The drumbeat continues

Who gets shot in America? Why do shootings spike over the weekend? Why are summers the worst? Who speaks for the victims? Jennifer Mascia has written 350 posts at the New York Times blog entitled The Gun Report, covering the deaths of 40,000 people. What has she learned?

Gang shootings are prevalent, especially in former hubs of industry now in economic decline.

She claims that suburbs are magnets for gun violence, a claim I find hard to believe. The older, decaying suburbs, maybe, but not the newer, more affluent suburbs. And I also think there is a racial and ethnic component, which she does not even mention in this Raw Story blog post summarizing her findings.

Of course, gun violence is prevalent in large cities such as

Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Dallas.

And let's not forget California.

She continues:

But while half of the shootings I featured were the result of a crime, the other half, I was most surprised to learn, resulted from arguments — often fueled by alcohol — among friends, neighbors, family members and romantic partners. More and more, people are solving their differences not with their fists but with guns. Husbands and wives are shooting each other, as are sisters and brothers. In many homes across America, loaded guns are easily accessible, and children find them, accidentally shooting themselves or each other. One hundred children died in unintentional shootings in the year after Newtown, which breaks down to two every week.

And there is this statistic:

In America, 60 percent of adult firearm deaths are a result of suicide.

Does she have a solution?

A year and a half later, you might expect that I’d have a solution to the country’s scourge of gun violence. But there is no one answer. It’s a favorite talking point of the right, but it’s true: Criminals will always find a way to get guns. But a lot of the people I covered weren’t criminals until the bullet left the chamber. How do you prevent a law-abiding person from obtaining a gun when he or she hasn’t done anything illegal yet?

Jennifer thinks one answer might be to increase vetting. She points out that

in order to obtain a firearm in Japan, which has half the population of America and averages about four gun murders per year, you must fill out binders full of paperwork, listen to 20 hours of lectures, take a written test and a shooting class, pass a criminal background check, subject yourself to a physical and psychological exam, submit to half a dozen police interviews, and police interviews of your friends and family, as well. You are asked to produce a floor map of your home and indicate where a firearm will be stored, as well as photos of the locks on your gun safe. Approval usually takes a year. You need to jump through such extreme hoops to own guns — and can get arrested just for firing one — that the Yakuza, the mob in Japan, prefers not to use them.

Universal background checks are something most Americans already support. Ensuring that gun checks are cross-referenced with mental health records in every state is a must. When Second Amendment advocates say we should enforce the laws already in place, they’re right. Montana and South Dakota submitted only three mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in 2012. North Dakota and Massachusetts turned in one, and Rhode Island submitted none.

Smart guns that only activate for their owner would reduce the chance that a child or an intruder could discharge them. Armatix, a German company, offers a gun that operates only when the owner is wearing a corresponding wristwatch. But the National Rifle Association has vigorously opposed such technology, and the two vendors who tried to market smart guns in America were harassed and received death threats from Second Amendment extremists, so they pulled the guns from their shelves.

Mascia shows her bias as an editorial assistant at the far left New York Times. She uses loaded phrases such as "the gun rights crowd," and "Second Amendment absolutists," and claims that in Florida "It’s easier to buy an assault weapon than it is to vote." And while she mentions "a favorite talking point of the right," she makes no mention of the favorite talking points of the left.

Joe Nacera, an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, was the man who asked Mascia to write The Gun Report blog. He also is the one who pulled the plug on it, as the last post was on June 10 of this year. Nevertheless, Mascic writes:

All we can do — journalists, gunshot victims and their families, people who care — is continue the drumbeat. We can mark every death and remember every victim. It’s not a solution, but it’s something.