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Some Points to Consider Before You Donate Money to “Stop Gun Violence”
Dear Friends,
If you’ve previously contributed to other gun violence prevention (GVP) organizations, as my wife and I have, you’ve probably received solicitations from these organizations recently urging you to make additional donations in the in the aftermath of the latest horrific mass shootings at the Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, and at “Club Q” in Colorado Springs. You’re also probably receiving similar solicitations in the leadup to “Giving Tuesday” on November 29. The solicitations I’ve received have been long on emotion, with messages such as “help save lives” and “stop gun violence,” but short on details concerning how the measures that these organizations support will actually help curb our country’s epidemic of gun violence or even prevent the mass shootings that prompted these solicitations.
My wife and I have not only donated to other GVP organizations in the past, I’ve worked with prominent members of some of the best known GVP organizations while I was serving as the injury person chairperson for the California Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians. As I’ve written in previous messages, those people who I worked most closely with were intelligent, well-meaning, and hard-working individuals, many of whom had lost loved ones to gun violence themselves.
After working with these other GVP organizations for many years, though, I wasn’t able to convince any them to join me in advocating the adoption of stringent gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws that have long been in effect in all the other high income democratic countries of the world – countries in which mass shootings, including shootings on school campuses, occur rarely, if ever, and in which the rate of gun related deaths is, on average, one tenth the rate in our country. And after the Supreme Court’s rogue 2008 Heller decision, in which a narrow five member majority of the Supreme Court reversed over two centuries of legal precedent - including four prior Supreme Court decisions and scores of lower court decisions - in ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own a gun unrelated to service in a well regulated militia, I couldn’t convince any of these other GVP organizations to join me in openly stating that Heller was wrongly decided and should be overturned. It was largely for these reasons that I co-founded Americans Against Gun Violence in 2016.
When we founded Americans Against Gun Violence, we didn’t intend to maintain a long-term monopoly on being the only GVP organization in the entire country that openly advocated overturning Heller and adopting definitive gun control laws comparable to the laws in other advanced democracies. Despite our best efforts, though, we still haven’t been able to get any of the other major GVP organizations to join us in taking such a position.[i] In past messages, I’ve quoted Joshua Sugarmann, Executive Director of the Violence Policy Center, who wrote in regard to these other GVP organizations in his book, Every Handgun is Aimed At You: The Case for Banning Handguns:
America’s gun lobby would be on the run, if only the gun control advocates would bother to chase them. Instead, trapped by their perception of the politically achievable, gun control advocates are always on the defensive….They nibble around the edges of half-solutions and good intentions dramatically out of sync with the reality of gun violence in America.
On further reflection, I believe that while Mr. Sugarmann’s critique accurately describes the ineffectiveness of the approach taken by these other GVP organizations, “nibbl[ing] around the edges” doesn’t adequately address the potential for real harm done by the failure of other GVP organizations to advocate definitive steps to urgently stop our country’s epidemic of gun violence. Based on my experience in participating in the treatment of innumerable patients with life-threatening hemorrhage in the emergency department over a 35 year career as an ER doc, I believe that the approach taken by these other GVP organizations is akin to a trauma team focusing on treating a minor shrapnel wound in a gunshot victim – and claiming to be helping the patient in doing so - while ignoring the fact that the patient is bleeding to death from a separate major arterial injury.
I’ve speculated in other Americans Against Gun Violence president’s messages concerning the possible reasons why the other major GVP organizations haven’t joined us in advocating overturning Heller and adopting definitive gun control laws. The leaders of these organizations may be victims of a form of “Stockholm Syndrome,” having been held hostage so long by the gun lobby, in a psychological sense, that they’ve come to sympathize with it. They may also be suffering from the “anchoring” phenomenon, the powerful tendency of people to stick with their initial approach to a problem despite accumulating evidence that the approach is not working.
More and more, though, as I’ve looked at the annual financial reports of the other major GVP organizations,[ii] all of which have multi-million dollar annual budgets, I’ve come to believe that the old adage, “follow the dollar,” best explains their intransigence. Although the steady rise in annual gun deaths and the frequency of mass shootings clearly demonstrates that the strategies that these other GVP organizations employ are not effective in curbing the epidemic of gun violence in our country, their financial reports show that their strategies are highly effective in bringing in donations.
If you’re thinking about making a year end contribution to help stop gun violence, I hope you’ll first consider the graph below that shows the direct relationship at the international level between rates of per capita gun ownership and rates of gun related deaths, with the United States being an extreme outlier in both categories:
And I hope you’ll also consider the following points:
- As the graph above demonstrates, it’s unrealistic to believe that we can lower rates of gun related deaths in the United States to levels comparable to those in other high income democratic countries without significantly reducing the vast pool of privately owned guns in our country. Americans Against Gun Violence is currently the only GVP organization in the United States that openly advocates measures that would result in a significant reduction of privately owned guns. Such measures include:
- Changing the guiding principle for gun ownership from the current “permissive” one, under which anyone of a certain age can own a gun if the government can’t prove that he or she is on a list of individuals who meet relatively narrow criteria for being prohibited from owning firearms;[i] to a “restrictive” one, comparable to the guiding principle in all other high income democratic countries, in which the burden of proof is on the person seeking to acquire a gun to provide convincing evidence that he or she has a legitimate need for a firearm[ii] and can handle one safely
- A complete ban on civilian ownership of all automatic and semi-automatic long guns (not just so-called “assault weapons”) with no grandfather clause,[iii] comparable to the bans that Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all promptly adopted after mass shootings in their countries
- A complete ban on civilian ownership of handguns, with no grandfather clause, comparable to the ban that Great Britain adopted after the 1996 Dunblane Primary School massacre, which was committed with handguns[iv]
- In order to adopt the above definitive gun control measures, we must first overturn the 2008 Heller decision and its progeny, which now includes the Bruen decision issued by the Supreme Court on June 23, 2022, as well as additional “GVR” orders issued on June 30.[v]
- Americans Against Gun Violence is the only GVP organization that has filed amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs in important Second Amendment cases at the Supreme Court and appeals court levels calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Heller and its progeny and calling on lower courts to interpret these decisions as narrowly as possible until they are overturned.
- Other GVP organizations have filed amicus briefs in these cases in which they tacitly endorsed Heller as being legitimate binding precedent.[vi]
In conclusion, I hope that you are considering making a year end contribution to help stop gun violence, and for the reasons discussed above, I hope that you’ll consider making a donation to Americans Against Gun Violence. If you find it difficult to believe my theory that financial motivations are the main reason why other major GVP organizations don’t join us in advocating the adoption of definitive gun control laws in the United States comparable to the laws in other high income democratic countries, then I seriously hope that you'll ask them yourself why they don’t join us. The only response that I’ve received is, “It will never happen;” with “It” being the adoption of the kinds of definitive gun control laws described above. I’m confident that one day, “it” will happen. The only question is, how many more innocent people will be killed with guns before that day arrives. By donating to Americans Against Gun Violence, you can be sure that you’re contributing to making that day come sooner rather than later.
Bill Durston, MD
President, Americans Against Gun Violence
Note: Dr. Durston is a board certified emergency physician and a former expert marksman in the U.S. Marine Corps, decorated for “courage under fire” while serving in combat during the Vietnam War.
Endnotes:
[i] The main criteria are a history of a felony conviction or a misdemeanor offense of domestic violence; being under an active domestic violence restraining order; being an illegal immigrant; having been declared by a court to be “mentally incompetent” or having been subject to an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization after being deemed to be a threat to oneself or others; or having been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Forces.
[ii] In the United States, as is currently the case in many other high income democratic countries, “self-defense” should not be automatically accepted as a legitimate reason for owning a gun, given the overwhelming evidence that guns in the homes and communities of honest, law-abiding people are far more likely to be used to harm them than to protect them.
[iii] The “assault weapons bans” that other GVP organizations advocate would ban only the new sales of a small fraction of all the semi-automatic firearms currently on the market, none of which have any legitimate civilian use, and would include “grandfather clauses” that allow individuals who already own the banned weapons to keep them.
[iv] See my interview with Dr. Michael North, who lost his five year-old daughter, Sophie, in the Dunblane massacre, and who subsequently helped lead the successful campaign to ban handguns in Great Britain. Handguns are the type of weapons used in the vast majority of gun related deaths in the United States, including in most mass shootings.
[v] In Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that Washington DC’s partial handgun ban violated the Second Amendment. In Bruen, the Court ruled that New York’s requirement for a special permit to carry a concealed handgun violated the Second Amendment. “GVR” is an acronym for “ grant writ of certiorari,” vacate the prior appeals court ruling, and remand for reconsideration. The Court’s June 30 GVR orders effectively invalidated large capacity magazine bans in California and New Jersey, a ban on open carry of loaded firearms in public in Hawaii, and a ban on “assault weapons” in Maryland.
[i] I’m pleased to note that an attorney on the East Coast who contacted us soon after we founded Americans Against Gun Violence has himself subsequently founded an organization, the American Enlightenment Project, that also advocates overturning Heller.
[ii] These financial reports can be found on the website, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. The annual income of Americans Against Gun Violence isn’t reported on this website because it’s typically less than $50,000. We pay consultants to help us with our website, other IT issues, filing amicus briefs, and the like, but none of our board members and officers, including the myself as president, receive stipends.
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