The stubborn realities of firearms

When Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine started to speak after the Dayton mass shooting, an impatient audience began to chant, “Do something!”

Yes, do something. But the question is: What?

The AFT says there are tens of thousands of guns in the Buckeye State alone — nearly 15 firearms for every man, woman and child there. And that’s just the firearms the AFT knows about, in one state.

How are you going to get guns away from the people you decide shouldn’t have them? How do you go about deciding who should have guns and who shouldn’t?

Okay, don’t let criminals and insane people have them. Fair enough.

But good luck regarding the former, who by definition are not fastidious when it comes to observing the law.

And as for the latter, how are you going to pinpoint and isolate them from the rest of the population?

Virtually all of the mass shooters have been people who suddenly went crazy.

Until the moment they did, there was little or no evidence, or only vague evidence, for labelling them whacko.

How are we going to anticipate who’s going to go mentally kablooey and make sure they don’t have guns?

Keeping guns away from ticking human time bombs is something certainly worthy of serious thought.

It doesn’t, however, sound like the easy task many politicians — for example, the thundering herd of virtue-signaling Democratic presidential candidates — would have you believe it is.

If there were an easy, simple fix to prevent massacres like the ones in El Paso and Dayton, wouldn’t it have been put in place long ago?

What’s easy and simple is not the fix but the placing of blame.

It’s easy to blame the NRA and its supposed diabolical political influence.

Or the right-wing deplorables clinging to their guns along with their bibles and racial prejudice.

Or the all-purposed scapegoat, Trump.

Is Barack Obama to be held responsible for the massacres during his presidency — 13 dead, Ft. Hood; 27 dead, Newtown, Conn.; 14 dead, San Bernadino, Cal.; 49 dead Orlando, Fla., etc?

There are loud voices saying demon guns are to blame, the guns themselves, just as temperance biddies once said demon rum was to blame for drunkenness, not the drunks themselves.

The very availability of guns, say the glib and allknowing among us, entices their owners to resort to lawlessness, sometimes to mass violence.

Were it not for guns, would swaggering, tattooed punk gangs have bibles tucked under their arms and be on their way to church instead of driveby shootings?

Certainly guns add to their menace. But do guns really explain their predatory, nihilistic lawlessness?

The facts don’t quite bear out that superficial analysis.

It’s certainly a truism that firearms accommodate acts of violence and are a routine instrument of such acts.

But acts of violence are, thankfully, actually minimal, in proportion to the vast number of guns out there.

The daunting fact is this: There are millions and millions of firearms in millions and millions of households, most of these weapons legally possessed.

Those who have fantasies that this massive firearms stash is somehow going to be banished — vaporized, as it were — by do-gooder legislative decree need to rein in their runaway imaginations. It’s not gonna happen, short of somebody coming up with a magic wand.

The Second Amendment, like it or not, stands athwart such fever dreams. For better or worse, the amendment complicates even many reform proposals short of the dreaded bugaboo of confiscation.

In any event, lots of luck ever persuading 38 states to agree to the elimination of that pesky amendment, as the Constitution would require.

Speaking of bugaboos, gun violence has no greater one than the reviled “assault rifle.” And it is undeniably a nasty piece of hardware, as it was designed to be.

Nearly all of the most horrific mass shootings have involved semi-automatic rifles (one squeeze of the trigger per shot). Such guns in the hands of the deranged are lethally efficient at mowing down large numbers of victims while keeping law enforcement at bay, no question about it.

The sale of such weapons could be outlawed, although that was tried before, to no avail. That could be tried again, of course, and polls indicate considerable public support now for doing so.

But what about the semi-automatic rifles already out there, legally purchased? Estimates put the numbers of such weapons legally sold, 1986-2015, at upwards of 17 million.

What’s the chance the owners are going to surrender those 17 million semi-automatic “assault” rifles? They would probably tell you, “I’m a sane, law-abiding person. I’ll give up mine when the drug-trafficking thugs give up theirs.”

Is a government that can’t enforce its own immigration laws or control its own spending capable of confiscating 17 million legally purchased semi-automatic rifles from American homes? Joe Biden seems to think so, but does anyone else?

In any case, handguns figure in firearms deaths nine times more than rifles do, and semi-automatic rifles are an even lesser factor in firearms fatalities.

So banning semi-automatic rifles would have, at best, a marginal effect on firearms carnage. It would be, as it was the last time it was tried, more an empty political gesture than a solution.

Then there’s a troubling statistic that doesn’t fit snugly into current political narratives: Most of 36,000 annual gun deaths — 22,000-plus — are suicides.

Whatever lies behind such terrible numbers, racial hatred, xenophobia and nationalistic white supremacy are unlikely explanations.

Here’s another fact to contemplate: Fully onehalf of gun deaths occur not in the rural boondocks of the much-maligned “gun culture,” but in 127 cities. And black Americans are 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide than whites — and are far more likely to be gunned down by fellow blacks than by whites.

To exasperated Americans chanting “Do something,” these are no doubt depressing ruminations. But realities are … realities.

Speaking of which, just ponder the number of firearms that are out there, total, in private hands. Estimates vary.

Let’s go with the most frequently cited one: 300 million.

That’s a frightening sum — especially no doubt to those of progressive sensibilities.

But here is a less depressing, though not exactly cheerful, thought: Such numbers give the 36,000 annual gun deaths an at least somewhat less disturbing context.

Thirty-six thousand gun deaths is 36,000 too many. But 36,000 deaths from 300 million firearms is hardly an astoundingly high rate of lethality given that many guns.

The math works out to the fractional 0.00012.

So, the homicide numbers, bad as they are, could be a lot worse. And in fact have been.

Random, lunatic mass shootings can’t be, and shouldn’t be, minimized in the grief they leave in their bloody wake and the terror they instill.

But the fact is they are a small percentage of the overall gun violence. Firearms casualties mount nightly in Chicago and Baltimore, by single and double digits, night after night after night. And they don’t make the news outside the cities where they routinely occur.

Meanwhile, though, the national murder rate has been steadily slipping downward, largely unnoted, from 6.3 per 100,000 in 1998 to 5.3 in 2014.

Violent crime overall also has been steadily trending downward too, from 567.8 per 100,000 in 1998 to 469 in 2010 to 382.9 in 2017, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. And this despite the proliferation of firearms.

There are death tolls to fret about — including, certainly. firearms — but hardly firearms alone.

There are, for example, the 60,000 or so fatal drug overdoses annually, not to mention the calculated elimination of hun

dreds of thousands of fetuses with fully developed human features — especially African-American fetuses, which are eliminated at more than triple the rate of white fetuses in America’s tax-subsidized abortion clinics.

For every facile guncontrol slogan, there’s a complicating reality.

Gun ownership is hardly confined to a tiny minority of yahoo Americans. According to a Pew Research Foundation survey, fully 30 percent of Americans own guns.

And — this surely will distress the leftish cohort while lifting NRA spirits — 36 percent of those who don’t own a firearm say they can see themselves owning one in the future.

The Pew survey, moreover, shows significant levels of gun ownership across racial and ethnic lines — 49 percent of white households, 32 percent of African American households and 21 percent of Latino households.

Even 25 percent of Democrat households possess the scorned and cursed instruments their party expends so much energy railing against.

Such percentages seem to constitute a substantial coalition, one that stands as a bulwark against efforts to infringe what legal gun owners widely, and staunchly, view as their rights.

So the political standoff over guns seems likely to continue — as well as, alas, the occasional, random eruption of deranged violence.

Meanwhile, self-righteous political sloganeering and slanderous scapegoating aren’t going to stop a single armed lunatic from going berserk.

The point here is not to suggest that nothing can be done or that nothing should be done. It’s simply to note that the issue of gun violence is hedged with mental health, legal, social and practical complications.

And milking the issue for poll numbers is not going to accomplish a damn thing.