant gun sales. By the 1980s production of firearms had leveled off, says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "The industry needs to find new markets to survive," reported the ever-candid American Rifleman. Yet the viewpoint of Mercy et al. is gaining ground. Suddenly the country's top cop, Attorney General Janet Reno, and the country's top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, seem to be finishing each other's sentences. "The growth of violence ... is a health problem as much as a criminal problem," says Reno. "People are beginning to change their thinking and look at violence as a health problem," says Shalala. Congresswoman Pat Schroeder has already introduced legislation to fund more CDC research on gun deaths in America. "The point," she says, "is to promote thinking that gun violence is a public health and safety issue as opposed to a rights and control issue." Mercy is especially gratified that women are beginning to reject gun manufacturers as representatives for their views. "The whole issue of women's empowerment we have been working on for 20 years is being co-opted by these damn gun manufacturers," fumes Betty Friedan, who calls the trend "pernicious." She recently organized a Los Angeles symposium on guns that leaned heavily on Mercy's work. And though the magazine Women & Guns has publicized itself with a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady and handgun owner, not everything is passed down from mother to daughter. Anne Roosevelt, Eleanor's granddaughter and Chicago's director of Museums in the Park, was among those at Friedan's symposium, where the following resolution was adopted: "Guns are killing us, not protecting us." The NRA bitterly complains that the CDC and its new allies have a preset agenda: strict gun control. A CDC chief did once admit that the agency is working on a vaccination for violence. Mercy, ever careful, says, "Nobody knows what works yet." But he does insist on one point: "What is being used to sell guns to women is a myth." From Mercy's mouth this has an almost unbelievably telegenic feel. Or maybe his drab vocabulary always hid an idealist's heart. * * * * * -- Larry Cipriani, [l v cipriani] at [att.com] or attmail!lcipriani