Does Anyone Care About the Facts?

Even Amnesty International

Last Friday I was rushing to the post office. You’ve been in that moment, I’m sure.

In a world awash with ambiguity, a few facts remain. If we enter the post office before 5pm, the letter will be stamped with that date. It becomes a fact that the letter was mailed that day.

Along the way I scooted past two pair of yellow-vested young people who called out to me:

“Sir, will you stand with Amnesty International against gun violence?”

I still see Amnesty International like I did when I was a kid in the years before the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, I knew it as a virtuous campaigner against the invasion of Afghanistan (by the Soviets) and for the freedom of objectors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Amnesty International logo, barbed wire around a candle, represented resistance against the tyranny of Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and East Germany. At the time, it gave me pride to be on the same side of the barbed wire.

We were the good guys, standing together.

Having established the 5 o’clock fact, I stepped out of the post office. This time I spoke to the second pair of young people and asked them,

“How is Amnesty International standing against gun violence?”

I want to make a confession before going on. I particularly care about gun violence because of two images seared into my mind.

In the first, my little brother is standing in front of a Glock-wielding fifteen-year-old. He has just handed over his wallet, iPad, and iPhone on a fall morning in a decent neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee.

His voice is earnest and friendly. He always had a knack for keeping cool in moments where others lost their head:

“I’ve got a wife and two kids at home. Today is my seven-year-old’s birthday. Take anything you want. Just don’t shoot me.”

In the second image, my brother is on the ground.

The echoes of a single 9mm bullet fade across the neighborhood, overshadowed by the yell of his close friend and partner still held at gunpoint. In the ensuing quiet, the gurgle of blood pulsing out of my brother’s neck is oddly loud. The dark pool on the walkway grows wider until…it…stops.

The human mind is dominated by images we believe to be true but have never actually seen.

Perched on the sidewalk outside of the post office, one of the Amnesty International solicitors eagerly began telling me about the recent successes in Ohio of “commonsense” gun legislation. Surely I knew about it, he said.

“Now that the tide is turning, it is time to strike!”

I hadn’t known that the tide of gun violence was turning. My understanding of recent US gun legislation was that the more restrictive states had worked to close loopholes in gun registration processes while the less restrictive had made gun possession easier than ever before.

After last summer’s Covenant Church school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, (coincidentally, my family was driving into Nashville that very morning), the state legislature voted to fund armed security guards at public schools and to delay passing new gun laws until 2024. Those new laws will lower the age of gun possession and carry to 18.

In March of this year, the Biden administration announced Executive Orders targeting gun violence. These points of administrative guidance might be honored by the agencies they enjoined. Or they may not be.

Still, I listened to the Amnesty International representative’s assertions. Maybe he was thinking about the single city of Columbus, Ohio passing commonsense gun legislation that could impact people within its city limits.

Next, the representative declared that surely I knew that assault rifles were the primary cause of US gun deaths.

“Most gun deaths in America happen as a result of assault rifles.”

I encouraged him to continue explaining and agreed to make a one-time payment to support Amnesty International. I later learned that the organization recorded my one-time payment as a monthly commitment, but that is another story.

As I listened, I debated with myself:

To middle-age-man-splain the facts on gun violence? Or not?

On the one hand, it seemed silly. Over the last few years, we’ve all been taught that facts should never stand in the way of a meritorious cause. I heartily agree that American gun regulations have tipped over into the realm of irresponsibility.

Following the pattern of our gun laws, the logical next step for America would be to allow fifteen-year-olds to drive cars without driver’s education, without licensing, without insurance, and with loopholes designed to minimize accountability for any harm caused by the driver’s car.

Cars with a top speed of 240 mph would be emblazoned in candy colors, offer vape integration to provide steady stimulation, and be sold in pop-up tents with inconsistent registration requirements.

It is a free country, after all. The Fourteenth Amendment established the “privileges and immunities clause” which is commonly taken to protect American citizen’s right to travel.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. — 14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in my birth state of Tennessee would crush these Amnesty International arguments. The assertion that assault rifles are the source of most American gun deaths was patently false. The knowledge of how people typically die with guns seemed pretty limited, too. And the reference to Switzerland with its military-mandated rifles in most homes felt deeply ill-informed.

To say something or not. That was the question.

The senior Amnesty International representative sounded so confident and earnest that I considered simply walking away. Amnesty International already got money from me. That’s all the organization really cares about, right?

But I couldn’t help myself.

There are such things as facts. And misunderstanding the facts rarely leads to quality solutions.

Whether socially correct or not, I began fact-splaining:

“To help you better argue the case next time, it’s important to understand that assault rifles are responsible for only a tiny fraction of all gun deaths in America today.”

The Amnesty International representative barely batted an eye and fell back on an intellectual-sounding stance:

“Sure, I know that some studies might say that hand guns cause most deaths, but that’s just because of suicides.”

His discussion was ill-informed and depended deeply upon the confidence of youth. I admired his determination but told myself how much better he could be at his job if he knew more of the facts.

Suicides make up almost two-thirds of U.S. gun deaths.

“You are right that suicides make up the majority of all gun deaths, and that half of all suicides are with guns, usually handguns. But there are no studies arguing that assault rifles are the leading source of gun deaths in the United States.”

Half of all U.S. suicides are with guns.

You won’t see any claim about the predominance of assault rifles in the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI. Or in the Survey of Prison Inmates from the Justice Department. Or in responsible reporting on our gun death problem.

Far more than half of all murders are with handguns.

Pew Research has access to some of the best data on everything. Its latest report from April of 2023 quotes FBI sources that indicate only 3% of gun murders are due to assault rifles, 1% to shotguns, 59% to handguns, and the [37%] rest due to guns of “type not stated.”

Youth in American cities get credit for lots of gun murders.

It is the murders of young people often tied to gangs, a steady rise in mass killings since 2000, and the persistence of suicides that have bumped up America’s rate of gun deaths. In 2021 we approached levels not experienced since the early 1970’s. Non-suicide gun deaths in 2022 fortunately went down slightly.

Those of us who have lived in the shooting death capitals of America like Detroit, L.A., Chicago, and Memphis feel certain that handguns are used in the vast majority of assaults and murders.

Rural counties have an even higher rate of gun death.

Not surprisingly, though, most of us from those places are unaware that in recent years, it is rural counties that experience the most murders with guns per capita.

“Suicides were always the highest in rural areas. That hasn’t changed,” Reeping said. “It’s just that the gun deaths overall have gone up…” Paul Reeping, UC, Davis researcher

Despite having data everywhere, today feels harder than ever for us to keep up with the facts.

In the realm of gun deaths, the reality is so stark that I urge everyone, even Amnesty International, to hold off on spinning the story.

Let the facts about gun violence speak for themselves.

J. Andrew Shelley has spent years in startups that did nice stuff. Some stalling. Some selling. One for over half a billion dollars. But none making him rich. He now distills work and life into worthwhile stories. Please subscribe to read his stories, especially those in Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs.