If Only Every Country Would Do This

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In the wake of yet another mass shooting in America, there are a lot of Australians unhappy with the United States. America has failed, they note, to implement any gun control measures to prevent these recurring tragedies — no background check expansions, no bans on larger assault weapons, no nothing.

But besides expressing disgust and leading by example, is there anything Australians can actually do about it?

One group thinks there is. In an interview on Australia’s Today Show, Gun Control Australia director Samantha Lee suggested a boycott of non-essential travel to America to protest its inaction on gun control.

“We have 2.1 million Australians visiting the U.S. every year and over 200,000 expats in America,” Lee said. “So I believe we have a duty to respond to this tragedy in the U.S. And the way to do this is have a boycott of non-essential travel to the U.S.”

Watch it here:

Though there’s been no indication yet that Australians will boycott travel over America’s inaction on gun control, Australians have been calling out the U.S. for not responding to gun massacres the way their country did two decades ago. In 1996, after a man went on a rampage with a semi-automatic rifle and killed 35 people, Australia banned high-powered rifles and enacted strict licensing requirements.

Since then, Australia has seen no mass shootings, which are defined as five or more people being shot. And millions of Australians still own guns.

In his address to the country following last week’s mass shooting at an Oregon community college, President Obama cited Australia as an example of a country with common sense gun laws. On the Today Show, Lee said Australia should “act as an international community to assist Obama to push those laws through Congress.”

Gun deaths in Australia decreased significantly after the country reformed their gun laws.

“Having criminal record checks, and mental health checks, and increasing security checks in schools,” Lee said. “This is in no way radical in terms of Australia and our gun laws.”

Lee also suggested that Australia ban donations from the firearms industry to their political parties, which she said would “allow us to raise that issue with America to ban donations from the gun lobby.”

The gun rights lobby has spent considerably more influencing U.S. policy than the gun control lobby.

CREDIT: BOSTON GLOBE

“Millions of dollars are donated by the [National Rifle Association], particularly to the Republican party [in America],” she said, lamenting the “cozy relationship” between the gun lobby and politicians in both countries. “In Australia, we need to be cautious that we also don’t take any donations from the firearms industry, and we need to raise this issue with the U.S.”

Led by the NRA, gun rights activists have spent millions of dollars influencing U.S. politics, though more of their money goes toward lobbying for and against legislation than to actual candidates. The top recipients of contributions from the gun rights lobby include current House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), according to the Boston Globe.

But even though millions of Australians have guns, conservatives have been decrying Obama’s attempt to look to countries like Australia for inspiration on gun control. On Fox News on Sunday, Clayton Morris asserted that Australian citizens “aren’t allowed to have guns.” “They also have no freedom!” another host retorted.

The Face of God

Had a conversation yesterday with an old man who has lived here for 50 years.  He told of working with a well driller back a few years who was a genius at finding water.  He was so good, in fact, that they would arrive at a site in the morning, he would decide where to drill, they would set up the rig, and have water by lunchtime.  A quick bite, a pee, maybe a smoke and then off to drill another well before dark.  

The old man said he had thought long and hard about God in his life, and had learned working with the driller that Water is the Face of God.  Nothing lives without water, Water is the trinity: vapor, liquid, solid.  We are composed of Water and a few other chemicals, everything you see outside your window contains Water.  He said he goes to church for the music and the food sometimes, but when he wants to feel the presence of God, he goes for a walk.

Get Your Act Together Before It's Too Late

An acquaintance back in New Jersey has been involved in a volatile, often abusive, relationship with one of those striking Italian brunettes that are native to the Jersey Shore.  He has threatened more than once to pack up his van and get out of Dodge (or Little Egg Harbor, in this case).  But, like in the Sopranos, every time he's almost out, "they pull me back in." And off he goes on the roller coaster again.

Recently, however, there was a new twist to the soap opera.  The Jersey girl was hospitalized with an aneurysm.  Her brain was swelling so that the doctors had to remove half her skull.  She has been in a coma for three weeks now.  Of course, Jersey Boy has been distraught, fearing that his sometime wish to have her out of his life might really be granted.

The feeling of helplessness he's experiencing has expressed itself in the decision to have her name tattooed down his arm from shoulder to wrist.  A friend who obviously knows the history of this on-again, off-again love affair posted on Facebook: "And nobody ever regretted a decision like that."  I wonder if Jersey Boy even got it.

I have walked around this planet with my eyes and ears open long enough to have learned a few things, and here is one of them.  You spend the first 18 years just growing up, going to school, rolling along to adulthood.  Then, you spend from 18 to about 30 figuring out who you are and learning what not to do.  This is also when you pair up with someone and pass on your genes to the next generation.  From 30 to 50, though, is when you actually get your shit together.  Your career is established, you accumulate assets, you realize your parents aren't going to live forever and you will step up to the plate, and you learn to take comfort in good friends, beautiful sunsets, and the fact that you have only put on an extra 15 pounds since your college days.

Now Jersey Boy is pushing 50, so it's beyond time to break the addiction to drama.

NOT ONE MORE

FYI

There are bumper stickers on both Zazzle and Cafe Press that simply say, "Not One More."  Buy it here:

Richard Martinez pleaded with a do-nothing Congress to act so that "Not One More" person is suddenly taken away by a gunshot.

Mr. Martinez, Gabby Giffords, Moms Demand Action, and others, like Jon Stewart, who are simply fed up with the daily shootings in this country, should make their voices heard in every way they can.

Is There a Right to Life? And I'm Not Talking About Abortion

Guns and Mental Illness

Editorial Page New York Times

Joe Nocera 

It is difficult to read stories about Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, Calif., last month, without feeling some empathy for his parents.

We know that his mother, alarmed by some of his misogynistic YouTube videos, made a call that resulted in the police visiting Rodger. The headline from that meeting was that Rodger, seemingly calm and collected, easily deflected the police’s attention. But there was surely a subtext: How worried — how desperate, really — must a mother be to believe the police should be called on her own son?

We also learned that on the day of his murderous rampage, his mother, having read the first few lines of his “manifesto,” had phoned his father, from whom she was divorced. In separate cars, they raced from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara hoping to stop what they feared was about to happen.

And then, on Monday, in a remarkably detailed article in The New York Times, we learned the rest of it. How Rodger was clearly a troubled soul before he even turned 8 years old. How his parents’ concern about his mental health was like a “shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life.”

Constantly bullied and unable to fit in, he went through three high schools. In college, he tried to throw a girl off a ledge at a party — and was beaten up. (“I’m going to kill them,” he said to a neighbor afterward.) He finally retreated to some Internet sites that “drew sexually frustrated young men,” according to The Times.

Throughout, said one person who knew Rodger, “his mom did everything she could to help Elliot.” But what his parents never did was the one thing that might have prevented him from buying a gun: have him committed to a psychiatric facility. California’s tough gun laws notwithstanding, a background check would have caught him only if he had had in-patient mental health treatment, made a serious threat to an identifiable victim in the presence of a therapist, or had a criminal record. He had none of the above.

Should his parents have taken more steps to have him treated? Could they have? It is awfully hard to say, even in retrospect. On the one hand, there were plainly people who knew him who feared that he might someday harm others. On the other hand, those people weren’t psychiatrists. He was a loner, a misfit, whose parents were more fearful of how the world would treat their son than how their son would treat the world. And his mother, after all, did reach out for help, and the police responded and decided they had no cause to arrest him or even search his room, where his guns were hidden.

Once again, a mass killing has triggered calls for doing something to keep guns away from the mentally ill. And, once again, the realities of the situation convey how difficult a task that is. There are, after all, plenty of young, male, alienated loners — the now-standard description of mass shooters — but very few of them become killers.

And you can’t go around committing them all because a tiny handful might turn out to be killers. Indeed, the law is very clear on this point. In 1975,the Supreme Court ruled that nondangerous mentally ill people can’t be confined against their will if they can function without confinement. “In California, the bar is very high for people like Elliot,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. In a sense, California’s commitment to freedom for the mentally ill conflicts with its background-check law.

Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.

In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun.

You read the stories about Elliot Rodger and it is easy to think: If this guy, with all his obvious problems, can slip through the cracks, then what hope is there of ever stopping mass shootings?

But, of course, there is another way of thinking about this. Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period. Something to consider before the next mass shooting.

WHAT ARE THOSE NRA BOYS AFRAID OF? NERDY SCIENTISTS?

We see once again with more dead students, this time at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that gun violence in America is an epidemic.

This is a fact of life seen everywhere except the National Rifle Association, the most dangerous lobby in this country or any country, and by the elected officials who regularly pimp themselves out to it.

We are talking here about all those in the Senate and in the Congress who represent gun companies even more fiercely than they do their states or their districts, those who hide behind the Second Amendment, something conceived and written for a world of muskets, the way cockroaches hide in similar dark places.

These are people who do not only fight what they call “gun grabbers.” They also fight any legitimate research into the whole complicated subject of gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is only allowed to spend around $100,000 a year because the NRA and its tame politicians act as if education is some kind of threat to our basic freedoms, instead of a way to understand the connection between the insane number of guns in this country and the people who keep dying as a result of them.

Nobody is saying that the NRA, or legitimate gun owners — you must differentiate between them and the gun nuts who act as if the government is about to roll into their driveways with tanks and take their rifles — are responsible for what happened this weekend in Isla Vista, Calif., or at Fort Hood last month, or Virginia Tech, or Newtown. But to ignore the growing problem of gun violence, to resist thoughtful and scientific — and nonpolitical — research into its causes, is no better than looking away when more innocent people are gunned down.

It reminds you of the old story, told by Jimmy Breslin, about when F. Lee Bailey was defending a New Jersey doctor named Carl Coppolino, accused of murdering his wife. At some point in the runup to the trial, Coppolino told Bailey one day that he hadn’t killed his wife.

And Bailey said, “Well, yeah, Carl, but it’s not like you did very much to keep her alive.”

Now Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York are introducing legislation that would give the CDC $10 million a year “for the purpose of conducting support or research on firearms safety or gun violence protection.”

They will be fought, certainly, by the NRA and those in Washington who provide cover for the gun manufacturers and their lobbyists. We will once again be told they are just preserving and protecting the Second Amendment, even as these people constantly shame the Second Amendment, as if they’re all knuckle-draggers like Joe the Plumber. But it is Markey and Maloney who are fighting an honorable fight here, in the shadow of another mass shooting in America.

“In America,” Maloney said in a statement the other day, “gun violence kills twice as many children as cancer, and yet political grandstanding has halted funding for public research to understand this crisis.”

She is already being called a grandstander by the NRA and the bullhorn media that too often genuflects in front of it. So is Markey. But maybe this will be a time when they can actually get something done on responsible research into this subject for the first time in 20 years.

Reasonable people know enough to be afraid of a gun in the wrong hands in America. But ask yourself a question: Why is the NRA so afraid of research on gun violence unless it is afraid of what that research might tell us? Even since Newtown, any kind of gun control has been fought in Washington by gutless politicians, so many of them from the right. Now they act as if they have to go get a gun to protect themselves from research, in what is supposed to be the most enlightened country on Earth.

Just not when it comes to guns. Those who scream about gun grabbers aren’t protecting the Second Amendment, they are protecting gun money. They act like Americans who look in horror at the number of gun deaths in America are like tree huggers, or those who want to save the whales, or members of the Flat Earth Society.

We are constantly told by the people who think the current gun laws and gun culture are just fine the way they are that they need their guns to protect themselves. But more and more you wonder who protects the rest of us from them?

The Centers for Disease Control sponsors all sorts of programs to prevent injuries and diseases, spends money on cancer and HIV, on brittle bones for the elderly. Then they get shamefully nickel-and-dimed on studying an epidemic like gun violence. We know we’re afraid of guns. What are the gun lovers afraid of?

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/research-shed-light-gun-violence-article-1.1809288#ixzz33EHBAqsn

Keep Handguns Away From Teenagers

By TERESA TRITCH MAY 30, 2014 4:23 PM 

In response to the Isla Vista rampage, legislators in California are introducing a bill that would let the police and private individuals ask a court for a restraining order to deny guns to those who pose a threat to themselves or others.

The bill would be an advance in gun-control legislation. Before now, the notion of gun restraining orders had mainly captured the attention of mental health experts and academic researchers, but not legislators.

Still, there is another step California has already taken to keep guns out of the wrong hands that should be emulated elsewhere: setting the age to buy and to own a handgun at 21.

Currently, federal law and most states  let 18-year-olds purchase and own handguns. That flies in the face of research and common sense.  Studies have documented the prevalence of heightened risk-taking among teenagers.  Statistics show  that homicide rates risein the late teens and peak at age 20. A Justice Department studyfrom 2012 found that many young gun offenders incarcerated in states with the weakest gun control laws would have faced bans on gun ownership in states with the strongest controls.

Raising the handgun ownership age would not apply to rifles and shotguns, and would not prohibit parents and children from going hunting together with a long gun. (Most of the states that limit handgun sales to those 21 and older allow 18-year-olds to buy and possess long guns.) Handguns, however, are the weapon most often used in gun shootings and deaths.

Pro-gun lobbyists will invariably point out that rampages like the one in Isla Vista have been committed by people over the age of 21. That is willfully off-point: The idea that gun control shouldn’t respond to obvious gun dangers because they didn’t play a central role in a particular crime amounts to fatal abdication of adult responsibility.

They also say that setting the age at 21 for handguns, as California, New York, New Jersey, and 10 other states have done, punishes law-abiding 18- to 20-year-olds for the transgressions of the few. But all 50 states have set the drinking age at 21 out of concern for increased risk-taking by teens and the threat that poses to them and the public. The same concern applies to gun ownership, and the solution is the same. Raise the legal age for handguns to 21 in every state.

To the Editor:

In “Why Can’t Doctors Identify Killers?” (Op-Ed, May 28), Richard A. Friedman argues that it’s extremely difficult for prospective mass murderers to be identified and stopped before they kill.

Although Dr. Friedman presents a convincing case, the regular occurrence of horrific killings cries out for drastic changes in the way the psychiatric community and the public treat even the slightest oddity in behavior that they observe that might signal a proclivity toward violence.

Virtually every mass killing has been carried out by angry young men, thus significantly limiting in scope the population of people who need to be identified.

The nightmares of Columbine, Aurora, Newtown and now Isla Vista require a nationwide effort to train thousands of people in ways to identify these angry young men and report them to local authorities before they kill more innocent people.

Nothing less is needed if this spate of murders is to be stopped before these mentally ill men kill again.

ALAN SAFRON

Woodcliff Lake, N.J., May 28, 2014

To the Editor:

Re “Campus Killings Set Off Anguished Conversation” (front page, May 27): Counteracting misogyny is a very worthy goal, but it is not likely to have a direct impact on mass shootings and gun-related violence in the United States — nor will the intense focus on one individual’s psychopathology.

The best predictor of violence is a history of violence, and a recent study by Mayors Against Illegal Guns finds a strong correlation between mass shootings and domestic violence. Of the 93 mass shootings between 2009 and 2013 in the United States, 57 percent involved the killing of a spouse, family member or intimate partner, and in at least 17 instances, the shooter had a prior domestic violence charge.

Closing loopholes in current laws prohibiting gun sales to people convicted of domestic violence, as proposed in a bill by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, would be one small but useful step in reducing gun-related killings.

RONALD PIES

Cazenovia, N.Y., May 27, 2014

A WAY AROUND "THE CRAVEN"

Chicago Mayor Proposes Restrictions on Gun Sales

By JULIE BOSMANMAY 28, 2014

CHICAGO — Calling gun violence Chicago’s “most urgent problem,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel outlined a proposal on Tuesday that would make it harder to buy firearms in the city.

The proposal would restrict gun purchases for individuals to one a month and would mandate that all gun sales be videotaped, an effort to deter buyers from using false identification. Under the proposed ordinance, employees in gun stores would be required to undergo background checks and complete training to help them spot the common signs of gun traffickers. Retailers would be subject to a quarterly audit of inventory in an effort to reduce theft. In addition, the plan would impose a 72-hour waiting period to buy handguns and a 24-hour waiting period to buy rifles and shotguns.

Mr. Emanuel planned to introduce the report at a City Council meeting Wednesday morning.

“Chicago’s violence problem is largely a gun problem,” the report said. “Every year, Chicago police officers take thousands of illegal guns off the street. But, despite these efforts, it remains far too easy for criminals to get their hands on deadly weapons.”

The proposal is the latest attempt by the mayor to restrict firearms in the city, a response to intractable gang-related violence. In January, a federal judge ruled that an outright ban on gun shops in Chicago was unconstitutional, citing “the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Emanuel has tried to tamp down violence in Chicago since taking office in 2011, pushing for tougher rules on gun retailers and stronger federal laws on firearms. Chicago’s rate of gun-related violence is three times that of New York.

The report blamed states with weaker gun laws for most of the illegal guns in Chicago, saying that from 2009 to 2013, 60 percent of guns used to commit crimes in the city were originally bought out of state, mainly in Indiana, Mississippi and Wisconsin.

What Did the Framers Really Intend?

I hope that New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wins a Pulitzer Prize someday for all his hard work regarding gun violence in the United States.  Here is his column published on May 26, 2014.

Three days after the publication of Michael Waldman’s new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” Elliot Rodger, 22, went on a killing spree, stabbing three people and then shooting another eight, killing four of them, including himself. This was only the latest mass shooting in recent memory, going back to Columbine.

In his rigorous, scholarly, but accessible book, Waldman notes such horrific events but doesn’t dwell on them. He is after something else. He wants to understand how it came to be that the Second Amendment, long assumed to mean one thing, has come to mean something else entirely. To put it another way: Why are we, as a society, willing to put up with mass shootings as the price we must pay for the right to carry a gun?

The Second Amendment begins, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” and that’s where Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, begins, too. He has gone back into the framers’ original arguments and made two essential discoveries, one surprising and the other not surprising at all.

The surprising discovery is that of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated. What we know is that the founders were deeply opposed to a standing army, which they viewed as the first step toward tyranny. Instead, their assumption was that the male citizenry would all belong to local militias. As Waldman writes, “They were not allowed to have a musket; they were required to. More than a right, being armed was a duty.”

Thus the unsurprising discovery: Virtually every reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms” — the second part of the Second Amendment — was in reference to military defense. Waldman notes the House debate over the Second Amendment in the summer of 1789: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.”

In time, of course, the militia idea died out, replaced by a professionalized armed service. Most gun regulation took place at the state and city level. The judiciary mostly stayed out of the way. In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld the nation’s first national gun law, the National Firearms Act, which put onerous limits on sawed-off shotguns and machine guns — precisely because the guns had no “reasonable relation” to “a well-regulated militia.”

But then, in 1977, there was a coup at the National Rifle Association, which was taken over by Second Amendment fundamentalists. Over the course of the next 30 years, they set out to do nothing less than change the meaning of the Second Amendment, so that its final phrase — “shall not be infringed” — referred to an individual right to keep and bear arms, rather than a collective right for the common defense.

Waldman is scornful of much of this effort. Time and again, he finds the proponents of this new view taking the founders’ words completely out of context, sometimes laughably so. They embrace Thomas Jefferson because he once wrote to George Washington, “One loves to possess arms.” In fact, says Waldman, Jefferson was referring to some old letter he needed “so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state.”

Still, as Waldman notes, the effort was wildly successful. In 1972, the Republican platform favored gun control. By 1980, the Republican platform opposed gun registration. That year, the N.R.A. gave its first-ever presidential endorsement to Ronald Reagan.

The critical modern event, however, was the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, which tossed aside two centuries of settled law, and ruled that a gun-control law in Washington, D.C., was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The author of the majority opinion was Antonin Scalia, who fancies himself the leading “originalist” on the court — meaning he believes, as Waldman puts it, “that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what the framers and their generation intended in 1789.”

Waldman is persuasive that a truly originalist decision would have tied the right to keep and bear arms to a well-regulated militia. But the right to own guns had by then become conservative dogma, and it was inevitable that the five conservative members of the Supreme Court would vote that way.

“When the militias evaporated,” concludes Waldman, “so did the original meaning of the Second Amendment.” But, he adds, “What we did not have was a regime of judicially enforced individual rights, able to trump the public good.”

Sadly, that is what we have now, as we saw over the weekend. Elliot Rodger’s individual right to bear arms trumped the public good. Eight people were shot as a result.

At Least I'm Not Nurse Jackie

There are days I am not the woman I would like to be and when I am very lucky, they coincide with a new episode of “Nurse Jackie.”

Here are a few of the things Jackie, a pill-popping addict played by Edie Falco on Showtime, has done lately: Lied to her 12-step sponsor that she stopped taking drugs. Lied to her cop boyfriend that she stopped taking drugs. Had sex in a bathroom with a drug dealer to score free drugs. Stole the ID of a doctor she works with to write prescriptions for drugs. Borrowed a snazzy leather jacket belonging to the drug dealer’s girlfriend without the girlfriend’s knowledge.

That, to me, was hitting bottom: It would be like putting on the wife’s bathrobe, if you were fooling around with a married man. It is something the Other Woman is not permitted to do, even if you are naked and the house is on fire. You stay in there and die.

I, too, have days where I behave badly: Dodging a call from an old friend planning to renew her marriage vows. Telling another friend how self-congratulatory and obnoxious marriage renewal ceremonies are. Covertly checking my email while a friend talks about the imminent death of her dog.

When they’re done, I can settle back with Showtime and I think, “But, at least I’m not as bad as Jackie.” I have these delicious waves of moral superiority like you cannot believe. It may be better than sex.

But there is one thing about the show that confuses me. Despite all her drug habit, Jackie is such a great nurse, I keep thinking, so what’s wrong with drugs? It’s having to sneak around that makes Jackie do bad things like lying, having sex with drug dealers, and stealing other people’s IDs.

True, I am usually in the dark about what drugs Jackie is taking and their side effects. It would be helpful if there were a crawl on the bottom of the screen: Nurse Jackie is now taking three 10-milligram tablets of OxyContin. This substance has been proven to enhance one’s ability to balance on a counter in a club bathroom while having sex.

It should be noted, however, that Jackie confines her bad behavior to herself and her family — her patients are spared. She destroys her marriage, messes up her two young daughters and ruins romantic relationships. And she does this with a complete lack of guilt, a state I have sought to achieve my whole life, much as a Buddhist monk seeks bliss.

I think that is why the show is such a hit. With “Nurse Jackie” you do not have a heroine who is smarter, nicer and more emotionally evolved than you, but whose behavior makes you feel so much better about yourself. I could steal a cab out from under the nose of a guy on crutches and still go back to my mantra: “At least I’m not Nurse Jackie.”

You sure didn’t find this kind of behavior in the TV heroines of my youth. Lois Lane, while she hankered after an unattainable guy from another planet, remained perky and indefatigable — she didn’t do shots in the bathroom of The Daily Planet when Superman didn’t call. Mary Tyler Moore worried so much about doing the right thing she had anxiety attacks. Lucy might have a horrible day, say at a candy factory, and she never even smoked a joint — and she was married to a band leader.

I don’t find a lot of heroines that make me feel better by comparison now. Alicia, in “‘The Good Wife,” with her unswayable moral compass who always knows the right thing to tell her children? Peggy, the secretary turned chief copywriter on “Mad Men,” who while lately short-tempered with her staff, takes coming up with those stupid ads seriously? The Mother of Dragons in “Game of Thrones” who’s so impressively decisive?(Crucify them! Invade that! Put those heads on a spike in that corner of the living room! No, not there, that’s too close to the dragons’ scratching post!)

I can take three days deciding whether to buy a pair of shoes.

But Jackie? Where are we in her life? She makes it with the drug dealer, then, about two hours later, jumps into the boyfriend’s arms and tells him how happy she is to see him. She yells at her ex-husband’s new fiancée for taking her daughter shopping because she has no impulse control, then learns they were buying a gift for her. She attends her one year of sobriety party stoned.

And, she has yet to return that snazzy jacket she never should have touched in the first place.

Really, I can’t get enough.

Joyce Wadler is a humorist and writer in New York. Her books include “My Breast” and “Cured: My Ovarian Cancer Story.”

Follow Joyce Wadler on Facebook: facebook.com/joyce.wadler and on Twitter:@joyce_wadler.  Previous “I Was Misinformed” columns can be found here.

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Gun Violence is a Public Health Emergency

It took only eleven minutes to transform a quiet elementary school into the scene of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary with a Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S semiautomatic rifle. He used the weapon to murder twenty school children and six adults. One state trooper warned the medical personnel who arrived at the school to formally declare the victims dead: “This will be the worst day of your life.”

The Sandy Hook shootings prompted an outpouring of national grief and outrage. Yet sadly, this tragedy—while especially shocking and visible—only represents the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deaths from gun violence. Every day in the United States, friends and family must make funeral preparations for an average of 86 peoplewho were intentionally or unintentionally killed with a firearm.

If measles or mumps killed 31,672 people a year, we would undoubtedly consider the situation to be a public health emergency. And indeed, gun violence shares many characteristics with other widespread safety threats that have been framed as public health issues.

In a Q&A published in a 2008 book, The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health, epidemiologist Mark Rosenberg recalls early efforts to frame gun violence as a public health issue in the 1980s. Finding that the burden of deaths from guns in the United States was similar to those of cars, he realized that gun violence was an area where public health could “make a big contribution and save lives by applying the same kind of science that had been applied to road traffic crashes.”

Indeed, like motor vehicle deaths, gun fatalities result from a consumer product that is integral to many Americans’ lives. Yet both cars and guns can be made safer with technology and engineering—air bags in cars and loading indicators for guns.

But efforts to frame gun violence as a public health challenge have met with considerable resistance, most notably from gun lobby groups, such as the NRA.

The NRA is a powerful force in American political life that attracts many supporters, not only with its ideological positions, but with its message of self-empowerment. And the organization has long and vociferously opposed the framing of gun violence as a public health issue, portraying research on the subject as biased and misguided. For instance, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, told the New York Times that the CDC was guilty of publishing “political opinion masquerading as medical science.”

The NRA has worked to translate their objections into policies that circumscribe public health research on the effects of gun violence. In the mid-1990s, after a failed campaign to eliminate the CDC’s National Center For Injury Prevention, gun lobbyists helped persuade Congress to include language in its budget stating that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”  (If the NRA is right about everything they preach, why are they so afraid of the data?)

Despite this limitation, the agency has since developed other mechanisms to study causes of violent deaths, notably the National Violence Reporting System. But to this day, the CDC’s funding level for research explicitly devoted to gun violence prevention remains at $0. And according to Dr. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, due to fears of getting attacked by the NRA lobby, many foundations have avoided funding such research. (Do you think Bill and Melinda are afraid of the NRA?) “It’s one of the reasons that there’s been relatively little gun research compared to other research in public health,” Dr. Hemenway says.

More recently, the NRA succeeded in adding a provision into the Affordable Care Act to limit doctors’ ability to gather data about their patients’ gun use. The Washington Post dubbed this provision “a largely overlooked but significant challenge to a movement in American medicine to treat firearms as a matter of public health.”

Then, in 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law a “docs vs glocks” bill, which banned physicians from asking their patients about gun ownership. In 2012, a federal judge permanently blocked this NRA-backed law because it violated the First Amendment rights of doctors. Nonetheless, such laws and provisions indicates the extent to which policymakers have attempted to limit medical and public health conversations and research on gun safety.

Despite this already remarkable influence in setting and limiting the terms of public health research, this year the NRA has wielded its power in an extraordinary new way by obstructing President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy as U.S. Surgeon General. The organization opposed Dr. Murthy’s characterization of gun control as a health issue and his support of regulatory measures, such as mandatory safety training for gun owners.

But by blocking Dr. Murthy’s nomination, the NRA prompted prominent medical and public health voices to take a stand. In a remarkable op-ed, the New England Journal of Medicine stated that “the NRA is taking its single-issue political blackmail to a new level.” And in April 2014, Michael Bloomberg took a bold step into the ongoing debate, announcing that he would donate $50 million of his own money to counter the NRA.

The New York Times describes how Bloomberg intends to restructure current gun control advocacy efforts to more effectively counter the NRA. Part of the idea is to combine forces and model advocacy efforts on the success of other safety-related groups, notably Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The resulting new group, Everytown For Gun Safety, has already produced an ad that directly challenges claims made by the NRA.

Whether these new strategies and influx of money can promote effectively a public health perspective on gun violence and safety interventions remains an open question with high stakes. In fact, even after the Sandy Hook shootings of 2012, many states have been loosening their gun restrictions. Georgia, one of the most prominent and recent examples of this trend, recently passed into law a bill that allows licensed gun owners to carry their weapons in schools, churches, bars, and airports. The public is often unaware of the extent to which gun owners may legally carry and display their weapons in public spaces across the country.

What policy changes do gun safety advocates seek? A recent Massachusetts report identified 44 strategies to reduce gun violence that all committee members, including public health professionals and gun owners, endorsed. Of the range of possible strategies to reduce gun violence, strengthening the existing background check system has the most public support. In fact, although the NRA as an organization does not support universal background checks, a 2013 poll found support among 74 percent of NRA members. (The NRA doesn't even support their own members!)

This approach is also supported by public health research. As reported by Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic, a 2014 study found that the murder rate in Missouri jumped 16 percent after the repeal of a state law that required anyone purchasing a handgun to obtain a permit indicating a background check had been passed.

Safe storage practices and more safely designed guns would also likely make an impact on reducing the number of unintentional gun deaths among young children. As Dr. Hemenway told WBUR’s All Things Considered, “We have childproof aspirin bottles; we should have childproof guns.”

Yet entrepreneurs seeking to market and sell “smart guns,” or weapons which can only be fired by authorized users, have encountered harassment and outrage from gun enthusiasts. This month, a Maryland gun dealer who had intended to sell the nation’s first smart gun backed down after enduring protests and death threats. And fewer than 20 states have enacted laws to hold adults criminally liable if they fail to safely store their gun, enabling children to access the weapon.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Julius Richmond and medical economist Rashi Fein have proposed three essential factors involved in addressing a societal problem: scientific data, a social strategy guiding the pursuit of public health goals, and political will. Public health researchers have sought to collect data on the effects of gun violence despite the obstacles, and gun safety advocates are currently seeking new strategies.

But ultimately, it seems that whether gun violence can be framed as public health problem will come down to political will. A public health frame for this fully loaded American issue can only be effective if it is built on a narrative of shared American values. These must include not only the second amendment, but also protecting our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.