Tag: gun control

4 Low-Lift Ways You Can Help Fight Gun Violence

Posted on by robbie

In the first six months of 2018, there were 150 mass shootings in America. And though the number of dead continues to climb — over 7,210 people have been killed by firearms this year, a figure that is rapidly rising — gun law reform hasn’t had much traction on Capitol Hill.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to get involved in shaping U.S. gun laws and regulations. From joining advocacy groups to buying lipstick (really), here are four ways you can take action on gun reform to help push it onto the congressional agenda.

ARM YOURSELF WITH KNOWLEDGE

Lobbyists and reporters are often at odds in how they can influence policy. Reporters expose, while lobbyists harangue and cajole. But despite their differences, both are effective in their own right — and they could use your help.
First, know your stuff: Read daily news from a source like The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that covers gun violence across the U.S. and is primarily financed through the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
Everytown, which is funded by $50 million of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s money, actively fights against the NRA’s lobbying with a coalition of their own — comprised of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, as well as survivors of gun violence — to help raise awareness and change legislation in the U.S.
Everytown recently had success in pushing gun reform in New Jersey, which just passed a “red flag” bill that allows law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from people they determine a risk to society or themselves. According to Axios, the group convened 10 times with state leaders and had a day of advocacy in support for the bill in order to help pass it.
Other organizations to learn about and support: The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center and The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

INFLUENCE POLICY FROM YOUR LAPTOP

Have an opinion on gun reform? Outside of voting, social media is the easiest way to send a message to your congressional leaders.   
Not only does Facebook’s Town Hall Project make it simple to find out who your local representatives are and to message them directly, websites like Countable help you navigate all the bills currently being considered in D.C., and to take action by letting representatives know what you think of the bills.
SideReel founders Peter Arzhintar and Bart Myers launched Countable in 2014, when there were few ways to engage politicians on the internet. “We were talking about what to do next, and we’re both passionate about politics,” Myers told Wired. “We were interested in what happened with campaign finance reform and [the Stop Online Piracy Act], but we were disappointed with the tools that were out there to drive advocacy and let the average voter to get involved.”
Countable now has news and a social component that allows users to interact with others’ opinions, and vote on them too.

Gun Reform 2
Activist beauty brand The Lipstick Lobby donates all net profits from their “Fired Up” line to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

STAY FLY

If you’re fired up about the lack of gun regulation in this country, buy some lipstick.
No, really. The Lipstick Lobby is a social movement e-commerce beauty website that is dedicating 100 percent of net profits from their “Fired Up” lipstick color — a fiery orange-red — to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The Brady Center aims to cut gun deaths in half by 2025.
If you’re feeling especially generous — or just need to stock up on cosmetics — you can also support Planned Parenthood or the American Civil Liberties Union by buying other products from The Lipstick Lobby that contribute to those organizations’ campaigns.
For those with extra deep pockets, supporting high-end brands that align with gun reform is another way to maintain your activism-glam game. As one example, Gucci donated $500,000 to the March for Our Lives rally this year. And if you’re a jet-setter, flying Delta and staying at a Wyndham hotel is yet another way to stick it to the NRA. Those are just a few of the brands that have cut ties with the gun lobby.

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD, EVEN IF YOU’RE UNDERAGE

With the website WeCan.Vote, you can see how your state representatives rank with the NRA’s scorecard (A+ being the most friendly toward the gun lobby and F the least). If you’re not yet voting age, you can sign up on the website and then cast your vote to keep those members in or out of office. The vote is purely ceremonial and doesn’t actually influence election results, but it does send a message to leaders that the next wave of voters is coming.
Another way to make a difference? Join or form your own activist group, much like students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did when 17 students and staff members were shot and killed this past February. If you need some inspiration, here are just a few examples of young activists demanding change.

5 Policies That States Are Using to Curb Gun Violence, With Encouraging Results

Posted on by robbie

On average, nearly 34,000 people are killed in the U.S. each year due to gun homicide, suicide or accidents, with another 81,000 who are shot but survive. But zeroing in on the causes of gun violence, in order to thwart them, is no easy task. It’s not just about a glut of available firearms or how easy it is to obtain one. As the Center for American Progress pointed out in its 2016 Progress Index, there is a connected web of social and economic issues that can impact rates of violence in a community — persistent poverty and a lack of employment, to name a few.
That’s led several communities to take novel approaches to curb the bloodshed, either by expanding existing federal law or implementing new ideas altogether. Below, five policies put in place by cities and states around the country whose smart governance on guns is changing the landscape for the better.

THE POLICY: A BETTER BACKGROUND CHECK

Federal law already requires licensed firearms dealers to perform criminal background checks on prospective buyers. But unlicensed private sellers — who are responsible for about 40 percent of all gun sales in “no questions asked” transactions — are not legally bound to follow the same rules.
Since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., six states (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Washington) have successfully closed this gap by passing and implementing these so-called universal background checks on every sale and transfer within their borders (including those purchased at gun shows and online) for all classes of firearms, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Nevada could soon be the seventh, but the state is currently undergoing a procedural dispute over the implementation of the measure.

THE POLICY: DENYING GUNS TO DOMESTIC ABUSERS

Research has repeatedly shown a lethal link between domestic violence and gun violence in the U.S. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of women who were murdered were shot and killed by their intimate partners. “It’s a huge epidemic,” says Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Under federal law, people convicted of a felony or domestic abuse cannot buy or own a gun. But there are some limitations to that measure, like defining a domestic abuser only as a spouse. To protect more women, some states, including six in 2017 alone, have strengthened federal law by expanding that definition to also encompass former dating partners.

THE POLICY: LICENSING AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives requires a federal license for those in the business of selling guns. But the law doesn’t mandate that dealers perform background checks on their employees, says Avery Gardiner, co-president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “They also don’t train them to recognize signs of illegal gun trafficking, nor is a gun store even required to lock up its inventory at night,” she says.
In response, 15 states, along with Washington, D.C., have made state-issued licenses mandatory for gun dealers. Additionally, six states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington — now require gun stores to do background checks on employees.

Six states now require firearm dealers to perform background checks on their employees.

THE POLICY: A FOCUS ON INNER CITIES

“Sometimes gun deaths in cities that are ethnically diverse get overlooked,” Shearer says, adding that instead, there’s a tendency to focus on mass shootings and rare events. But the reality is that deaths by guns happen every day across the country.
The Law Center published a report last year on promising approaches being implemented nationwide to reduce urban gun violence. One such city that’s seen success: Richmond, Calif.
In 2007, the Bay Area city was considered one of the country’s most dangerous. So officials there enacted intervention programs and policy reforms in response. They created a new agency, the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), to treat violence as a communicable disease and connected vulnerable residents to social services. As ONS’s director DeVone Boggan, a 2015 NationSwell AllStar, described the agency’s mission: “You’ve got to understand the nature of [violence], and you’ve got to understand the drivers of it” in order to combat it.
The results were impressive, with homicides in Richmond dipping by 2010. Three years later the city saw its murder rate fall from more than 40 homicides a year to 16, its lowest number in more than three decades.

THE POLICY: DETERMINING WHO’S TOO DANGEROUS TO HAVE A GUN

A measure designed to keep guns away from people perceived at risk of harming themselves or others allows police, and sometimes family members, to ask the courts to intervene. Provided with enough evidence, a judge might temporarily deny a person’s access to guns if he or she is deemed to be a significant danger.
Connecticut was the first state to enact a version of this order in 1999, followed later by Indiana, California and Washington State. Others, including Oregon, are considering adopting similar bills. In 2016, researchers from Duke University led a study that found a measurable reduction in Connecticut’s suicide rate as a result of its risk-warrant policy.
“These laws have a huge potential for saving lives,” Shearer says, “because family members often notice warning signs that somebody is suicidal or homicidal before something really bad happens.”
Homepage photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
Continue reading “5 Policies That States Are Using to Curb Gun Violence, With Encouraging Results”

Giving Mickey Mouse an Energy Boost Helps the Environment, How One Neighborhood Transformed Itself from the Country’s Worst and More

Posted on by robbie

 
Want Power? Fire Up the Tomatoes and Potatoes, National Geographic
In Florida, scientists discovered that the tomato can be transformed from a lycopene storehouse into an electrical powerhouse. Considering that the annual surplus in South Florida could power Disney World for three months, is a new type of utility — one that’s fueled by food waste — in the state’s future?
How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood, Politico
Simply put, in 2009, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was the nation’s worst. When city government couldn’t provide a lifeline to the downtrodden area, a nonprofit private development company stepped in. Now, in just seven short years, the community is experiencing a blossoming transformation.
New California Law Could Keep Guns Away from People Like Omar Mateen, Reveal
After a mass shooting tragedy in 2014, the Golden State proved that it’s possible to pass sensible gun legislation. Its gun violence restraining order can prevent someone from purchasing or possessing a firearm for 21 days if law enforcement or a family member is worried they’ll turn violent.
MORE: The Surprising Second Life of Urine

These 5 Smart Gun Technologies Could Be the Future of Firearms in America

Posted on by robbie

Would anyone shopping for a new car buy one that wasn’t equipped with seat belts? Live in a house without smoke detectors? Use a chain saw without a safety brake? It goes without saying that consumers expect products to be safe. But when it comes to one of the most deadly objects — a gun, which killed more than 30,000 Americans in 2013 — people are hard-pressed to find one with state-of-the-art safety features.

That’s not because the technology isn’t readily available. Back in 2000, Smith & Wesson agreed to manufacture handguns with a built-in lock, but boycotts curbed sales. More recently, in California and Maryland, stores stocking the leading smart gun in production were met with vicious backlash online, protests and death threats. Some question the reliability of smart guns, and others believe that they threaten the Second Amendment. But Stephen Teret, a policy expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says unequivocally, “Smart guns are going to save lives. They’re not going to save all lives,” he continues, “but why wouldn’t we want to make guns as safe a consumer product as possible?”

Many Americans share his sentiment. In 2014, through the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, Silicon Valley luminaries like Ron Conway pledged $1 million toward research and development of smart gun technologies, and last month, President Barack Obama signaled his support. Which devices are the most promising? NationSwell interviewed five leading inventors about their prototypes.

A small wireless transmitter, disguised within a ring, communicates with a circuit board in the gun’s handle.

TriggerSmart by Robert McNamara

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology keeps guns from firing when they’re in the wrong hands. TriggerSmart’s small wireless transmitter (disguised inside a ring) “talks” with a circuit board in the firearm’s handle. When they’re within less than two inches of each other, the gun unjams. (The technology works nearly identically to keys that remotely unlock car doors.) And unlike fingerprint recognition, the signal communicates through material, like a glove.
Robert McNamara, founder of the Florida-based company manufacturing the technology, started investigating how to build a smart gun after wondering why he could remotely lock and disable his iPhone, but not his gun. He approaches the issue of gun violence with a foreigner’s eye. Uncomfortable with the regularity of shootings of America, this level of gun violence “doesn’t happen every day in Ireland,” McNamara points out, speaking with the thick brogue of his homeland. “We never hear of a child shooting themselves or their mother, or a police officer being overpowered.” Recognizing that U.S. politics around smart guns are “a bit of a hot potato,” McNamara hopes to capitalize in an industry avoided by many. Previously working in construction and property development, he now spends his days courting big investors with the hopes of soon bringing TriggerSmart into final states of testing.

Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core resembles a knife block.

Dual:Lock by Timothy Oh

Dual:Lock is a throwback to traditional safety measures, but with a contemporary twist. In essence, the device is simply a high-tech, wall-mounted gun safe. Rather than punching in numbers or spinning a dial, the safe opens with a fingerprint scan. Dual:Lock’s stainless steel core looks like a knife block; its carbide retaining pin locks the weapon in place.

With relatives in law enforcement, creator Timothy Oh says that he was raised with an ingrained sense of the devastation gun violence can cause, as well as the importance of firearm safety. The native of Orange County, Calif., and current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., built his first smart gun in high school. After uploading his idea to an online forum and receiving extremely negative feedback, he started listening to consumers’ desires and conducted 500 interviews with military, law enforcement and civilian gun owners. Many told him that they keep their guns loaded and unsecure in case there’s an emergency. “Immediate access and security are two values that are conflicting right now in the current market,” Oh explains. For these gun owners, Dual:Lock provides faster access than traditional closed-door safes (the device opens within 0.8 seconds). A prototype will be tested at the Los Angeles Police Department gun ranges this fall, and eight gun stores in the Albany, N.Y. region, have signed letters of sale intent.

Chloe Green works on the breadboard prototype of her technology, gUNarmed™.

gUNarmed by Chloe Green

Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Oikos University, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Umpqua Community College. Fifteen-year-old high school student Chloe Green says she’s read too many news reports about, “children being killed and the families being torn apart by gun violence.” Green comes from a family of gun owners, but thought she could bypass the political divide and enhance “safe, responsible gun ownership” with technology.

Her early-stage device, gUNarmed, will use satellites to track a gun’s location and automatically jam the magazine when inside schools and government buildings. (The owner can program additional excluded areas.) When a firearm is detected in a prohibited space, a motor on the magazine prevents bullets from entering the chamber and could send an alert to local law enforcement. Currently, Green has mapped out the electronics in a breadboard prototype, but she doesn’t know when she will advance to the next stages since her young age makes it difficult to network professionally. Still, she doesn’t plan to let that derail her. “I’ve always been interested in the process of making, tinkering and inventing things,” she says, hoping to save American lives from firearm deaths while also getting other young women involved in STEM.

A mini camera that can detect distances is installed in this smart bullet.

EverLokt by John William Stein

Pennsylvania resident John William Stein believes that smart guns will only sell if they are attractive to gun owners. The one-time biotech inventor for pharmaceutical companies knew little about firearms, but he was moved into action by the Sandy Hook massacre. (A few weeks after the shooting, dozens of kids walked onstage at his church to sing Christmas carols, and he could only think of the other children who had been lost.) The 75-year-old’s first device was a safety round hooked up with a motion-sensor that pinged parents by cell phone if shaken (a sign that a child or an intruder had found their gun). But that device seemed too simplistic to motivate firearms enthusiasts.

So recently, Stein decided to take advantage of today’s increasingly compact processors and cameras and installed a miniature lens into the head of the bullet. Using its ability to detect distances, this smart bullet would not fire if a person is less than three feet away or if a child is looking down the barrel. At the same time, however, the bullet would release if aimed across a room in the direction of a home invader. Still in the early stages of development, Stein’s bullet could also film the incident for law enforcement, and a second camera in the back could snap a picture upon discharge to show who fired the gun.

Before developing this biometric sensor Kai Kloepfer, built a remote control robot.

Ægen Technologies by Kai Kloepfer

Boulder, Colo., teen Kai Kloepfer describes the 2012 Aurora movie theater mass shooting, where 12 people died at a sold-out midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” as feeling like his September 11. The loss of life was close — he had visited the Century 16 theater with his friends — so the self-taught electronics nut who participates annually in the local science fair focused his next project on something socially relevant: creating a smart gun. His first attempt involved iris recognition. But that idea foundered when he realized the sensor would be incompatible with sunglasses, thick eyeglasses or shooting in the dark. The next logical alternative? Fingerprint recognition.

Going on four years later, Kloepfer’s biometric sensor is located on a gun’s grip. It captures an image of a person’s fingerprint and checks it against a database of authorized users. If the system finds a match, the gun unlocks. As soon as the owner releases it, the device relocks — a vital feature if the firearm is used in self-defense or is stolen. “The whole goal is to remove human error from the equation as much as possible,” Kloepfer, now 19, says. Kloepfer’s current 3-D printed plastic model unlocks within a span of 1.5 seconds, but he aims to reduce it to just half a second. Just weeks away from his first live sample, Kloepfer is already a long way ahead of most high school science fair projects.

MORE: This Lifelong Hunter Aims to Make Guns Safer — By Making Them Smarter