I watched TMZ Live yesterday. They interviewed the rapper Killer Mike. Harvey Levin was his usual overcomplimentary self. He asked the rapper about his recommendation that every family should have "multiple guns, all sorts of guns" and this is what he said:
"5 - 5. I have always just said 5. You should have a revolver, a semi-automatic pistol, you should have a shotgun, you should have one bolt action rifle, and you should have a semi-automatic rifle."
When questioned about the semi-automatic rifle:
"I said semi-automatic, military is fully automatic. It's not military - it just looks cool. It can look like a race car but it doesn't go 200 miles an hour. My thing is simply this - the founders of the Constitution saw a need to fight tyranny at some point and they believed that that could happen again so they wrote that provision so to get to the ultimate answer you got to dig up those old white guys and ask them. I'm simply applying - I'm going by the rules that were given to me in the Constitution - nothing more-nothing less."
When asked about the risk of an increasingly armed and divided population, Killer Mike points out that the fastest growing group of gun owners is black women and he does not want to get in the way of black people enjoying their freedom.
In terms of stopping gun violence he was in agreement with curfew and an exception for working adolescents. He believes that no new gun laws are needed and echoes the line that there are enough laws to take care of the problem already on the books and that criminals are not going to follow the laws anyway. That ignores the fact that almost all mass shooters have no criminal record and in many cases have recently purchased firearms that they use in the mass shooting crime. Instead he recommends "Stop the Bleed" classes and joining gun associations or gun clubs. His rational is that if you have a tool that can cause harm you should be educated about what to do for that harm. Unfortunately if you get hit anywhere in the body - the education you will need is how to be a trauma surgeon and even then you had better be at a Level 1 trauma center.
Consistent with the previous writing on this blog Killer Mike is clearly behind gun extremism and normalizing it as a constitutionally derived right. Obvious gun extremist rhetoric includes the claim that just because an assault rifle is not fully automatic it is somehow less worrisome. Anyone who has fired an AR-15 knows that you can fire as many high velocity rounds just as fast as you can pull the trigger and if that gun is discharged in a residential community that bullet is going a long way and in some cases through multiple buildings. In fact, all of the weapons he recommends for the family will penetrate multiple walls and are a potential risk for the entire neighborhood. The normalization of assault rifles by the NRA and Republican party was a move away from the use of guns for hunting to the use of guns for killing people and there is no way around it. From the testing link this was a quote about the assault rifle result. It speaks to the mechanism of assault rifles as a combination of high velocity and bullet deformation and tumbling:
"Though the 5.56 bullets showed the most deformation, they were also terribly penetrative (19 panels, or nine walls) and, beyond the first two or three panels, created relatively large holes as they tumbled along their paths."
Just as a reminder this is the full text of the Second Amendment:
"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"Nothing about tyranny. Gun extremists ignore the preamble. The "well regulated militia" these days is each state's National Guard. This country went through a period of gun regulation that was widely accepted and reasonable until one political party realized they did not have many ideas to run on and decided to make guns a part of that culture war. I don't know Killer Mike's political affiliations. There may be a subcultural effect since this same show regularly reports gun violence and deaths within the rapper community.
The problem with all forms of extremism is that it is an appeal to emotion and it typically ignores the facts. Killer Mike sees the problem as encroaching on the rights of black people but that doesn't address the problem that firearm homicides have increased in the black community by 39% from 2019-2020 (1). We know that the political rhetoric that more guns for defensive purposes does not put a dent in those numbers and that these are almost always impulsive homicides based on gun availability.
The answer to how to reduce gun violence is not increasing guns and I don't care what your rationale is - but that is the residue of this interview that started with that question.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
References:
1: Kegler SR, Simon TR, Zwald ML, et al. Vital Signs: Changes in Firearm Homicide and Suicide Rates — United States, 2019–2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:656–663. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7119e1
No comments:
Post a Comment