Thus, we get today's letter from Joe Moore of Oklahoma City. This is one of the paper's "Letters of the Month" so one would hope that it is well-written, intellectually sound, and makes some trenchant observations. Unfortunately, it fails in most regards.
Mr Moore begins:
Tyler Schwartz (Your Views, Dec. 29) wrote that 31,000 Americans are annually 'gunned down' in private homes and backyards. This is a misleading distortion. Of the U.S. firearms-related deaths in 2011, the latest year for which full statistics are available from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, 17,000 were suicides — not innocent citizens criminally gunned down. Another 9,000 involved only inter-gang and intra-gang warfare — not innocent citizens criminally gunned down.
About 4,000 more were criminals, who, while in the commission of a felony, were killed by police and armed private citizens. Fewer than 2,000 innocent citizens were actually 'gunned down' that year.
Whoa. First off, this letter originally ran back on January 12th. Why not announce it as the "winner" of the special "Letter of the Month" award back then? Perhaps they wanted to wait until the end of the month? But then, it is half way into February! Do the editors really put any thought into this meaningless "award" at all?!?
As noted already, the Oklahoman is famous for running letters that say whatever, even if the "facts" stated therein are completely baseless. So red flags should immediately come up when someone starts putting out gun "facts" in their letters.
Moreover, it is sort of pathetic the editors are "rewarding" a letter that attacks another letter (editors: there are these things called hyperlinks where you can direct readers to articles and letters previously published!!!) that critiques one of your own editorials. It's the whole point/counter-point on steroids. Classless, but perhaps expected.
Anyhow, Mr Schwartz originally notes that "the 100 or so yearly deaths from mass killings shouldn't serve as the primary impetus for discourse on preventing firearm-related violence. The 31,000 Americans gunned down annually in our backyards and private homes should serve as that impetus." Mr Moore disagrees with these numbers-- and claims that facts are being distorted.
So what are the facts? To be sure, Mr Moore is right that ca. 19,000 (he says 17,000; my figures are different-- but I have linked mine so they are, unless proven different-- superior) of those 31,000 deaths are due to suicide. But it isn't clear why those should be discounted in the larger discussion of what guns bring to the table in terms of the danger of guns in society. While it is difficult to arrive at solid numbers, it is easy to see how guns facilitate suicide-- it is much quicker and easier to grab a weapon and pull a trigger than it is to engage in some of the other more common methods of suicide-- like jumping off a high edifice, or taking drugs, or whatever. Indeed, just over half of all suicides come via firearm. But one imagines that some people would probably be alive right now if their access to firearms were limited when it came to wanting to off themselves.
Nevertheless, Mr Moore dismisses these 19,000 firearm deaths as not worth considering and moves on. Amazingly, he then goes on to say that some 9,000 firearm deaths are gang-related and thus also not worth considering in the gun debate. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know where he gets this number. A blog posts the same thing (8,880 to be exact), but the link that the blog uses to back up its number provides no such support. Indeed, neither the number 8,880 nor the word "gang" shows up in the report.
Assuming this is true (a bold assumption, and one must even wonder who is in charge of determining if something is "gang-related" in the first place), let us wonder if we need to just dismiss those numbers out of hand. Read through some of these murder blotters for a moment. Even though none of these specifically say "gang-related" (definitions, definitions...), if we posit that some significant number of handgun-related murders are gang-related (as Mr Moore does), then at least some of those listed in the above link no doubt fit in that category. And yet, do we imagine that we should just dismiss those deaths as unimportant in a discussion of handguns and their role in American society?
If a 19-year-old kid is shot to death in the middle of the afternoon on your block, should you comfort yourself and just think, well, it was probably gang-related so I am perfectly safe? Does Mr Moore know that stray "gang-related" bullets can kill people??? It seems callous and cold to imagine that if some teen-aged boy gets involved in some bad things as a kid that his death is somehow OK or deserved.
Going on, Mr Moore dismisses another 4,000 deaths as being OK because it was by the police or "armed private citizens." No doubt with this last bit, Mr Moore is imagining the largely fictional (but for people like him, totally ejaculation-worthy) scenario where some crazed murderer breaks into Mr & Mrs Whitebread's home, only to be gunned down at the last minute by Mr Whitebread and his arsenal of weapons. And while we can imagine that sometimes there are justified reasons for killing someone who is in the act of committing a robbery, there are certainly plenty of others were there is scant justification-- of when it is completely accidental!
So we are left with only 2,000 people, according to Mr Moore, who didn't deserve to be "gunned down" in 2011. As I have shown, though, Mr Moore's own interpretation of the data he presents is slanted in its own way. He imagines that if a brown kid is gunned down in Urban America because of "gang-related" activities, it has no impact on anyone-- not the kid's family, or his neighbors, or friends. He just dies because he deserved it. Likewise, if a person with depression issues takes his own life with an easily-obtained handgun, that is also OK. Because-- obviously-- if a gun weren't available, he would have done it another way (even if there is evidence to the contrary).
While there is certainly plenty of room for honest discussion about guns in society, letters like Mr Moore's hardly fit the bill. His statistics-- and his logic for using certain numbers-- are pathetic and sad. And yet the Oklahoman-- as a sop to the gun-toting god-fearers-- runs this sort of discussion to further its right-wing agenda. A real newspaper would never consider Mr Moore's letter at all, let alone award it as a "Letter of the Month". But the Oklahoman isn't a real newspaper and so things like this are printed-- and praised.
Sad.
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