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Posted 12/22/19
LOOPHOLES ARE LETHAL (PART I)
Federal gun laws are tailored to limit their impact.
And the consequences can be deadly.
For Police Issues by Julius (Jay) Wachtel. On December 9, two days after a 9-1-1 caller’s abusive ex-boyfriend gunned down Houston P.D. sergeant Chris Brewster, his chief berated Federal legislators for blocking renewal of the “Violence Against Women Act” (VAWA):
We all know in law enforcement that one of the biggest reasons that the Senate and Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are not…getting the Violence Against Women Act [reauthorized] is because the NRA doesn’t like the fact that we want to take firearms out of the hands of boyfriends who abuse their girlfriends. And who killed our sergeant? A boyfriend abusing his girlfriend.
Full stop. VAWA was never a gun control measure. Enacted in 1994, it tightened domestic abuse laws in areas under Federal jurisdiction, such as tribal lands, and allocated funds for victim restitution, investigation and prosecution (for a detailed analysis click here.) What made Chief Art Acevedo so mad? To get a better grasp of where he was coming from let’s take a trip down gun-law memory lane.
Click here for the complete collection of gun control essays
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1929, a crew of Al Capone’s goons, including two dressed up as cops, lined up seven rival gangsters and machine-gunned them to death. Five years later the Feds enacted the nation’s first set of gun laws, the National Firearms Act, which required the registration of machineguns, silencers, and short-barreled shotguns and rifles.
Done under the Government’s taxation power, the focus on “gangster-type weapons” was thought resistant to Second Amendment concerns. Mission accomplished, right? Alas, in February 1933, even before the NFA took effect, a disaffected citizen used an ordinary gun – a .32 caliber pistol that he bought at a pawn shop – to unleash a barrage at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although Roosevelt was spared five others were wounded; one, Chicago Mayor Anton Cernak, succumbed to his injuries.
Roosevelt’s near-miss built momentum for going after everyday firearms. Concerned about onerous restrictions, the National Rifle Association stepped in and helped draft the nation’s next set of gun laws, the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. It required that gun dealers be licensed, keep records and not knowingly sell to felons. Criminal record checks weren’t part of the deal. In the end, other than for handing over their ID, gun store patrons would hardly feel a thing. And if they wished to feel nothing at all, private-party transfers and mail-order sales remained completely off the radar.
Twenty-five years later, on November 22, 1963, a 23-year old man peered out a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. He had a rifle by his elbow and a revolver in his pocket, both purchased by mail order under an assumed name. As the motorcade passed by, Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire, mortally wounding President John F. Kennedy and seriously injuring Governor John Connally. One hour later he shot and killed Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby used his revolver to shoot Oswald dead.
One might think that gun laws would be back on the plate. But resistance from the NRA, the gun industry and hobbyists slowed things down. In the end, lawmaking took another five years and two back-to-back assassinations: of Martin Luther King, shot dead on April 4, 1968 by an escaped convict, and of Robert Kennedy Jr., murdered two months later by a disaffected immigrant. Both killings were accomplished with “ordinary” guns. King’s killer used a .30-06 caliber rifle, which he bought at a gun store using an assumed name. Kennedy’s assailant, who had no criminal record, got his .22 caliber revolver from an acquaintance.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Gun Control Act of 1968 into effect four months later. Private gun transactions would continue as-is, no paperwork required, and guns would still be handed over immediately, with no confirmation of one’s ID nor a criminal record check. But mail-order sales were barred. Most importantly, the GCA established a class of “prohibited persons” who could not possess guns and to whom they could guns not be legally sold or given: felons, fugitives, persons adjudicated mentally defective, illegal immigrants, dishonorably discharged veterans, and the few (apparently including Oswald) who had renounced their citizenship.
On March 30, 1981 John Hinckley fired at President Ronald Reagan with another “ordinary gun” – a .22 caliber recover. He missed, but his shots badly wounded James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary. Hinckley, who had a record of arrests and mental health problems, bought the weapon at a pawnshop some months earlier. It was delivered immediately, and, as usual, without a record check.
After a decade-plus of lobbying by James Brady’s wife, Sarah, in November 1993 the Gun Control Act was amended to impose an interim five-day waiting period on the delivery of handguns. That afforded authorities a crucial if brief window for checking criminal and mental health records. (As provided by the original bill, in 1998 the waiting period was expanded into the current national “insta-check” system (NICS), which applies to the transfer by dealers of all firearms, including long guns.)
Brady only affects sales by licensed dealers. Private gun transactions thus remained virtually unimpeded. Neither did the law address domestic violence, which was gaining recognition as a major context for gun misuse. Perhaps surprisingly, this concern was promptly addressed. Unsurprisingly, the law’s reach was circumscribed by narrowly defining two key terms: “intimate partner” and “domestic violence.”
- In 1994 legislators addressed restraining orders, which Brady ignored. Their product, Section 110401 of the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, codified as 18 USC 921(a)(32), prohibits receipt or possession of firearms by “intimate partners” who have been served with a domestic violence restraining order.
Intimate partners are “the spouse of the person, a former spouse of the person, an individual who is a parent of a child of the person, and an individual who cohabitates or has cohabited with the person.” (18 USC 921[a][32])
- In 1996 the late Senator Frank Lautenberg complained that even though “two-thirds of domestic violence murders involve firearms” most spousal and child abusers don’t get convicted of felonies, thus remain unaffected by Brady. His proposal to prohibit gun possession by persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence was approved and codified as 18 USC 922(g)(9).
Crimes of domestic violence are “the use or attempted use of physical force, or the threatened use of a deadly weapon, committed by a current or former spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabiting with or has cohabited with the victim as a spouse, parent, or guardian, or by a person similarly situated to a spouse, parent, or guardian of the victim.” (18 USC 921[a][33])
It’s in these details where we find the explanation for Chief Acevedo’s angry barrage. Arturo Solis, the officer’s killer, pled guilty in 2015 to assaulting the 9-1-1 caller (the plea agreement, a State matter, reportedly barred him from having guns.) One year later Solis was arrested for harassing her with dozens of text messages. However, since his victim didn’t clearly fit any of VAWA’s protected classes (not a present or former spouse, etc.) Solis remained free, at least under Federal law, to buy and have guns. (That’s not just our feeble opinion. Check out the statute’s nightmarish prosecutorial guide.) That loophole drove tinkerers in the lower, “Blue” chamber to insert language that broadened the definitions of “intimate partner” and “crime of domestic violence”:
- Intimate partner would include “a dating partner or former dating partner.” Bottom line: past or present boyfriends or girlfriends who are the subject of a domestic violence restraining order would be ineligible to buy or possess firearms.
- Crimes of domestic violence would no longer require an actual or attempted assault. Stalking would suffice. Bottom line: a misdemeanor conviction for stalking would prohibit the purchase or possession of firearms.
Naturally, expanding the roster of bad guys (violent domestic abusers are mostly men) would substantially enlarge the roster of prohibited gun possessors. For the “Reds” who control the Senate that’s a big no-no. That’s why VAWA’s “new, improved” version has languished in the upper house since April.
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Really, as your retired-ATF-agent-cum-blogger well knows, one could argue the complexities and limitations of Federal firearms laws until the cows come home. Thanks to the gun lobby and their subservient lawmakers, when it comes to regulating guns it’s always been about loopholes. We’ll have more to say about that (and even bring in the States for a spanking) next year, in Part II. But for now let’s give Chief Acevedo the last word:
My officers are not a serial number to me…They're my family so when they go down I get pissed…A 32-year-old man should not be dead and it's not just him, it's every day in this country. If you don't understand the emotion I say check your pulse because you don't understand me or you don't understand this profession.
UPDATES (scroll)
4/16/25 In 2016 a divorced California woman obtained a restraining order against her ex-husband. According to her petition, he had told friends that he wanted to commit suicide and kill their child. One year later the ex-husband nonetheless bought a pistol at a gun store. And in 2020 he carried through on his plans. That restraining order, which would prevented the gun sale, wasn’t in the database used to screen gun buyers. A new California law that requires Courts to speedily pass on the identities of persons named in restraining orders is in the works.
12/7/22 Oregon’s tough new gun laws are on hold while court challenges proceed. If the law survives, buyers will have to pass fingerprint and background checks and complete a training course. Magazines with more than ten round capacity will also be prohibited, but existing ones may continue to be used. Unlike Federal law, there is no “loophole” that mandates gun transfers if a background check takes too long. With such restrictions on the horizon, gun sales have soared.
6/16/22 John Hinckley, the would-be Presidential assassin who was found not guilty by reason of insanity forty-one years ago, has been fully released from official supervision. His bullets lightly wounded President Ronald Reagan but paralyzed Press Secretary James Brady.
5/23/22 In 1981 John Hinckley’s bullets lightly wounded President Reagan, a police officer and a secret service agent. But they paralyzed Press Secretary James Brady. A jury adjudged Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity and he was confined to a mental hospital. By 2000 Hinckley was doing home visits, and in 2016 he was conditionally released to live with his mother. Last year a court found him stable and compliant, and Hinckley’s remaining restrictions are set to be lifted next month. Wikipedia
10/29/21 On October 28 the Justice Department agreed to settle a multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by the families of the nine victims of Dylan Roof, who perpetrated the 2015 South Carolina church massacre. Roof was able to acquire his gun at retail because an FBI background checker did not follow through to determine the disposition of his recent drug arrest in time to prevent the gun’s delivery.
10/15/21 After six months on the job, Miami PD Chief Art Acevedo was fired by unanimous vote of city commissioners, whom he once accused of interfering in an internal investigation. A typical sentiment was that his “personality and leadership style are incompatible with the structure of our city’s government.” Officers also considered him brusque and unyielding, and his vaccination mandate had made no friends.
10/2/21 Miami PD Chief Art Acevedo’s job is on the line as city commissioners meet to decide his fate. A stern disciplinarian and gun-control advocate, he has asked DOJ to investigate his cops’ use of force and marched alongside protesters after George Floyd’s death. But although Chief Acevedo was born in Havana, his recent off-the-cuff remark that the department is in the throes of a (right-wing) “Cuban mafia” ruffled the feathers of politicians and underlings who felt ignored when the progressively-minded ex-Houston chief was brought in to run the struggling Florida agency six months ago.
3/12/21 In 2015 Dylan Roof murdered nine church parishioners in South Carolina with a gun he bought at retail. Although he was Federally prohibited from acquiring firearms because he was a drug user, the FBI did not discover his drug arrest within the three days allotted for background checks. So Roof automatically got his gun. A flood of gun sales has also burdened the “Insta-Check” system, leading to “more than 4,800” gun transfers in 2018 to prohibited buyers. On March 11 the House passed a bill that would extend background checks to seven days, require them for transactions at gun shows and between private parties, and ban the manufacture and transfer of unserialized “ghost guns.”
2/24/21 State criminal history checks are required for sales by gun dealers. However, Federal law (18 USC 922[t]) allows transfers to proceed after three days should a check remains incomplete. Gun crimes have been committed by prohibited persons who took advantage of such delays. President Biden will reportedly sponsor regulations to correct this loophole and, as well, require criminal checks of persons who wish to assemble unserialized “ghost guns” from parts.
2/1/20 Loopholes aren’t just about guns. Nicotine-hooked teens are continuing to get their preferred, tasty fix by substituting one-time use flavored vapes for banned Juuls. An obscure “footnote” in FDA rules that ostensibly limit flavoring to menthol allows disposable units offering a full range of flavors to keep being sold.
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Posted 8/12/19
GOING BALLISTIC
Stop with the tangential! Gun lethality is, first and foremost, about the projectile
For Police Issues by Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Many years ago, while working as an ATF agent in Phoenix, I became acquainted with a physician whose name came up during one of my investigations. Dr. John, an avid hunter and target shooter, was unmoved when I explained that a man with whom he traded guns was an unlicensed dealer, and that local police had been seizing guns that went through him from thugs on the street.
That’s how most trafficking casework begins. Agents follow the paper trail from a gun’s manufacturer to its initial retailer, then “hit the streets” to find out how it wound up in the wrong hands. Illegal “street dealers” often get guns one at a time from individuals such as Dr. John. Some deploy “straw buyers” to buy them in stores. Corrupt licensees are often in the mix, falsifying records and supplying firearms in quantity “out the back door.”
Click here for the complete collection of gun control essays
Best I knew Dr. John had committed no crime. He was cordial and helpful and we eventually got to know one another quite well. Possibly too well. On my final visit I knocked on the door of his home. Dr. John greeted me warmly. Then with a flourish he pointed to the floor. Somewhere below, he proudly announced, lay the pistol that Big Brother wouldn’t get when they came for his guns.
I, too, had once enjoyed firing guns. Proficiency with a firearm, especially a powerful semi-automatic, offers many personal rewards, from the tangible pleasure of operating an intricate gadget to the thrills of accurately striking targets at range. It may be pop psychology, but some also seem to find in guns a sense of power and autonomy that is otherwise lacking.
Perhaps all the above applied to Dr. John, perhaps not. Still, we both knew that whether he really buried a gun wasn’t the point. His diatribe about confiscation was meant to signal his commitment to that particular ideological space where Government can’t be trusted and it’s ultimately everyone for themselves.
Dr. John’s point of view wasn’t uncommon in Arizona nor in Montana, where I was later posted. Yet while neither I nor my colleagues considered rugged individualism inherently dangerous, extremist baggage occasionally made threat assessments tricky. How should one deal with the eccentric, reportedly unstable loners who hole up in remote mountain cabins? (One turned out to be the Unabomber.)
Yet when it comes to guns, commercialism confounds things. My first trial in Phoenix involved an unlicensed older gentleman who bought handguns in quantity from a local retailer, then resold them for a tidy profit at gun shows, no paperwork or ID needed. In his opinion, that’s how the good Lord decreed guns ought to be dispensed, and if some wound up with criminals, as a police officer testified, that was simply a cost of liberty.
I was pleased that jurors ultimately found the man guilty. It didn’t happen quickly, as several were conflicted about pinning a felony on a seemingly well-intended entrepreneur.
Out-and-out greed by commercial gun stores was the subtext for my final years with ATF, when I supervised a trafficking squad in Los Angeles. Methodically tracing guns recovered by police led us to an array of licensed dealers who sold guns under-the-table to street marketers. My published research paper discussed the appalling contribution of such practices to street crime. One instance, the murder of an LAPD officer, stuck with me through the years. An affecting example of how making a buck can lead so-called “businesspersons” to make terrible decisions, it eventually inspired a screenplay. Alas, the lack of a happy ending probably dooms it in Hollywood-land.
Guns aren’t only about street crime. Waves of mass shootings, most recently in Dayton and El Paso, have renewed attention on assault weapons. These ballistically-formidable darlings of the gun culture fire projectiles that easily penetrate so-called “bulletproof” vests. When their bullets pierce flesh they create massive wound cavities, shattering blood vessels and pulverizing nearby organs, with predictable consequences. (Vincent Di Maio’s “Gunshot Wounds” is the standard work on the subject.)
According to the FBI, 510 police officers were feloniously murdered during the past decade. Gunfire claimed 472 officer lives, including 336 by handgun and 108 by rifle. Two rifle calibers characteristic of assault-style weapons, .223/5.56 and 7.62, were responsible for sixty-five deaths. Twenty-one officers were killed by rounds that penetrated their body armor; all but one of these fatalities was caused by a rifle.
When it comes to what’s available to the hateful, we’re talking lethality, on steroids. There’s a good reason why police have increasingly turned to armored cars.
But wait: haven’t many states banned assault weapons? Yes, but. Their go-by, the lapsed 1994 Federal ban, limited magazines to ten rounds and prohibited external baubles such as handgrips. Yet it was silent about what really drives lethality – ballistics. Every state that’s dared to institute a “ban” has followed suit.
Why?
For a simple reason. Focusing on ballistics would effectively doom the assault-style pistols and rifles that enthusiasts cherish. That would drive the NRA berserk and, not incidentally, threaten the survival of the firearms industry, whose profits depend on cranking out ever-more-lethal hardware. Instead, lawmakers boast about regulating peripheral aspects such as magazine capacity, bump stocks and the like. These “controls” are ridiculously easy to circumvent. Most recently, authorities breathlessly announced that Connor Betts, who perpetrated the Dayton massacre, bought a readily-available “shoulder brace” to help steady the so-called .223 “pistol” he legally purchased, thus transforming it into an illegal short-barreled rifle. And consider the December 2015 San Bernardino massacre in supposedly gun-stern California, where a married couple murdered fourteen and wounded twenty with a pair of state-legal AR-15 clones, both modified to increase ammunition capacity, a simple process that’s clearly described online.
In any event, whether high-powered weapons are short or long, or have bump stocks or extended magazines, their killing power centers on ballistics. That’s clearly how the rest of the civilized world perceives it. In 1988, one year after an angry Hungerford man used a handgun and two rifles to gun down sixteen persons, Britain banned all semi-automatic rifles beyond .22 rimfire. And despite its vibrant gun culture, New Zealand is presently buying back semi-auto rifles, which were largely banned after this year’s murderous rampage in Christchurch.
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But in our polarized land we prefer to make-believe. Consider, for example, the drive to expand the use of “red flag” laws, which empower judges to order gun seizures from the allegedly violence-prone. While there’s no question that dangerous characters shouldn’t have guns, liberty interests and practical issues unavoidably constrain the laws’ reach. While occasionally useful, they are certainly no answer to the gun massacres that bedevil society. Considering that many perpetrators obtain their guns legally, and that guns are readily available through the unofficial marketplace, neither are background checks.
How to make a difference? We could devise a scale that emphasizes what really counts. Points (demerits) would be assessed for the factor that most directly affects lethality – ballistics. Secondary issues such as ammunition capacity, cyclic rate and accuracy at range could also be considered. Guns with high scores would be banned outright, while others might be subject to a range of controls. Of course, no system is perfect or immune to manipulation. Americans would have to set aside selfish preoccupations and cherished beliefs for the common good. Alas, given our tolerance for mass slaughter, the prognosis is not good.
UPDATES (scroll)
2/20/25 Medical science has developed a “case fatality rate (CFR)” that precisely compares the lethality of various diseases. It’s 90 percent for untreated HIV, 99 percent for rabies and 30 percent for smallpox. Can firearms lethality be placed on a similar scale? Spurred by mass shootings, a research team led by emergency room physicians is at work to create a “wounding ballistics theoretical lethality index,” which would quantify the killing power of specific bullets when fired from an assortment of specific guns.
6/26/24 According to the Surgeon General, firearms violence is a “public health crisis” that has displaced motor vehicle deaths as the number one killer of youths thru age 19. Among its recommendations are requiring secure gun storage, implementing universal background checks that include private-party sales, “effective firearm removal policies” that keep guns away from domestic abusers and other dangerous persons, and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Its report makes no mention of ballistics or differences in ammunition lethality.
11/13/23 Eighty-four of the 147 .223 caliber bullets fired by Nikolas Cruz during the 2018 Parkland High School massacre were produced by the U.S. Army’s Lake City armory. Although the plant is owned by the U.S. and began as a strictly military supplier, since 2011 it’s sold “hundreds of millions of rounds” each year to the commercial market. And its highly lethal projectiles have made their way to virtually every massacre of note during that period.
11/6/23 ATF’s 2019 rule that bans accessories known as “bump stocks” because they effectively transform semi-automatic rifles into machineguns was set aside last year by the Fifth Circuit, which held that a change in law would be required. That ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, and it recently agreed to decide whether a regulation would suffice.
6/21/22 New York thought it had a “better idea” when it responded to the Buffalo massacre with a law that banned sale of “bullet-resistant soft body armor” to ordinary citizens. Problem is, the most bullet-resistant armor isn’t “soft” - it contains hard plates that can stop high-energy projectiles such as those fired by assault rifles. They’re apparently still OK. So is bringing in the banned kind from other States. Legislators protested that they were working hurriedly. “We’ll try to make this law better.”
1/24/22 On January 21 three NYPD officers responded to a 9-1-1 call from a woman whose 47-year old son had become violent. What they weren’t told, possibly because the dispatcher didn’t ask, is that Lashawn J. McNeil had a gun - a stolen .45 Glock pistol with a large extended magazine - and a criminal record. When two officers went into the back of the residence to fetch him he emerged and opened fire, mortally wounding rookie officer Jason Rivera, 22, and critically wounding his partner, Wilbert Mora. The third officer, who remained in the front, returned fire and critically wounded the shooter.
12/1/21 In a vote that mirrored the justices’ political affiliations, the full Ninth Circuit reversed a 2020 decision by a three-judge panel which affirmed a ruling by a District judge that California’s ban on large-capacity magazines (more than ten rounds) violates the 2nd. Amendment. So that State law is back in full effect. Still to be litigated is a June 2021 opinion by the same District judge throwing out California’s ban on assault weapons, and for the same reason.
5/6/21 In an op-ed, sociologist Frederick H. Decker suggests that a “scoring system” based on a weapon’s lethality could be used to devise a “graduated firearm tax.” To avoid circumventions, such as through private sales, background checks would have to be required whenever firearms change hands.
8/14/20 Applying a standard of “strict scrutiny,” a Federal appeals panel ruled, 2-1, that California’s ban on magazines that hold ten or more rounds (i.e., “high-capacity”) violates the Second Amendment. Mass shootings don’t require such magazines. And state bans won’t necessarily have an effect, since assailants often use multiple firearms and bring in large-capacity magazines from other states.
8/4/20 A 2018 YouGov nationally representative survey of 1,100 adults about regulating firearms lethality revealed considerable overall support for banning assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks. However, Republicans, conservatives, gun owners and, especially, NRA members, were far more likely to consider mass shootings as “the price of liberty.”
3/28/20 Two articles in a special issue of Criminology & Public Policy, “Assessing the potential.....” by Christopher S. Koper, and “Evidence concerning the regulation....” by Daniel W. Webster, Alexander D. McCourt, Cassandra K. Crifasi, Marisa D. Booty and Elizabeth A. Stuart, report that restricting large-capacity magazines reduces the frequency of mass shootings. Handgun buyer licensing (but not background checks or assault weapon bans) were also found effective in the latter study.
12/23/19 Following a national buy-back in which residents turned in more than 56,000 guns, New Zealand’s prohibition on military-type semi-auto rifles and high-capacity magazines went into effect. Propelled by the March massacre that took fifty-one lives at two mosques in Christchurch, the law has met resistance in a land where gun ownership is widespread.
10/26/19 Dick’s Sporting Goods sells guns. But it no longer sells assault-style weapons or high capacity magazines and requires all gun buyers to be at least 21. That decision was made by C.E.O. Ed Stack after the 2018 Parkland, Fla. high school massacre. He concedes these steps won’t eliminate all mass shootings. “But there will be less loss of life if an assault-style rifle isn’t used. And if we do all those things and we save one life, in my mind it’s all worth it.”
10/25/19 Undercover California state agents regularly watch California residents acquire California-illegal assault rifles at gun shows in Arizona and Nevada. Buyers are tailed when they return to California, where they are stopped and the loot is seized. “The...problem is that California has a 608-mile border with Nevada...and Nevada’s gun regulations are less stringent,” a prosecutor said.
9/20/19 According to Colt Firearms “a pretty sharp decline in rifle sales” and a “significant inventory buildup by our distributors” has led it to suspend production of civilian versions of the AR-15. Colt will focus on police and military orders, which, it says, are “absorbing all of Colt’s manufacturing capacity for rifles.”
9/6/19 Check out Jay’s op-ed about assault weapons bans in today’s Washington Post.
9/1/19 A male in his 30s armed with a rifle hijacked a mail truck and went on a shooting rampage in the West Texas cities of Odessa and Midland. He killed seven and wounded nineteen, including three officers, before police shot him dead.
8/15/19 A Philadelphia man who had served Federal prison time for being a felon with firearms fired repeated barrages at police serving a narcotics search warrant. Six officers sustained minor wounds. The suspect eventually surrendered. An AR-15 rifle and a handgun were recovered.
8/15/19 Authorities say that the gun used to kill CHP officer Moye (see below update) was a “ghost gun,” meaning untraceable. It was apparently built by completing a partially-machined lower receiver that can be legally bought without a serial number, then assembling it into a weapon using legally-available parts.
8/13/19 On August 12 veteran California Highway Patrol officer Andre Moye, 34, was shot and killed and two colleagues were injured when a convicted felon whom officer Moye pulled over for a traffic violation opened fire with an “AR-15 style” rifle. Their assailant was reportedly a gang member who had served prison time for an armed assault.
8/12/19 Dayton gunman Connor Betts assembled his gun from legally-bought parts. Its upper receiver came from a friend, Ethan Kollie, who legally acquired it online. Kollie also bought the drum magazine and ballistic vest used by Betts.
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Posted 6/22/19, edited 6/26/19 & 8/14/19
A DISTINCTION WITHOUT A DIFFERENCE
An epidemic of police officer suicide raises the question: do guns cause violence?
For Police Issues by Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Friday, June 14 was a very bad day for cops in the Big Apple. That date marked the third occasion this month in which a member of the force – in this tragic case, a 29-year old officer with six years on the job – would commit suicide with a gun.
NYPD suffered four officer suicides in 2018, and four so far this year. Alarmingly, this month’s three took place within a single ten-day period. Reacting to the crisis, NYPD Commissioner James P. O’Neill called on his colleagues to use and promote the use of mental health resources:
This is a mental-health crisis. And the NYPD & the law enforcement profession as a whole absolutely must take action. We must take care of each other; we must address this issue - now…There is no shame in seeking assistance from the many resources available, both inside and outside the department. Accepting help is never a sign of weakness - in fact, it’s a sign of great strength. Please, connect yourself or your friends and colleagues to the assistance that is so close by.
Officer suicide is by no means a new phenomenon. Yet it’s never been officially tracked. (The FBI’s yearly Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report only includes deaths due to criminal activity.) However, in 2016 the nonprofit “Blue Help” began systematically collecting information about episodes of police and correctional officer suicide. According to its website there were 142 officer suicides in 2016, 169 in 2017, 167 in 2018 and 92 so far this year. To compare, the FBI’s most recent LEOKA report indicates that 46 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 2017, all but four by firearms. BlueHelp doesn’t presently publish manner of death, but firearms are presumably the predominant instrument in suicides as well.
Click here for the complete collection of gun control essays
Why do cops and correctional officers kill themselves? Suicide-prevention organizations and the professional and academic communities tend to emphasize the unique stressors of the criminal justice workplace. Here, for example, is what the NIJ Journal has said:
Be it an officer patrolling a high-crime neighborhood in a big city, a small-town cop responding to a bar fight, or a homicide detective arriving at the scene of a multiple murder, the common factor in their jobs is stress. They work in environments where bad things happen…The same is true of corrections officers [who] work in confined societies that are, by definition, dangerous. The stress levels are so high that, in one study, 27 percent of officers reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Suicide isn’t just a problem in law enforcement. According to the Centers for Disease Control it’s the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S. What drives individuals to end their own lives? In a recent online article, “Suicide Rising Across the U.S.,” the CDC cited seven reasons: relationship problems, substance use, personal crises, physical health problems, job/financial problems, criminal-legal problems and loss of housing. Guns got little play. While one table indicates that guns were used in 41 percent of suicides with mental health issues, and 55 percent where none were known to exist, they are explicitly mentioned only once, in a suggestion to safely store “medications and firearms to reduce access among people at risk.”
It’s not just the Feds who seem reluctant to put the onus on guns. “Promising Strategies for Advancement in Knowledge of Suicide Risk Factors and Prevention,” a 2014 article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, identified seventeen factors, including gender, occupation, personality disorders, financial stress and maltreatment in childhood. Firearms didn’t come up until the very last risk: “access to lethal means” (meaning, guns and pesticides.) The message that gun availability is but one of many hazards (and not necessarily the most pressing) seemed perfectly clear.
Yet as CDC data clearly indicates, firearms are by far the most common means of suicide. In 2017, guns were responsible for about fifty-one percent (23,854) of the 47,173 suicides recorded that year. Suffocation came in second at 13,075. Poisoning, at 6,554, was third. (For a table grouped by age click here).
Gun ownership and suicide rates are also closely linked. A 2008 Harvard study reported that the nine states lowest in gun ownership were also the nine lowest in suicide, and that the three with the most gun ownership were among the four with the most suicides. A comprehensive study of gun ownership and suicide between 1981-2013 found “a strong relationship between state-level firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates among both genders, and a relationship between firearm ownership and suicides by any means among male, but not female, individuals.” And a recent study of youth suicide reported that for each ten-percent increase in households with guns, suicide among the young increased nearly 27 percent.
Gun violence, of course, goes way beyond suicide. According to the FBI, there were 16,617 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 2017. Guns were used in 72.6 percent of these killings – about three in every four. Firearms were also used to commit 118,745 robberies (about 41 percent of the 319,356 reported that year) and 95,194 out of 741,756 aggravated assaults, or about one in every four.
Compared to other wealthy Western-style democracies, America seems a uniquely violent place. A yearly global report, summarized by NPR, revealed that in 2017 America’s gun violence death rate of 4.43 per 100,000 pop. was fully nine times that of Canada and an astounding twenty-nine times higher than peaceable Denmark’s.
Gun-control advocates argue that America’s infatuation with firearms has created a toxic environment. Here, for example, is Everytown for Gun Safety’s introduction to its sobering statistical compendium:
Every day, 100 Americans are killed with guns and hundreds more are shot and injured. The effects of gun violence extend far beyond these casualties—gun violence shapes the lives of millions of Americans who witness it, know someone who was shot, or live in fear of the next shooting.
But enough with numbers. Let’s give the problem a bit of real life (and death). Below are four of the gun-violence related headlines that appeared on the main page of the L.A. Times website on June 20. (It’s simply the day your blogger happened to look. Links were copied on the 21st., so wording may slightly differ):
Here are two more found on June 26:
While some interventions seem to hold promise (see, for example, “Red Flag at Half Mast, Part II) “means restriction” – that is, reducing access to potential instruments of violence like guns – is the international gold standard in suicide reduction. Given what’s known, it’s a relatively small leap to argue that limiting access to guns would sharply reduce violence of all sorts. That’s what Great Britain did after the Hungerford Massacre. And why Great Britain, Australia, Japan and Norway enjoy freedom from the carnage that Americans tolerate as the cost of, well, being American.
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But we’re not Great Britain. In the U.S., the proliferation of firearms, and the spectacular increase in their lethality, have dramatically affected the sociopolitical landscape. It’s changed the rules and assumptions that shape social interaction and altered the very nature of our existence. When an off-duty LAPD police officer shopping with his family at a Costco feels impelled to respond to an assault with a barrage of gunfire (and in so doing, not only kills his unarmed, mentally disturbed assailant but critically wounds both of the man’s parents, also unarmed) we know something really, really bad has happened. (See 8/11/21 update)
A threshold has been crossed. Guns cause violence. They’re not just “enablers” anymore.
UPDATES (scroll)
4/17/25 According to Virginia’s Law Enforcement Assistance Program, officers are twice as likely to die by suicide than to be
feloniously killed. With that in mind, the program offers seminars and guidance to cops before and after they experience the “traumatic life events”
that are so commonplace to policing. With the loss of one of its own by suicide last month, the Giles County Sheriff’s office is welcoming VALEAP’s
help. One of its tools, peer support, will “try to help normalize the trauma that comes after a critical event, and give people tips and tricks to move past
these events.”
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RELATED WEBSITES AND REPORTS
BJS - Preventing police suicide - programs and resources
IACP - National Consortium on Preventing Law Enforcement Officer Suicide Final report
“Officer Suicide: Understanding the Challenges and Developing a Plan of Action” (BJA exec. summary, Aug. 2020)
“An Occupational Risk: What Every Police Agency Should Do To Prevent Suicide Among Its Officers” (PERF, October 2019)
Blue H.E.L.P. Tracks officer suicides nationally and provides information about their prevention
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