In the Aug. 31, 2018 issue, Mr. Eric Spinner defends the National Rifle Organization over their mission to promote safe and responsible gun ownership and decries the protests over an NRA event at The Inn at New Hyde Park slated for Sept. 27.
Before taking exception to Mr. Spinner’s comments, I’d like to note that with close to a third of Americans owning firearms, there are clearly many more responsible gun owners than not. It is also worth noting that clear majorities of Americans of all political parties favor protecting the right to own firearms.
However, Mr. Spinner raises many of the NRA’s usual talking points to support an organization that has worked tirelessly to allow guns in as many places as possible. Mr. Spinner’s casual claim that “the perpetrators of gun violence don’t care about laws or gun-free zones” is compelling so long as you do not think about it at all.
But once one starts to ponder the meaning of this statement, one can only conclude that most laws are irrelevant because criminals ignore them anyway.
In his defense of the NRA, Mr. Spinner promotes the ‘good guy with a gun’ theory, which, once again, makes sense until you actually think about it.
While the NRA has been promoting this idea to create fear in the citizenry, there is an important unspoken agenda for the organization, specifically, the NRA receives millions in financial support from gun manufacturers.
Disclosure requirements have changed in recent years as the NRA throws support behind legislators who will aid them in hiding the donations received from corporations, but as of 2013, the political action committee arm of the NRA received close to $53 million dollars over the prior eight-year period (https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-industry-funds-nra-2013-1) from gun manufacturers, with an additional nearly $21 million from advertising revenue.
The NRA executive director, Wayne LaPierre, earns between one and five million dollars annually in his role leading the NRA, which is a large sum considering that the NRA fancies itself a ‘grassroots’ organization.
The ‘good guy with a gun’ theory falls apart further when one considers the incredibly high rate of friendly fire injuries and fatalities.
Nationwide police statistics for 2016 showed that six percent of officer fatalities were a result of friendly fire.
If one does not like a statistical representation of human harm from gunfire, consider the death of Hofstra Student Andrea Rebello, who was killed by friendly fire from a police officer during a hostage standoff in 2013.
These incidents involved highly trained professionals who nonetheless in the conduct of their official duties killed innocent individuals.
I would implore Mr. Spinner and any other proponent of the ‘good guy with a gun’ theory to describe how this would unfold with untrained or minimally trained civilian ‘good guys’ trying to stop the evildoers in our midst.
Consider further the pernicious actions of the NRA at the legislative level: the NRA lobbied to prevent federally funded research on the health consequences of firearms, in a piece of legislation called The Dickey Amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1996.
Despite this ban, independent (that is, not federally funded) research has demonstrated clear public health consequences associated with firearms.
Research by Anestis and Anestis published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2015 showed that legislation that regulated access to firearms was associated with lower rates of suicide.
Research by Kalesan and colleagues published in The Lancet in 2016 demonstrated that gun legislation that strengthened background checks, placed restrictions on certain forms of ammunition and specific firearms (i.e., rapid-fire weaponry) resulted in lower fatality rates in the geographic regions these were in effect.
Further, and more damaging, geographic regions with more permissive legislation and ‘stand your ground’ laws have higher levels of violent crimes, as demonstrated in research by McClelland and Tekin, published in the Journal of Human Resources.
The NRA promotes ‘stand your ground’ laws and ardently opposes any and all gun control, making the organization itself a true public health danger.
Further, while elected officials who earn “A” ratings from the NRA have successfully passed legislation that puts the public in ever greater danger (such as the aforementioned stand your ground laws, more permissive background checks, and the like), the public is moving swiftly in the opposite direction.
Polling data from this year shows that close to two-thirds of the public favors greater gun control.
These are just a few of the ways that the NRA should be considered at the very least a public health menace.
Since the points raised here were uncovered with about a ten-minute Google search, it is undoubtedly the case that the NRA is well aware of these statistics.
Willfully placing the public in danger would be, therefore, the very definition of an enemy, in direct contradiction to Mr. Spinner’s spirited defense.
There was a time when the NRA was a true grass-roots organization that promoted safe and responsible firearm ownership.
Examination of their materials from the 1960s and early 1970s shows an organization that was true to that mission and was not a threat to the public.
Those halcyon days are long gone, however, now that the organization relies on scare tactics and strongly opposes any common-sense steps to regulate firearms.
Dean McKay
Port Washington
