Joel Mathis

Photo by  Mikhail Nilov  from  Pexels Henry Olsen at the Washington Post, on the FBI's scary murder statistics: "Murders in the United States rose by 30 percent in 2020, the largest one-year increase on record. There are likely many factors that contributed to the spike, but there’s one thing that clearly did not help: the blanket anti-police mantra adopted by many urban and national leaders after the killing of George Floyd" It pains me to admit he might be right*. Here's The Guardian in July:  Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 – even before pandemic-related shutdowns started in March, the analysis found. But there was also a “structural break” in the data in June, indicating “a large, statistically significant increase” in the homicide rate, around the same time as the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. But also:  A preprint study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, which has not yet been peer-review

 This piece in the NYT is frustrating: Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “How did we not know?” Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders. There has been lots of coverage of guns -as-a- major - tool -of- suicide , though. (Those links are all examples from within the last year.) The "media" has covered murders quite a bit, yes, but there has been a lot of reporting about the gun-suicide link. There has been a problem with gun-rights activists playing down those suicide numbers, though, for fear it will increase pressure to restrict gun sales somehow. In counting down top-three fake news stories about guns from 2017, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield asserted that suicides by firearms shouldn't be counted as "gun deaths," even though they very

I have a friend who says there's no such thing as "common sense gun control." Maybe if we just did the little things: Tens of thousands of people wanted by law enforcement officials have been removed this year from the FBI criminal background check database that prohibits fugitives from justice from buying guns.  The names were taken out after the FBI in February changed its legal interpretation of “fugitive from justice” to say it pertains only to wanted people who have crossed state lines.  What that means is that those fugitives who were previously prohibited under federal law from purchasing firearms can now buy them, unless barred for other reasons. So if you're accused of murder but haven't crossed state lines: Congratulations?

I believe that guns are tools made for the explicit purpose of killing. I think that sometimes, unfortunately, killing is necessary. I think that even when necessary, killing is morally fraught and not to be entered into lightly. I think the act of owning a gun is a signal to the world you have determined you can trustworthily decide when killing is correct. I think that’s … kind of extraordinary. I think I do not possess that sensibility myself. I think that even if I wanted to make gun ownership illegal, it would be impossible to do, politically, in America. I think I grew up in Kansas, around good people who possessed guns safely and with respect for life. I think I lived eight years in Philadelphia, around good people who feared for their lives because of guns. So. I think that firearms education - like the hunter safety classes of my Kansas youth - should be available wherever access to guns is available. Which is to say, just about everywhere. I think that the right to bear a

It seems to me that when liberals draw on particularized knowledge (say, of science) to make the case for certain policies (say, regarding climate change), they're accused of pointy-headedness, tyranny by bureaucracy, and general elitism. When conservatives draw on particularized knowledge - such as with guns - they're more "in touch with the people" and keepin' it real. This, coincidentally, lets them try to shut down conversations about gun regulations because folks on the left lack a certain expertise regarding the details of the issue.  A bit of an epistemic closure problem I'm not sure how to resolve, except to note the hypocrisy.  Anyway, one doesn't have to have particularized knowledge of guns or how they work, specifically, to note that just one man killed 59 people and wounded more than 500 more in just a matter of minutes the other night, nor to sense that perhaps something's amiss in our governance that apparently gathering the tools

My latest at PennLive : No, guns are not just "inanimate objects."  Yes, guns are tools. And yes, those tools don't operate without humans making the decisions.  But guns are a different type of tool. They are designed for one purpose only: To kill.  The simple fact is that guns are qualitatively different, are designed and made to be dangerous -- are prized, in fact, for the amount of injury and death they can inflict -- and that makes them worth considering differently than we do, say, a wrench. I also show why the "cars kill people too" argument is (ahem) fatally flawed. Please give it a read !

I believe in the right to self-defense. I believe that that right encompasses, to some extent, the right for individuals to bear arms — even though that's a particular right I personally choose not to exercise it. By recognizing that right I have, in recent years, focused my solutions to the gun-violence problem around the edges — solutions I thought might be effective in keeping guns out of the wrong hands (convicts, the mentally ill, domestic abusers, and so forth). I've even suggested expanding gun-safety classes. (Yes, I've also argued that guns, far from being the inanimate objects their defenders try to suggest they are, are uniquely efficient tools of death. It's possible to hold both ideas in my head.) It's meant nothing.  The latest mass shooting has changed my mind on one part of the issue, though. I now favor an assault weapons ban.  My conservative friends will be angry with me. Some will say "what do you mean by assault weapons?" They&

NRO's Charles CW Cooke: “It is not acceptable to treat the Second Amendment as if it is a second class or less important right, and it’s not acceptable to deprive individuals of it purely because they are under suspicion… In my view, the way to take someone’s rights is to convict them of something.” I hear this kind of thing a lot from my conservative friends, but it seems there's a kind of willful naiveté involved here. The reason our discussion of the Second Amendment is different is because the effects are different. As I've said a million times: The function of a gun is to kill. Other things that a gun is useful for — hunting, self-defense — are a byproduct of its function to kill. That differentiates it from other tools or inanimate objects that can also cause death: Yes, lots of people die in cars each year, but that's an accidental and unfortunate byproduct of the car's essential function to provide fast transportation — and, incidentally, we've

Two years ago, trying to find a radical solution to the gun violence problem in Philadelphia, I suggested that maybe it was time to stop clamping down on guns and time to start inculcating a culture of responsible gun ownership and usage. It was kind of a controversial idea.  While there are plenty of guns circulating in Philadelphia, there are also plenty of guns — per-capita, at least — in my home state of Kansas. Yet there are relatively few gun deaths there: As best I can tell, 9.9 gun deaths per 100,000 residents in Kansas , compared to 24.3 in Philadelphia . (The comparisons aren’t quite exact, but I think the disparity between those two numbers is probably in the neighborhood of correct.) Why?  One of the reasons, surely, is that cities are simply more violent places: Living cheek by jowl can produce short tempers; short tempers can produce violence.  But it’s also true that my rural friends have built a culture of gun safety that goes hand-in-hand with the culture of

Whenever a gun massacre happens—at Virginia Tech, say, or someplace else—we usually get a revival of the mostly neutered gun debate in this country. Some liberals decry lax gun laws, some conservatives suggest that if only everybody was armed you'd somehow see less gun violence. A new study from the Violence Policy Center suggests the conservative analysis is wrong: States with higher gun ownership rates and weak gun laws have the highest rates of gun death according to a new analysis by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of just-released 2008 national data (the most recent available) from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The analysis reveals that the five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Wyoming. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.38 per 100,000 for 2008. Each

Kevin Drum grouses about the California push by gun-rights advocates for "open carry" laws that let owners walk around with loaded firearms strapped to their side: Maybe victory always makes people eager for more more more. But why don't they just accept their victory and bask in it instead? Get Heller and McDonald enforced around the country and call it a day. None of them cared about carrying guns around in public twenty years ago, after all. And if there's any way to get a sympathetic public to turn against them, demanding the right to have armed posses of obsessive gun enthusiasts marching around in supermarkets and bars and school corridors sure seems like a good way to do it. I've written before that I don't think the Second Amendment is always and everywhere a good thing—if it were up to me, this would be one of those items to be decided at state-level, a la "laboratory of democracy" federalism. What's good for farmer in Kansas isn't

I'm pretty much on record that I find gun ownership the most ambiguous of all the civil rights. It's not that I dispute the meaning of the Second Amendment -- that debate, I think, is for all intents and purposes over -- but, let's be frank: Guns are instruments of violence. Period. I'm not at all certain that the Second Amendment is always and everywhere a good thing. But I like civil rights a whole bunch, and it seems to me that if I call on folks to defend them when they don't like it, I should do the same thing. That's why I find this story in the Philadelphia Daily News so disturbing: In the last two years, Philadelphia police have confiscated guns from at least nine men - including four security guards - who were carrying them legally, and only one of the guns has been returned, according to interviews with the men. Eight of the men said that they were detained by police - two for 18 hours each. Two were hospitalized for diabetic issues while in

Ben and Joel are joined by Joyce Lee Malcolm to discuss  McDonald v. Chicago , a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court, and the history of the right to bear arms. Malcolm is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. She is a historian and constitutional scholar. She is the author of seven books including  To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right  and  Guns and Violence: The English Experience .  Her work on the Second Amendment and the right to be armed has been widely cited in court opinions and legal literature including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 opinion,  District of Columbia v. Heller This coming week -- on May 5 -- she'll appear in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center  for a discussion about "RETHINKING THE SECOND AMENDMENT: THE CHICAGO GUN CASE AND THE FUTURE OF GUN RIGHTS." The event is 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and is free, but reservations required. Check  constitutioncenter.org  for details. CL