Out of Control

I listen to many different podcasts and in turn I am going into comedy now after major news and true crime ones finally exhausted me. And usually they are quite entertaining, very vacuous and focused on pop culture. One I did listen to until finally it became too exhausting was Heather McDonald’s Juicy Scoop. From her I began to listen to Chris Franjola’s Cover to Cover and Julie and Brandy’s Dumb Gay Politics. I have seen her and Chris live and enjoyed the shows and now I don’t. I don’t mind that they are not the most informed folks of all time and that endless discussions on Britney Spears is tedious, so all things eventually will run a course and this finally has. The Nation’s obsession on Scandoval including inviting the dumped partner to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner says more about the lack of IQ over lack of actual News and Newsmakers. But when two Comedians are spending an hour discussing issues that they seem ill informed and equipped to discuss it is time to pull the plug. The reality is that they both live and work in Hollywood and with that could pick up a phone and contact Laverne Cox or Elliot Page who just wrote his Memoirs and is out on the book tour circuit to discuss these concerns and fears Heather McDonald has over Trans women. She has not expressed that over Women becoming Men but both of those individuals fall into each and could perhaps explain some things to her. But I doubt she will listen. She talks over Chris in this episode, rants and makes illogical examples of how Trans Women will harm Women and especially in Prison. Okay so after my head stopped spinning I went to their respective Facebook and Instagram pages to make a point. Many agreed and there are likely many who feel like me that this is not an argument worth having. But point made that again it is not appropriate period. This is get in your own lane and unless it affects you personally or professionally why the fuck do you care?

But as I have written about the rise of Trans bills and laws that are further doing damage to many in this country struggling with their sexual and gender identity I was truly horrified to find the supposed Activists were former pro Trans individuals who had decided to detransition and return to their original gender. Nothing wrong with that it is again a choice and they have the right to make those personal decisions about their health as it has NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. Nor should they project their decisions onto anyone looking into doing the same or changing their gender. This is an individual decision that is only their and their family/friends business. This is the same argument we have made repeatedly over Marriage, interracial or same sex, and now with regards to Abortion and bodily autonomy. But the same groups that preach Liberty and Freedom have no problem taking others away from them when it suits. This suit is one large and ill fitting one.

So when you turn of a podcast for a laugh and get Heather McDonald ranting about a story in a Sorority in Colorado accepting a Trans Woman as a Member posing this individual as weird and a pervert and making them unsafe, is sad.pathetic.grim. And the best part the Girl DOES NOT LIVE in the Sorority House but has come to visit to get acquainted with the group. Clearly that welcome mat is tucked away. Perhaps they need to do this thing called TALKING to her to understand and in turn learn about her and her decision to change genders. Frankly I would love to know why anyone would join a Sorority but have it. It was a bizarre rant that led her Guest Chris to compare the hysteria over Trans people to the issue with Bed Bugs. That was to say the least strange and then of course mock her looks comparing her to the actor Jack Black. Well you can change a Leopard’s spots and still be a Leopard I guess. But then again we as Women are more than familiar with hearing about our looks. Some things change but that trope nope.

When this is the national discussion between two Comics this is how bad it is. That you cannot find anything in contemporary culture to discuss and laugh at but rant about a bunch of girls upset their club now is taking on a Member who looks less like Laverne Cox and well yes like Jack Black, is really what it is about. Not the gender switch and at least that point Chris made for if she was in fact a natural born girl and looked like that (and yes women come in all shapes and sizes) she would have found the Welcome mat pulled in as well.

We have a gun problem in America. We have health care problems in America. We have Democracy at risk and we have a massive Immigration crisis and a War abroad that is taking a toll. With that we are worried about .25% of a population that causes no threat what.so.ever. Change Trans to “Black” “Asian” “Native” “Latino” and then see the picture there. It is not a pretty one.

And this will be my last mention of Trans issues. I support anyone who needs to fix or change their lives. I will respect and acknowledge we may agree to disagree on the fuss over pronouns, names and endless issues over who has a priority when it comes to attention to this or any issue. We choose to decide the matters of import and this is not one in my life. I do not make decisions on what to go, who to see, read or care about because of that. I can find even those I disagree with a common ground and move on from there. This particular issue is frankly one that has no impact on me at all, can cause me no harm and with that I want to live and let live. The end on that.

The issue of Guns however do have an impact. I can be killed at work or on the street, in a store, on a bus, in a theater, or any place I go that many gather. Guns are the largest health problem in the nation but banning health care for a marginal group of people seem to take the priority seem so be, I disagree as I will never stop discussing gun rights and the need to protect ourselves from Guns that kill ALL kinds of people regardless of the kind but often most directed to whom? The Marginalized ones.

Below is a timeline of Gun Control efforts and laws from the inception through the early 20th Century to 2019. And below that another breakdown of how those laws have transpired via the psychology and mentality associated with Guns and Gun Control. And lastly and Editorial from the New York Times about how FEAR is the predominant reason behind most Gun purchases and who seems to buy and own them; and in turn how that it is reinforced during training and sales of guns. The current stats is that the amount of guns in this country exceed licensed vehicles and cell phones.

• US has 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, report finds
• Only country with more civilian-owned firearms than people

US gun owners possess 393.3 million weapons, according to a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization, which is higher than the country’s population now of about 330 million. India, which has almost 1.4 billion people, had the second most civilian-owned firearms with 71.1 million.

Here’s a Timeline of the Major Gun Control Laws in America

By Sarah Gray Time Magazine April 30, 2019 11:13

Through their grief, the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have become a political force. One week after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly used an AR-15 to shoot and kill 17 people at the school, around 100 students met with lawmakers in the Florida state capital to advocate for gun control. They also met with President Trump in the White House Wednesday. In organizing the March For Our Lives, they’ll rally next month in Washington, D.C.

But with the right of gun ownership enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, gun regulations remain a thorny issue in the U.S. Throughout history, there have been several laws and Supreme Court cases that have shaped the Second Amendment. This timeline outlines the most important events in influencing the country’s federal gun policy.

1791

On Dec. 15, 1791, ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution — eventually known as the Bill of Rights — were ratified. The second of them said: “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.”

1934

The first piece of national gun control legislation was passed on June 26, 1934. The National Firearms Act (NFA) — part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal for Crime“— was meant to curtail “gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

The NFA imposed a tax on the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of firearms listed in the law, among them short-barrel shotguns and rifles, machine guns, firearm mufflers and silencers. Due to constitutional flaws, the NFA was modified several times. The $200 tax, which was high for the era, was put in place to curtail the transfer of these weapons.

1938

The Federal Firearms Act (FFA) of 1938 required gun manufacturers, importers, and dealers to obtain a federal firearms license. It also defined a group of people, including convicted felons, who could not purchase guns, and mandated that gun sellers keep customer records. The FFA was repealed in 1968 by the Gun Control Act (GCA), though many of its provisions were reenacted by the GCA.

1939

In 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case United States v. Miller, ruling that through the National Firearms Act of 1934, Congress could regulate the interstate selling of a short barrel shotgun. The court stated that there was no evidence that a sawed off shotgun “has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” and thus “we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.”

1968

Following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA repealed and replaced the FFA, updated Title II of the NFA to fix constitutional issues, added language about “destructive devices” (such as bombs, mines and grenades) and expanded the definition of “machine gun.”

Overall the bill banned importing guns that have “no sporting purpose,” imposed age restrictions for the purchase of handguns (gun owners had to be 21), prohibited felons, the mentally ill, and others from purchasing guns, required that all manufactured or imported guns have a serial number, and according to the ATF, imposed “stricter licensing and regulation on the firearms industry.”

1986

In 1986 the Firearm Owners Protection Act was passed by Congress. The law mainly enacted protections for gun owners — prohibiting a national registry of dealer records, limiting ATF inspections to once per year (unless there are multiple infractions), softening what is defined as “engaging in the business” of selling firearms, and allowing licensed dealers to sell firearms at “gun shows” in their state. It also loosened regulations on the sale and transfer of ammunition.

The bill also codified some gun control measures, including expanding the GCA to prohibit civilian ownership or transfer of machine guns made after May 19, 1986, and redefining “silencer” to include parts intended to make silencers.

1993

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 is named after White House press secretary James Brady, who was permanently disabled from an injury suffered during an attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. (Brady died in 2014). It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law, which amends the GCA, requires that background checks be completed before a gun is purchased from a licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer. It established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is maintained by the FBI.

1994

Tucked into the sweeping and controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Clinton in 1994, is the subsection titled Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. This is known as the assault weapons ban — a temporary prohibition in effect from September of 1994 to September of 2004. Multiple attempts to renew the ban have failed.

The provisions of the bill outlawed the ability to “manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon,” unless it was “lawfully possessed under Federal law on the date of the enactment of this subsection.” Nineteen military-style or “copy-cat” assault weapons—including AR-15s, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, etc.—could not be manufactured or sold. It also banned “certain high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than ten rounds,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice Fact Sheet.

2003

The Tiahrt Amendment, proposed by Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), prohibited the ATF from publicly releasing data showing where criminals purchased their firearms and stipulated that only law enforcement officers or prosecutors could access such information.

“The law effectively shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny,” The Washington Post wrote in 2010. “It also keeps the spotlight off the relationship between rogue gun dealers and the black market in firearms.”

There have been efforts to repeal this amendment.

2005

In 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was signed by President George W. Bush to prevent gun manufacturers from being named in federal or state civil suits by those who were victims of crimes involving guns made by that company.

The first provision of this law is “to prohibit causes of action against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers of firearms or ammunition products, and their trade associations, for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended.” It also dismissed pending cases on October 26, 2005.

2008

District of Columbia v. Heller essentially changed a nearly 70-year precedent set by Miller in 1939. While the Miller ruling focused on the “well regulated militia” portion of the Second Amendment (known as the “collective rights theory” and referring to a state’s right to defend itself), Heller focused on the “individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”

Heller challenged the constitutionality of a 32-year-old handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and found, “The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment.”

It did not however nullify other gun control provisions. “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” stated the ruling.

A Brief History of Guns in the U.S.

How to explain Americans’ astonishing personal arsenal? Start with politics, fear, and marketing.

By Cathy Shufro Bloomberg News

Let’s start with a few facts about firearms in the U.S.: Americans own 393 million guns, the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey reports.

Firearms can be found in 44% of U.S. households, according to a 2020 Gallup survey.

And, tragically: Almost half of Americans know someone who has been shot, a 2017 Pew Research Center report noted.

How did we get here? Marketing, politics, racism, fear, and other forces have contributed to America’s exceptional proliferation of guns.

Soon after the end of the Civil War, gunmakers with surpluses sought peacetime customers. They convinced dry goods stores to sell handguns alongside flour and sugar; they ran classified ads in newspapers; and they told parents that a rifle would help “real boys” to develop “sturdy manliness.” Private gun ownership dramatically expanded.

The end of slavery catalyzed the formation of armed groups, some seeking to protect newly freed Black men, others to terrorize them. After Reconstruction failed, supremacist military groups like the White League in Louisiana used guns to threaten and sometimes murder Black men attempting to vote.

While the popular imagination holds that gunslingers sauntered down the dusty streets of Western towns, that’s largely a myth, according to UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, JD. “Frontier towns—places like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge—actually had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation,” Winkler wrote in the Huffington Post. When visitors arrived in Dodge City, Kansas, they encountered a billboard announcing, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.”

Indeed, by the early 1900s, 43 states limited or banned firearms in public places. Gun control would become sharply divisive only with the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, made law after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The legislation limited interstate sales of firearms but did too little to satisfy gun control advocates including President Lyndon Johnson.

By the late 1990s, fear became a potent selling point as cultural attitudes changed. In a 1999 poll, most gun owners said they kept guns for hunting and target shooting; only 26% cited protection as paramount. By 2015, however, 63% cited self-defense as a primary motivation for gun ownership, according to a 2015 National Firearms Survey. In reality, having access to a gun triples a person’s risk of suicide and nearly doubles the risk of being a homicide victim, according to a 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine meta-analysis. For a woman living with an abusive partner, the risk of being murdered increases fivefold if the partner has a gun, according to an American Journal of Public Health study led by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, MSN, a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy at the Bloomberg School.

As gun owners increasingly emphasized self-defense in recent decades, restrictions on carrying concealed firearms evaporated. Whereas in 1990 concealed carry in public spaces was illegal in 16 states (including Texas), by 2013 all 50 states and Washington, D.C., allowed some civilians to carry hidden guns.

At the same time, gunmakers have redesigned their wares. “Technology has focused on making smaller and smaller handguns, with more lethality, and with almost no attention to safety,” says Josh Horwitz, JD, who directs the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. For example, the popular $450 Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 2.0 pistol is 6 inches long and carries 15 9mm cartridges. And children now have their own firearms, like the 2½-pound, .22-caliber Crickett (“my first rifle”). Its gunstock comes in pink, camo, and “amendment”—Second Amendment text overlaid on American flags.

Horwitz says lobbyists and owners of military-style weapons increasingly embrace “the insurrectionist idea.” Since 2009, he has warned of armed citizens who claim that “threatening violence against government officials is within normal bounds of political discourse.”

The multiplication of “stand-your-ground” laws marked another shift in American attitudes, with Florida taking the lead in 2005. Today, 34 states give gun owners the right to use deadly force outside of the home with no duty to retreat or use other means to protect themselves. The laws “make it much easier for a person to legally kill someone,” writes University of Texas sociologist Harel Shapira, PhD, who credits the laws with “the militarization of everyday life.”

“In almost any aspect of public health, culture and policy are reinforcing and reflecting each other,” says Daniel Webster, ScD ’91, MPH, director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. “You gradually see carrying a gun around as normative.” Forty years ago, if someone brought a gun to a party, Webster says, “you would have been shocked. It would have been incredibly abnormal.” Now, gun ownership is a lifestyle choice, one rooted in the individualism “baked into our culture and our laws.”

In recent decades, the National Rifle Association has identified its greatest foe as the government itself. After Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, NRA President Wayne LaPierre told members that the bill “gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

“The gun lobby thrives on fear and drives fear,” says Horwitz. In many ways, he adds, “this is about white men feeling less powerful.”

Horwitz notes that gun sales rose during the past year. “People are afraid of other people with guns, so now they’re buying guns. Breaking that cycle is really important. Are we too far down the road? I don’t think we are, but we’ve got to make major changes in how we approach gun violence, soon.”

“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.”

Gun owners embrace the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, claiming it guarantees that civilians can own and use guns. Contemporary interpretations of the amendment diverge, however. A key issue is whether “the people” means individuals or the collective. In the second instance, the right to bear arms would derive from a state’s interest in being able to raise a militia.

Emory University Professor Carol Anderson, PhD, offers a historian’s interpretation of the amendment’s origin, calling it “a bribe”: When the Constitution was drafted, Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry of Virginia warned that Southerners couldn’t count on federal help if enslaved people revolted. James Madison needed Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution, so he promised to draft a Bill of Rights once Congress met. For this reason, Anderson argues, the Second Amendment is “steeped in anti-blackness.”

Firearms Classes Taught Me, and America, a Very Dangerous Lesson

May 16, 2023

By Harel Shapira Harel Shapira is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin.

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I did not grow up around guns, but 10 years ago, I started attending firearms training classes. I wasn’t there to learn how to protect myself or my family. I was there to learn what was taught in the classes themselves, which a broad coalition of groups — including many police officers, Republican and Democratic legislators and gun violence prevention organizations — have hailed as a path out of the nation’s epidemic of violence.

I found something very different. The classes I attended trained students to believe that their lives are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy.

I took 42 classes and conducted interviews with 52 instructors and 118 students, in traditionally red states like Texas as well as blue states like Massachusetts, in urban areas like Newark as well as rural Southern Illinois. (The instructors knew I was there to conduct research; in keeping with my university’s academic protocols, I had permission to take notes in class and to record interviews but not to publish anyone’s names.) Most of all, I immersed myself in firearms schools in Texas, where I live, that cater to people who wish to learn how to use guns for self-defense. Some instructors in these schools told me they have been involved in drafting public safety protocols or running active shooter drills for public school teachers. Some of these instructors’ students have gone on to open training programs of their own.

While American gun culture has diversified in recent years, the overwhelming majority of firearms instructors — in Texas it’s 75 percent — are white men. Many have a background in the military or law enforcement. Nationwide, more than 125,000 of them have taken a certification course offered by the National Rifle Association. Many states require instructors to complete additional training.

First, the good news: Every firearms instructor I encountered was extremely serious about preventing accidents. When a student inadvertently pointed his gun at me for a moment, our instructor immediately chastised him. And when the student objected, saying he didn’t have his finger on the trigger, the instructor became livid and threatened to kick him out of class.

But teaching people how to avoid shooting someone by accident is a small part of what these classes are about. The primary lessons are about if and when to shoot someone on purpose. And this is where the trouble begins.

Instructors repeatedly told me that a big part of their job was to make people feel vulnerable, to make them aware of dangers they were not conscious of before to understand that bad things can happen at any time. One instructor told me he encourages students to carry their gun at all times. If students say they plan to leave it in the car, he responds, “So what you’re telling me is the only time you are ever going to get attacked is if you are in your car?”

The instructors describe a world teeming with violent and deranged individuals. And not just any individuals. The scenarios cluster around the public spaces of racially diverse cities. “More often than not,” an instructor who had been a high-ranking police officer said, the place you’re likely to be attacked is “in an urban part of society.” Another instructor, also a former police officer, tells students to keep their gas tanks filled at least halfway to avoid situations in which “it’s the middle of the night and you need to get gas in downtown Houston.”

Outside a restaurant in Austin, an instructor saw a disheveled man sitting on the curb and nudged me in the other direction, directing me to pick up the pace. He said he had detected “potential predatory behavior” and wasn’t sure if this man was a panhandler or someone about to stick a gun in our faces.

Instructors repeatedly told me that statistics about crime are meaningless when it comes to the need to carry a gun. It’s not the odds, I heard on numerous occasions; it’s the consequences. I have been taught strategies for avoiding interactions with strangers. I have participated in scenario training sessions in which students carrying guns loaded with plastic ammunition enact mock burglaries, home invasions, mass shootings and attacks by Islamic terrorists. Repeatedly the lesson was that I ought to shoot even when my instincts might tell me otherwise.

For example, in one scenario, an instructor pretended to punch someone I know and care about in the head. The instructor’s back was toward me, so I held my fire. Later, I told him that I hadn’t had enough information to act. Wrong answer. Being punched in the head can be fatal, the instructor told me, so there was no time to wait. I had never heard someone advocate shooting an unarmed person in the back. The instructor did it with a sense of moral, legal and tactical clarity and conviction.

Officially, the message is caution. A line I heard from multiple instructors was: If you are not about to die in the next three seconds, don’t pull the trigger. If you are not 100 percent sure, then don’t shoot. But relentlessly harping on the dangers that surround us changes the way students assess those risks.

I experienced it myself.

On a recent night I saw a driver who didn’t appear to realize that he was going the wrong way on a one-way street. As the other car approached, I began to slow down, roll down my window and stick my hand out in a friendly gesture. Suddenly I worried the other driver might have a gun. How might he respond to someone slowing down a car and waving at him in the middle of the night? Would he shoot? Probably not. But it’s not the odds, I remember telling myself; it’s the consequences.

That’s the great irony of firearms training: In learning how to use a gun for self-defense, something that seems like it might give you confidence and a sense of safety, people end up feeling more afraid than before. “I knew the world was dangerous,” a student told me after class one day, “but this was a real wake-up call.” “He scared the daylights out of me,” I heard from another student, who went straight from class to a gun store. Others who already owned a gun told me the classes made them feel the gun should be bigger, with a larger caliber and more capacity.

Firearms instructors are not the only ones who make an appearance at self-defense classes. Lawyers do, too. Lawyers who specialize in defending gun owners. They go to classes and tell students how to talk (or not) to 911 operators and police officers in the event they shoot someone. In one seminar, a lawyer emphasized the importance of explaining, “I had no choice.”

With more than 200 mass shootings in our country this year alone, advocates of gun regulation often cite the tragic number of lives lost or the fact that gun-related injuries have surpassed car accidents as the nation’s leading cause of injury-related death among people under 24. But another, less recognized casualty is the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable. The N.R.A. says that “an armed society is a polite society.” But learning to carry a gun isn’t teaching Americans to have good manners. It’s training them to be suspicious and atomized, learning to protect themselves, no matter how great the risk to others. It’s training them to not be citizens.