BRADY VOWS TO CONTINUE THE JUDICIAL PROCESS WITH APPEAL

BRADY BLASTS TRIAL COURT RULING HALTING CALIFORNIA’S LAW ON BACKGROUND CHECKS FOR AMMUNITION PURCHASES

Washington, D.C., April 23, 2020 - Today, a federal district judge stopped enforcement of California’s law requiring background checks for ammunition sales. The unprecedented and controversial decision was issued by United States District Judge Roger T. Benitez, who granted the preliminary injunction in Rhodes v. Becerra.

Brady opposes this decision and vows to support the law on appeal.

Brady President Kris Brown explained:

“This decision is patently wrong and we expect that it will be reversed on appeal. The Second Amendment does not provide felons or domestic abusers with the right to buy ammunition or firearms, and it does not prevent states like California from requiring background checks that screen out prohibited purchasers. An unelected judge has — temporarily — deprived Californians of an important public safety law that they want and need, claiming an unprecedented, radical revision of the Second Amendment that is contrary to what the Framers intended, and to basic principles of democracy. While this judge suggests that purchasers who must simply undergo a background check to buy ammunition are the 'casualties,' of this law, the true victims will be the people endangered by this ruling. As we saw last August, this law stopped over 100 individuals from illegally purchasing ammunition and likely deterred many more. This law works. It is constitutional. And it protects Californians.

While this injunction is a disappointment, Brady remains dedicated to ensuring the safety of Californians. We are heartened that the judicial process will continue and optimistic that the judge’s error will be corrected on appeal. In recent years, gun laws in California that have been initially struck down, including by Judge Benitez, have been upheld later on appeal. This setback is concerning, but decades of precedent and public safety laws are on our side.”

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Brady has one powerful mission — to unite all Americans against gun violence. We work across Congress, the courts, and our communities with over 90 grassroots chapters, bringing together young and old, red and blue, and every shade of color to find common ground in common sense. In the spirit of our namesakes Jim and Sarah Brady, we have fought for over 45 years to take action, not sides, and we will not stop until this epidemic ends. It’s in our hands.

COVID-19, Gun Sales and Guns in Homes

Dr. Griffin Dix, a Brady Leader, OpEd published in The Hill:
April 11, 2020

In March an astounding 3,740,688 background checks took place, according to the FBI.

While this does not correlate exactly with gun sales, it is close and tells us that more guns were sold than any time since the background check system began in 1998.

This purchasing of firearms is not surprising now that the COVID-19 virus is causing unpredictable health and financial disruption. People are afraid a desperate person will break into their home. President Trump has called COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” as if we were being attacked by foreigners.


Even before this, for decades, the gun industry marketed guns as the best defense against home invasions. But there is scientific research on the use of guns for self-defense and on the risks of having guns in homes.

Dr. David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard’s school of Public Health, summarized the research studies on the risks vs. the benefits of owning firearms and found, “there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms.” Defensive gun use is rare, and “it does not appear that self-defense gun use is more effective at preventing injury than many other methods of resistance,” Hemenway found. (On the myth of guns for defense see this summary.)

But here’s the big problem. According to Hemenway’s work, “[T]he evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the likelihood not only that a household member will be shot accidentally, but also that someone in the home will die in a suicide or homicide.”

When couples are sheltering at home together in anxious and financially difficult times, tempers can flare and — if a gun is present — disputes can become lethal. “When there is a gun in a home with a history of domestic violence, there is a 500 percent higher chance that a woman will be murdered,” according to a Brady summary of research.

More than a dozen studies examined the link between guns in the home and suicides. All of them found that “firearms in the home are associated with substantially and significantly higher rates of suicide,” said Hemenway in his summary. A meta-analysis of studies found that access to guns in homes increases the risk of suicide by more than three times.


Another risk is unintentional shootings. During this pandemic many families will have children at home all day. Those bored, antsy children are likely to get into everything. If a gun is in the home and not stored locked and unloaded, the likelihood of an unintentional gun death or serious injury will increase. Already, every year there are 450 to 500 unintentional gun deaths and over 20,000 unintentional gun injuries. With more homes with guns and more people staying at home with kids for long periods of time, these numbers could rise.

People who choose to have firearms in their home now more than ever should keep them locked up, with the ammunition locked separately. Before this pandemic came along, eight children or teens were being killed or injured every day due to unlocked or unsupervised guns in the home. Safe gun storage will now be especially important. Storing firearms locked and unloaded is associated with a 73 percent lower risk of youth “family fire” suicide and unintentional gun death or injury in the home, according to a study led by Dr. David Grossman.

In order to slow the spread of COVID-19, 42 states have required nonessential businesses to close, but at least 30 of those states have designated gun shops as essential businesses and allowed them to stay open. A recent Department of Homeland Security advisory named gun shops as “essential” to suggest they can stay open. All of the above considerations strongly argue that the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory is fatally misguided. Fortunately, it is only an advisory.

Keeping gun shops open during the pandemic will not only contribute to the spread of the virus, it will increase its deadly toll. Now is the worst time to be buying a gun and bringing it into the home.

I strongly urge state and local officials to require gun shops to remain closed temporarily during this pandemic, like other nonessential businesses. Local and state authorities can still enforce their regulations. We should not let gun shops (or other nonessential businesses) re-open until the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.

Griffin Dix, Ph.D., is president of the Oakland/Alameda County (Calif.) Brady chapter and served on the Brady Board of Trustees from 2006 through 2008. He was research director at MacWEEK. His 15-year-old son was shot and killed in 1994 in an unintentional shooting with a gun that was stored unlocked and loaded. Since his son was killed, Dix has worked with a coalition that has helped to pass many state laws to prevent gun violence, including laws establishing semiautomatic handgun product safety standards. He is writing a memoir about the loss of his son, his lawsuit against Beretta USA and his work on gun violence prevention. Follow him on Twitter @griffindix.




 

“Because I believe all the statistics that say that the more guns we have, the more gun deaths we have.”

Trust in Guns During Crises Is a Triumph of Marketing

thetrace.org/rounds/coronavirus-gun-surge-marketing-triumph

A nearly empty display shelf for ammunition at a gun store in Idaho on March 14. [AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane]

Caroline Light is a Harvard professor whose field of study includes “America’s love affair with armed self-defense,” as she put it in the subtitle of her latest book. Reading the extensive reports this week of a surge in gun buying around the country, she was not surprised.

“Firearms are increasingly marketed as the most rational solution to our sense of fear and insecurity,” she told me. “And this epidemic, to me, seems like the perfect storm for convincing a whole variety of different consumers, who may or may not have been gun consumers in the past, to look at guns as a way to make themselves feel more secure.”

Guns, in fact, do not make people safer, according to the research. And for most of its history, the American firearm industry did not emphasize self-defense in its pitches to customers. As recently as the mid-1990s, even with Americans still shaken by a historic spike in violent crime, survey results showed that most people who owned guns owned them for recreation — things like hunting deer, or shooting clays. By 2015, when the survey was updated, crime was down dramatically. Yet two thirds of gun owners cited “protection from people” as a primary motivation for having a firearm.

“That was a massive triumph of advertising by the manufacturers,” says Light. The National Rifle Association has echoed those appeals to anxiety in its own messaging. Light is careful to note that the gun industry and the gun lobby did not create the underlying conditions that have left Americans balkanized and jittery — i.e., the way the social safety net “was pretty much destroyed and obliterated by the end of the 20th century.” But they did aggressively exploit them. “The gun industry was very much a powerful player in taking advantage of these circumstances and shifts in our economic and political systems,” she says. “There’s so much money to be made in making the population fearful of its individual security.”

Now we are living through an unprecedented public health crisis that’s given Americans many genuine reasons to be afraid. To judge from the lines out the door at many of the nation’s gun stores, firearms manufacturers are cashing in nicely. Light, who was raised by gun owners in Virginia, doesn’t own one herself. “But I do think about other people, who at this moment right now of unprecedented turmoil are turning to guns, and I can kind of see it.”

While she empathizes with those individual decisions, Light worries about their collective toll: “Because I believe all the statistics that say that the more guns we have, the more gun deaths we have.”

Senators to feds: Gun-buying surge could allow prohibited purchasers to slip through the cracks. Via a letter to the FBI director and acting ATF director obtained by Newsweek, 16 Democratic lawmakers are pressing for measures to ensure that firearms aren’t sold to people banned from owning them due to background check loopholes and an overtaxed vetting system. Though licensed dealers can legally sell guns to buyers whose checks take longer than three business days to resolve (a transaction known as a default proceed), the senators say the bureaus should advise gun dealers not to complete any sales until the purchaser is cleared while the pandemic is raging. They’re also requesting data on how many guns have been sold with background checks still pending during the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. ICYMI: The FBI conducted 3.7 million gun background checks in March, a new single-month record.

NEW from THE TRACE: Gun store closures put states in “uncharted” legal territory. Stay-at-home orders have forced thousands of businesses to close, but extending that to the firearm industry has proven contentious. Gun rights advocates have challenged gun store closures in several states, and their lawsuits raise a mountain of thorny legal issues that courts have seldom debated. “We’re in uncharted legal territory,” said one of the gun law scholars Brian Freskos interviewed. “There are some doctrinal guideposts, but not a whole lot of precedent that is directly on point.” This just in: The NRA is suing New York over its decision to subject gun stores to the state’s infection-abatement policies, adding to the group’s existing suit against California. “We will aggressively defend the state against yet another legal assault by the NRA,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Some gun dealers are defying orders to cease operations. There are five states still ordering gun stores to stay closed. But the Trace has spotted several examples of sellers in at least three of them — New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Washington — who are refusing to comply. “I don’t know anything about what the governor has said,” one recalcitrant owner told The Seattle Times.

A panicked purchase — then an accidental shooting. A 35-year-old Michigan man admitted to accidentally shooting himself in the leg after reportedly buying a gun in anticipation of pandemic-related chaos. Don’t miss: As coronavirus fears buoyed gun sales among first-time buyers, Trace reporter, gun-owner, and former vet Alain Stephens prepared this primer on safe firearm handling.

Anti-violence advocates offer phone counseling to kids scarred by shootings. The TraRon Center, which offers trauma support to families in Washington D.C., currently can’t host people at its community center due to social distancing. Instead, it’s arranging video chats with neighborhood young people. “Crime is still happening around them,” the group’s founder told WUSA9. “They’re trying to deal with this new norm, and they just need somebody to talk to.”

DATA POINT

An estimated 1,534,000 handguns were sold in the U.S. last month, compared to 836,000 long guns, the most lopsided ratio since the federal gun background check system launched in 1998. As The Trace has reported, the firearms industry was for a long time dominated by rifles and shotguns used for hunting or sport shooting, until manufacturers began aggressively marketing handguns for self-defense. —Small Arms Analytics