Shots Fired: Gun Violence in the United States 9781626378902

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SHOTS FIRED

SHOTS FIRED

Gun Violence in the United States Howard Rahtz

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2020 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB

© 2020 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-62637-884-1 (hc.)

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

Foreword, Frank Straub Acknowledgments

1 Gun Violence in the United States

2 The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

vii ix 1 9

3 Firearms and Violence

21

5 The Crime Triangle: Ability to Kill

47

4 Black Market Guns

6 The Crime Triangle: Opportunity to Kill 7 The Crime Triangle: Desire to Kill 8 Rampage Killings 9 Daily Homicides

33 65 83 99

123

10 The Police Response

139

11 Moving Left of Bang

157

12 Do Something!

185

Bibliography Index About the Book

193 213 222 v

Foreword

As I write this, another young person has taken a gun to school, shot and killed fellow students, and then shot himself. He was a “good kid” according to his friends and fellow classmates—no one understands why he did what he did, no one saw it coming. Sadly, like so many of the school attacks that have taken place since Columbine, there is a common denominator—the use of firearms. For more than thirty years, I worked in federal, state, and local law enforcement to prevent, investigate, and bring to prosecution persons and groups that sought to perpetrate acts of violence in our communities. Four years ago, I retired from law enforcement and joined the National Police Foundation, where I am now the director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies (CMVRS). The CMVRS is dedicated to identifying like-minded individuals and organizations committed to improving the prevention of, response to, and recovery from mass violence events. In the work we do at the CMVRS, whether it be our critical incident reviews or the administration of the national averted school violence database, there is a common factor: the use of firearms to attack innocent persons in public spaces. Among the mass violence attacks we have studied—San Bernardino, California; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Orlando, Florida; Parkland, Florida; and the University of North Carolina–Charlotte—persons armed with firearms claimed eighty-eight lives and injured ninety-eight others. In 2019, the US Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, released a report that I coauthored with Peter Langman in which we compared fifty-one averted and fifty-one completed school attacks drawn from the National Police Foundation’s

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Foreword

Averted School Violence database. Among the incidents we analyzed, firearms were involved in the majority of both averted and completed attacks (Langman and Straub, 2019). In an analysis of targeted school violence, the US Secret Service in 2019 found that most attackers used firearms, and firearms were most often acquired from the home (n = 25, 61 percent of 41 attacks). The report also found that half of the attackers (n = 17, 49 percent) had an unusual or concerning interest in violence or weapons (National Threat Assessment Center, 2019b). An FBI study of “lone offender terrorism” found that 65 percent of the attackers used firearms to carry out their attack (National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, 2019). Regardless of our perspective on firearms, it cannot be denied that guns have been and continue to be the primary tool used by persons to commit acts of horrific violence in our schools, offices, places of worship, entertainment venues, retail establishments, government facilities, and neighborhoods. The effects of these attacks are devastating for the survivors, families of victims, for communities who have lost loved ones, and for first responders. However, as we consider gun violence, we must also recognize that our Constitution protects the rights of citizens to bear arms. As we, as individuals and a nation, continue to think through the vexing challenge of firearm violence, we are well served to consider Howard Rahtz’s Shots Fired: Gun Violence in the United States. Rahtz thoughtfully examines firearm violence from a variety of perspectives, recognizes that there are no simple solutions, and concludes that we are not helpless, that we need a new way forward, and that it is time to come together to find a way to make our schools and communities safer while protecting our right to bear arms. —Frank Straub, director, Center for Mass Violence Response Studies

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