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September 19, 2008

Freedom under fire

Gun violence jeopardizes American way of life in costly ways, speaker says 

by Evan Silverstein
Presbyterian News Service

Dr. Garen J. Wintemute

STONY POINT, NY — Gun violence threatens the nature of society, costing us in ways that is difficult to quantify but affects us all deeply, a leading expert told about 40 Presbyterians gathered here for a conference on the topic Sept. 15-17.

“There are real dollar costs in hardening our society [against gun violence], in making airports secure, in making schools secure,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine in Sacramento, CA.

“But the larger costs I think are intangible, they’re indirect. Gun violence threatens the nature of our society as a free and open society,” Wintemute continued. “It scares us. We live our lives to a greater or lesser extent with fear because of gun violence.”

Wintemute, an author and nationally renowned researcher in the field of injury epidemiology and the prevention of firearm violence, was the opening keynote speaker at the 2008 Peacemaking Colloquium “Gun Violence and Gospel Values.”

The three-day event was held at Stony Point Center, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)-related conference center located about 35 miles north of New York City. The clergy, lay leaders, elders and others attending from across the country explored ways that gospel values can transform society’s acceptance of gun violence and lead to building a culture of peace.

“Gun violence affects where we live, where we choose not to live if we have the choice,” Wintemute said. “It affects where we work, what kind of work we do, it affects what we do.”

Firearm statistics, pictures of gunshot victims and other images were displayed on a screen as Wintemute presented his 40 minute address titled “We all Pay: The Public Health and the Social Costs of Gun Violence.”

He said an estimated 250 million guns are currently in circulation or available in the United States for civilian use.

Wintemute said there are about 500,000 gun deaths worldwide each year, according to recent statistics. Other conference presenters put that number at 700,000.

“There are bigger problems,” Wintemute conceded. “Malaria kills maybe a million people a year, HIV maybe 2 million, but the fact those problems are larger in that sense does not in any way diminish the fact that 500,000 dead people a year is too many.”

In 2005, 30,694 people died from gunshot wounds in America — 12,352 were homicides, 17,002 suicides, and 1,340 were accidental, police-related, or of undetermined intent, Wintemute said, adding that firearm suicides have outranked firearm homicides almost every year for more than 100 years.

He said about 71,000 people received treatment for nonfatal wounds in U.S. emergency rooms in 2005. More than 80 percent of gun-related deaths are pronounced at the scene or upon arriving at the hospital.

Of those who survive, the median cost of medical care is $10,000 per case, but that figure can easily reach into the millions when more severe cases require lengthy stays in intensive care units or extensive rehabilitation.

This reality is reflected in the $2 billion annual costs of medical care for the victims of gun violence, said Wintemute, the author of numerous published scientific articles on gun violence and prevention.

In a recent poll, putting a stop to gun violence ranked ahead of making certain all Americans have universal health care and ending the war in Iraq. Eradicating gun violence was second only to reducing gas prices.

“It’s right up there with what hits me in my pocketbook every day,” Wintemute said. “These costs are real. These costs are indirect and virtual, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel them.”

Wintemute said the United States is the largest legal exporter of firearms for military purposes in the world. He said 80 or 90 percent of guns recovered in Mexico after being used in a crime, and 50 percent recovered in Canada, come from the United States.

In response the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has established offices in both countries as well as throughout Europe and Latin America.

Law enforcement officials in these regions have direct access to ATF gun ownership tracing records  “because everybody understands that if you are confiscating a gun that’s been used in a crime in Colombia the country it’s mostly likely to have come from is the United States, and if you want to do the investigation you need our resources.”

Wintemute said there are two systems of legal gun commerce in the United States. One is regulated licensed gun dealers who are required to see a perspective buyer’s identification, initiate a background check, keep records of transactions and observe a waiting period before transferring a firearm or face being put out of business by the ATF.

However, these laws never have applied to individual-to-individual sales of personal firearms, which is the other type of legal gun commerce, said Wintemute, who has served as a consultant for the National Institute of Justice, World Health Organization, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Red Cross. 

He said there is an exemption for private sales by individuals who are not “engaged in a business of buying and selling guns” and there is no longer a clear definition of what “engaged in a business” means.

And so unlicensed private sellers are permitted by law to sell privately-owned guns at venues that include gun shows.

Those attending the 2008 Peacemaking Colloquium discuss how the faith community can respond to the ongoing problem of gun violence. Photo by Evan Silverstein

“It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a gun show or anyplace else, at a flea market, out of my trunk, out of my house ... there is no gun show loophole per se,” Wintemute said. “It is simply legal to sell guns for cash, without any records, without seeing identification, without a background check, whether you’re in a gun show or anywhere else.”

Referring to the prevalence of gun violence in some communities, Wintemute cited research conducted by a colleague a few years ago where at-risk youth in Richmond, VA, were asked if they had ever been shot, or shot at, and if so how many times.

Surprised by the frequency in which respondents said they faced bullets, the researcher sought a comparison by examining how often frontline U.S. combat troops had been shot, or shot at, during wars.

Wintemute said his colleague had to go back to the civil war to find a group of U.S. combat troops that were more at risk of being shot than the youths interviewed for the study.

“When young people say it’s a war out there, they are not kidding,” Wintemute told conference-goers.

He said guns make possible the illicit drug industry, which relies on firepower to sustain production facilities and supply lines. He said the attorney general of Mexico and others south of the U.S. border agree that narcotic-related firearm violence in the northern part of their country is getting close to levels that threaten the integrity of the entire nation of Mexico.

“There is at both borders a circular commerce,” Wintemute said of the U.S.-Mexico border. “Drugs flow north, firearms flow south. Drugs flow south, firearms flow north. Often times the same people are involved in bringing one commodity and then the other as they cross the border.”

There are people who profit mightily from manufacturing guns in an industry that exhibits all the behaviors of any consumer product industry, Wintemute said. Decisions are made about the type of guns to produce and not to produce based on a company’s knowledge of its consumer base.

Wintemute said manufacturing guns was a longtime tradition for members of one extended family — the Jennings. Together they once cornered the market for small, cheap handguns, often called “junk guns” or “Saturday Night Specials.”

This family affair was led by patriarch George Jennings, a machinist by trade, who founded Raven Arms in 1970, ironically because of restrictions imposed on firearms importers by the federal Gun Control Act of 1968.

George’s son, Bruce, joined Raven in 1972, but left six years later to form Jennings Firearms. In 1982, George Jennings helped his daughter Gail and her husband Jim Davis, formerly the office manager at Raven Arms, start Davis Industries, and Lorcin Engineering was launched by Jim Waldorf, Bruce Jennings’ high school friend. A nephew of George Jennings later started Sundance Industries, another gun maker.

The original Jennings company, Raven Arms, was destroyed by fire in 1991. Soon after George Jennings retired and sold the company, which re-emerged as Phoenix Arms.

These lucrative companies and several others also linked to George Jennings were known in the gun trade as the “ring of fire,” producing more than 800,000 firearms a year in their heyday, Wintemute said.

But the family dynasty eventually crumbled as gun-control advocates pushed for legislation in Washington, in state capitals and in city councils to ban these weapons.

“These folks are now all out of business, every one of these companies except for Phoenix [Arms], which is a very small remnant of its former self,” Wintemute told those attending. “They no longer produce firearms and they were put out of business by people just like you, by citizens who took it upon themselves to go outside their usual activities.”

The annual Peacemaking Colloquium is sponsored by Stony Point Center, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, the Synod of the Northeast Public Policy Advocacy Network, Albany Presbytery and Monmouth Presbytery.

In addition to keynote speeches, participants also attended biblical and theological reflections, took advantage of networking opportunities and workshops, and heard a panel discussion focusing on gun violence in the U.S. and the world.

They also prayed together, met in small groups and in “open space” sessions where they discussed issues related to gun violence and gospel values and considered plans for countering gun violence.

The conference was timely, as an overture addressing the tragedy of America’s gun violence was approved in June by the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The overture, among other things, calls on the entire church to pray for “God’s comfort, courage and peace” for the 80 families who lose loved ones every day to guns in America and to pray for the 1,000 families who experience death by guns daily in the developing world.

It also calls on the entire church to closely monitor the political process in cities, states and the nation for opportunities to work for the passage of laws that control gun access and to seize these opportunities to support legislation that will make “streets, schools, and places of worship free from gun violence.”

Wintemute said it is important for people of faith to attend events like the colloquium that address the ongoing problem of gun violence.