Whipped Cream Difficulties

Oh, look! The WP‘s “Hidden Life of Guns” is back! Unleash the dagron, as they say on FARK!

I am rapidly coming to the belief that the most dangerous things in the world, in order, are:

• a software guy with a soldering iron.
• a hardware guy with a programming language.
• a journalist with a database.
• and a government employee with an idea.

This time around, the WP has decided to focus on guns used to kill police officers:

Clark and Shelton are two of 511 police officers killed by firearms in the United States from the beginning of 2000 through this past Sept. 30.

As Lawrence pointed out to me, that’s one gun death per state per year.

To trace these guns, The Washington Post did a year-long investigation, including building a database of every police officer shot to death in the past decade. (More than 1,900 officers were wounded by firearms during the same period.)

So here’s the first thing that jumps out at me. The WP talks about 511 police officers killed, and “more than 1900″ wounded”, we can assume over the “beginning of 2000 through this past Sept. 30.” period. Nowhere in the article does the WP give a total figure for police deaths over that period. You’d expect that they would give some sort of percentage figure; you know, firearms deaths represent X percent of total officer deaths over that period. But, no.

I’ve been able to find some breakdowns on the web. For 2009, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund gives a total of 116 officer deaths. Of those, 49 were “firearms related”. Not surprisingly, that wasn’t the leading killer of police officers; 51 deaths in 2009 were “traffic related”.  The 2008 figures were 133 total deaths, 39 officers “shot” and 71 killed in “traffic related” incidents. The 2007 figures were 181 total deaths, 68 “shot” and 83 “traffic related”. NLEOMF doesn’t have figures up for 2006 and earlier, but the 2007 report gives a breakdown for 2006 of 151 deaths, 54 “shot” and 74 “traffic related”. NLEOMF also does have this handy little table which doesn’t give us quite the detail that’s in the bulletins, but is still useful for our purposes. Just to make things a little clearer, I did my own breakdown of those figures, and did a comparison of “shootings” to “traffic related deaths”. (I defined “traffic related deaths” as the sum of auto accidents, motorcycle accidents, and vehicle strikes, all of which were separate categories on the chart. In order to make the chart fit, I hid those individual categories, but I’ll be glad to put up the Excel worksheet if anyone wants to double check my work.)

	Shot	Total traffic-related	Overall Total
2000	53	76	162
2001	72	74	240
2002	60	65	157
2003	50	76	148
2004	59	74	164
2005	60	64	162
2006	54	72	154
2007	68	84	185
2008	40	65	138
2009	49	57	116
Total	565	707	1626
	34.75%	43.48%

So we’ve already run into something else interesting just by taking a close look at the numbers. The WP gave a figure of 511 police officers killed by firearms “from the beginning of 2000 through this past Sept. 30”, while NLEOMF’s figures give us 565 officers killed by “shootings” just through 2009. NLEOMF has more officers killed in a shorter timeframe. Makes you wonder.

Also interesting, but not surprising if you keep up with these things, is that firearms are not the leading killer of police officers. 43% of police officers during the 2000-2009 period were killed in “traffic related” incidents. Clearly, banning cars and motorcycles would save the life of almost half of the police officers killed every year.

(As a side note, let me pull in another well-known fact: “Despite perceived dangers, policing has never been listed among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. In terms of deaths per capita, driver-sales work such as pizza delivery is a more dangerous profession than being a police officer.“)

A good chunk of the WP article, including the lead (about “Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers Sean Clark and Jeff Shelton” who were killed in 2007 with a legally owned gun that was stolen from a car in 1992) is antidotes. But we’ll get to those.

This kind of analysis is made more difficult by a law passed by Congress in 2003 that bars federal law enforcement from releasing information that links guns used in crimes back to the original purchasers.

Keeping on grinding that ax, Posties.

In 30 cases, the newspaper obtained confidential firearms traces generated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

You mean, the data that’s illegal to release?

Okay. What exactly does the Post have to tell us?

Legal purchase was the leading source of weapons used to kill police officers. In 107 slayings, the killers acquired their firearms legally.

Really?

In 170 deaths, The Post could not determine how the shooters got their guns, including 29 killings in which weapons were not recovered.

So, actually, the Post wasn’t able to determine the source of the weapon in almost exactly 50% of the cases (170 out of 341). Of the ones in which they were able to make that determination (the other 171), 107 were legally purchased. That leaves us with 64 cases in which the weapon was not legally purchased, right?

Stolen guns turned up in 77 deaths.

77 does not equal 64. Apparently, the WP is counting stolen guns with legal purchases.

Separately, guns obtained or taken from relatives or friends who legally owned them were used in 46 killings. Fifty-one officers were killed when their department-issued firearms or another officer’s gun were turned against them.

Just in case you were wondering how often cops are shot with their own guns, there’s your answer: approximately 10% of the total fatalities.

In 41 instances, guns were illegally obtained on the streets through sale or barter. Sixteen times, someone bought a weapon for a person prohibited from having a gun, an unlawful transaction known as a straw purchase.

Ah, yes. The “straw purchase“. Of course, the straw purchasers of the guns that were used to kill cops were prosecuted and are serving long prison sentences, right?

The straw buyers were federally prosecuted in fewer than half of those cases.

Oh.

Three were illegally purchased at gun shows or from private sellers.

So much for your “gun show loophole”. By the way, 3 + 16 + 41 = 60, not 64.

The two deadliest situations for police are traffic stops and domestic disputes.

Which kind of makes sense: you’d figure that’s the two situations where police have the vast majority of contact with the public.

Ninety-one of the officers were killed while making traffic stops; 76 were responding to domestic disturbance calls. The officers killed at traffic stops were generally slain by felons wielding illegal guns; the weapons used to kill police in domestic situations were often obtained through legal purchases. Only 13 percent of the weapons in the traffic stops were legal, compared with 47 percent in the domestic calls.

No big surprises there. Speaking of “no big surprises”,

More than 200 of the shooters were felons who were prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms. Many had spent time in prison for illegal handgun possession. At least 45 were on probation or parole when they killed an officer. At least four were previously convicted of murder or manslaughter, including a Texas man who had done time for two separate slayings and was on parole at the time he killed his third victim: a 40-year-old sheriff’s deputy with a wife and three children.

Wow! You mean the kind of person who’d break the law to possess guns illegally is also the kind of person who’d shoot a cop? Who would have thought that! (By the way, Lawrence pointed out to me that Larry White is still awaiting trial three years after he shot three cops in Odessa. But apparently he has cancer. I feel sorry for the cancer.)

Handguns were used to kill 365 officers; long guns – rifles and shotguns – were used to kill 140 officers. (Two were killed with a rifle and a handgun, and in four cases, The Post could not determine the type of weapon.)

I find it interesting that the Post didn’t break this down further into types of long guns, specifically “assault weapons” vs. others. But perhaps the Post data didn’t go that far.

The ratio of handguns to long guns in The Post review – about 70 percent to 30 percent – is close to being the inverse of the ratio of all guns in the nation: 40 percent handguns to 60 percent long guns. But the ratio found by The Post matches that for U.S. homicides in general, experts say, reflecting the preference among criminals for handguns because they are generally cheaper and easier to conceal.

I also don’t know a lot of people who haul around long guns in their cars, either, Texas stereotypes notwithstanding.

The most common handgun used was the 9mm semiautomatic pistol, which was used to kill at least 85 of the police officers.

Kind of makes you wonder if the 9mm is so heavily represented because of relative popularity in the population, or if there’s something about the 9mm that renders body armor ineffective? I lean in the direction of the former.

With a median age of 27, the shooters were generally younger than the population at large, while the officers’ median age of 36 matched the country’s. Forty-two of the killers were 18 or younger, including four 15-year-olds. The oldest shooter was 77.

The Post has already had to correct an earlier error about 18-year olds and gun laws.

At least six of the suspects had been released early from prison sentences for previous crimes, including a man who was freed a day before gunning down an officer.

You don’t say?

Among the officers killed were a newly minted officer fresh from the police academy; a 31-year veteran two weeks from retirement;

I know I’m going to Hell (and Lawrence stuck me with the window seat) for this, but: “MENDOZA!“

and one slain moments after having dinner with his family on Christmas Eve 2000. The youngest slain officer was 19; the oldest was 76.

They let 76 year olds serve as active duty police officers? In what jurisdictions? Frankly, I’m not 100% convinced 19-year-olds should be cops, either.

The two most populous states led the nation in police officer shooting deaths: California with 47 and Texas with 46. Next were Louisiana with 28 and Florida with 27, even though Florida has four times as many residents.

Huh? Four times as many residents as what? Louisiana? Sloppy editing, Posties.

Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of police killings per capita and the nation’s highest overall rate of death by gunfire, according to a study by the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates gun control.

Actual numbers instead of statements from an admitted advocacy group would go a long way here. And stricter gun controls in Louisiana sure would have helped Ronald A. Williams II. Or Henry Glover.

Larry Hyatt is the owner of Hyatt Coin, the Charlotte store that sold the gun to James originally. He said he had heard rumors that a gun from his store had been used to kill the officers, but he was not certain of it until called by a Post reporter.

“That was so horrible what happened,” he said. “It just makes me sick to think about it. Do I feel bad? You daggone right I feel bad.”

Hyatt, 63, said he runs an honest business, family-owned since 1959. His 81-year-old mother still runs the cash register and occasionally lectures buyers on the need to be legitimate.

“We do everything we can and double- and triple-check to try and do everything right,” he said, adding that the store participates in an ATF program to cut down on straw buyers, “to keep a girlfriend from buying a gun for her boyfriend.”

Hyatt said it is difficult to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, because once a firearm leaves the store it can be stolen or passed around.

“What it is is hundreds of thousands of random events – thefts, deaths – outside the federally licensed, controlled system, [guns] that are being stolen, sold hand to hand and inherited,” he said. “That’s why it’s so difficult to get a handle on it. It is a problem, but it’s not with us.”

Just to make it clear, the gun we’re talking about here is the one that shot Clark and Shelton. The one that was purchased in 1991, stolen in 1992, and used to shoot the two officers in 2007. It is hard to see what Larry Hyatt could have done differently, given that the original sale was legal. So what is the Post trying to say by interviewing Hyatt?

The remainder of the article is a series of antidotes representing one type of shooting from each category the WP was able to trace:

• “Legally obtained”, involving an individual who was “very delusional and very paranoid” according to a local sheriff. (Yet the individual in question had never been legally committed. If it was well know that he was delusional and paranoid, shouldn’t local law enforcement have sought commitment?)
• “Stolen”. “Four hours later, the stolen revolver turned up in the hands of Terry Lee Brooks, a 48-year-old felon with a long rap sheet: murder, burglary, drugs, auto theft and illegal firearms possession.” “Turned up in the hands of”. Nice use of the passive voice there. You think Brooks might have been the one who stole it, given his rap sheet?
• “Police gun”, in this case an officer who was shot with his own department issue Glock during a home invasion after his own off-duty Glock jammed. Glocks jam? Who knew?
• “Borrowed or taken from relatives”. “His teenage son later testified in court that he had sneaked it out of the house in the summer of 2002. The teen gave the gun to a classmate who said he ‘needed a little money,’ according to court records.” Sounds more like “stolen” to me.
• “Obtained on the street”, in this case a Mossberg shotgun stolen from someone’s grandfather, which the felon in question then sawed off the barrel of (in violation of Federal law) and used to kill a detective.
• “Straw purchase”. Wife of a convicted felon bought him a Glock. “She later told police that she wasn’t aware that Bryan was not supposed to possess a firearm.” Anybody want to place a bet on the straw purchaser getting prosecuted? Yes! “She was not prosecuted for the straw purchase.”
• “Illegal purchase from gun show or private seller”. The WP was able to come up with three of these. In this case, the gun show seller was a licensed dealer (so he was required to call in the purchase). The dealer claims:
  

  Wedge said that Barnaby showed him some ID, possibly a voter registration card, and that he told Barnaby to fill out the federal firearms form. But Barnaby just handed him $300 and took off, Wedge said.
  “He just picked up the gun and the receipt and took off,” Wedge said. “It’s not the first time somebody’s taken a gun off my table, but it’s the first time somebody’s taken a gun off my table and killed a police officer with it.”

  But the dealer (actually, one of two dealers who sold to this particular customer at that show) also:

  told police that the reason he didn’t do any background checks that weekend was that he didn’t know how to access the National Instant Criminal Background Check System from the gun show and had decided to do so after the weekend.

  Surprisingly, both dealers were prosecuted. The one quoted in the article got a ten-month sentence; the other one got nine months and “was killed in a prison fight”.

I think we’ll wrap up this part here. The second part ran today; we’ll see if my other obligations will allow me to blog it on Tuesday.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 22nd, 2010 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Clippings, Guns, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.