“I’d have to say look, there’s always a plan. I believe God has a plan. Life is short

              no matter what it is.”

                        Comment on the Uvalde mass school shooting by pro-gun Republican

                        Texas State attorney general Ken Paxton

God, guns, and the Bible. It’s the old motto going back to frontier days when gun toting Christian colonists and early Americans were ethnically sweeping the continent nearly clean of the aboriginal peoples as part of divine Manifest Destiny. And Bible endorsed enslavement applied to Blacks kidnapped from Africa and kept in line at the end of the gun. Followed by the firearms enforced lynchings and destruction of Black neighborhoods. These days the gun industry, backed by the religious right, has succeeded to the benefit of its bottom line into making the USA the only developed nation which is armed to the teeth with rapid fire weapons.

Which brings us to a grim fact too few realize. The gun industry and its gun rights allies proclaim that the best way to drive down the extraordinary rate of murder in this nation is with a citizenry even more heavily armed with their products than it already is. What they have kept under wraps – with the inept aid of the rest of the population — is how the ongoing financial success of the gun industry literally can continue only as long as the USA perpetually suffers the high rates of murder that could not exist if not for all the guns in a horrendous feedback system of death and profits.

It is a matter of sales and violence in a pernicious feedback scheme. Mixed with belief in the pugnacious side of the Jesus of the Gospels.

More Guns, More Murder — It’s the Statistics Driven by Firepower

There are about 400 million privately owned guns in America where 330 million dwell, 1.2 per person, with under half of households possessing guns. In all other peer democracies the gun/people ratio is far lower at 0.03 to 0.35. The US suffers an epidemic of over 20,000 homicides per year, about 6 per 100,000, all but a small fraction by firearms. Less than a percent of those deaths are mass shootings that occur on near daily basis. In the rest of the first world homicide rates vary from just 0.3 to 1.8, with the great majority not by guns, and mass shootings far less frequent. To look at it another way, homicides not by firearms is broadly similar in advanced nations, being about the same in the US and Canada.

It’s the guns that make the horrifying difference.

It is a very straightforward situation. Averaging some six times as many firearms per capita America has around six times as many murders as do peer nations. That there is a fairly good correlation between levels of gun possession and murder in a given country reinforces the more guns results in more murders relationship.

Rates of homicide total (Capital letters) and not by gun (indicated at ends of lines projecting  down from former, except by lower case U for USA) as a function of private gun possession in the developed democracies; the Pearson correlation of 0.905 is very high. Data from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate, values are averaged over last few years for US.

That makes a sick sense. Gun advocates like to say that guns do not kill people, people do. The glib cliché is beautifully designed to disguise how rapid fire guns – revolvers and especially semi-automatics — are deadly potent, user friendly force multipliers that boost the ability of people to kill by a factor of about six. It is semi-auto pistols that are the primary American killers, rifles account for less than a tenth of homicides. But the AR-15, its design (devised in the 1950s) maximized for killing humans enmass, is more prominent in mass shootings. Americans are packing so much heat that police have to be similarly heavily armed – to the benefit of a pleased gun business – and are prone to shoot first and deal with the legal consequences latter especially when the suspect is a minority. In other countries police do not need to regularly carry firearms.

The USA is a war zone. Most gunfire aimed to kill others does not do so because about two thirds of those hit survive, and even more so because the great majority of bullets fired miss. Hundreds of thousands of rounds are fired illegally each year in America, it is like a low grade battlefield.  

Say there is a guy intent on murdering others on a street corner. He has a knife. His chances of achieving his aim are limited, any near him can flee, or fight back, he will not be able to stab that many, and the victim’s chances of survival are relatively good.

Same guy has a Glock. With a laser pointer. With a few pulls of the trigger the killer can gravely wound and probably kill a good number of nearby people who cannot outrun bullets or fight back. Perhaps a bullet misses, sails down the street and smashes through a window and takes out a little girl trembling in fear from the sound of gunfire under the table as her mother holds her.

Can’t do all that with a knife.

The bogus claim made by gun advocates is that guns make for a polite society. Why a culture driven to politeness by fear rather than ethics or kindness would be a good thing is not apparent. So how is that right wing fantasy working out? Are folks peacefully polite to one another these days? Hardly. The real world fact is that hundreds of millions of personal weapons make for a fearful, angry, murderous country – a terror state of dread — in which people are blowing one another away over road rage incidents at a rate of about 500 per year – a 19 year old distant relation of mine suffered that fate — domestic disputes, work place discontents, mass shootings at schools and places of retail, entertainment, medicine, worship et al., targeting minorities, and most commonly petty street gang tiffs leading to revenge cycles that kill thousands each year.

Canadians are known to be a generally polite population. They don’t have nearly as many guns per person. Same for Norwegians. Japanese. Just why is it we Yanks need to be gunned up to be nice to one another?

Believe that yet more guns are the way to tamp down on gun deaths? Please name the nation where that strange idea actually works.

So. Really want to get murder mass and individual down to first world norms? Bring gun possession rates down to first world norms. That is the only proven way to do it.

Yet gun production is three times higher than in 2000, and now exceeds cars. Blacks and women are arming themselves at levels never seen before. The national reward? Firearms have become the leading cause of child death. And that is a very good and very necessary thing for the gun makers.

Why Murder and Lots of It is All Important for the Gun Business

The gun industry is in a delicate financial state perpetually teetering on disaster. The need to find a way to gin up sales is always very intense. Venerable Remington went bankrupt during the “Trump Slump” when gun sales fell as is usual when a firearms friendly Republican occupies the White House and fear of gun control retreats. With hundreds of millions of weapons already sold, the firearms industry is desperate to sustain sales in a gun saturated society – and that when the business has a product problem. Unlike other merchandise that needs to be rapidly replaced as they obsolesce, wear out, or are consumed — cars, digital devices, alcohol, tobacco, food, etc. — a well maintained gun lasts for decades. A target shooter can send thousands of rounds down range over the years without trouble if they give the gun a little loving care. And it is not like a given semiauto is a huge money earner, most sell for hundreds of bucks. Nor are guns the deep brain addictions like tobacco, alcohol and legal opioids that generate big volume sales. That when Americans into hunting – a cohort getting smaller all the time — sports shooting and collecting are under one in ten. Women tend to be more gun averse than men, minorities more than Whites. Fact is that most folks are not gun enthusiasts and have no desire to possess one of the deadly devices – people get killed cleaning the damn things. All the more so because the research indicates that possessing a gun or more is more likely to harm the owner, family or friend than protect them.

So how to evade industry collapse by further boosting the percentage of households that are gunned up and thereby sell the hundreds of millions more guns needed to keep the business humming in coming decades?

Fear. Fearing the financial failure that looms before them, gun producers have to use the powerful motivating factor that is fear to save themselves. The main reason four in ten households are already gunned up is because the residents think they need the weaponry to protect themselves from other Americans with heat. What is needed is yet more alarm in more citizens to get them to gun up.

The gun trade that enjoys tens of billions in annual revenue would collapse if not for all the mayhem. That dread that drives most sales brings us to why murder — the more of it and the more spectacular the better – will always be a key necessity for the firearms industry. It’s a perversely lucrative financial feedback cycle running on the combined factors of perceived fear driven by actual deaths.

Imagine if the homicide rate in the US dropped to what it is in say Denmark. Or Australia. Or France, or Canada. Gun sales would nosedive, gutting the firearms industry. Browning, Colt, Springfield, Savage, Winchester, Smith & Wesson, Kimber America, Ruger, and the Daniel Defense that sold the gun used in the Texas school massacre would all be in severely diminished if they survived at all. And they know it even as they will deny it. The dependence is as obvious as it is being swept under the rug.

The private weapons industry has more riding on murder in the five figures than anything other business. More than the outright criminals individual and organized who could not be committing murder wholesale if not for all the semiautos around and about in this strange gun crazy – crazy for guns, or crazy about what they are doing to our society – country. Those pushing illegal drugs would do just fine without murder, all they want is more addicts to sell product to.

This relationship cannot be exaggerated, yet it remains amazingly hidden. On 6/1/22 on MSNBC Joy Reid and her pundit panel just did not get it in the wake of the Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa shootings. They kept wondering if the progun people, makers included, did not realize the destruction that the weapons were creating!? The doctors who have to deal with the massive wounds created by bullets ask the same questions. Would not revealing that terrible truth to gun producers and sellers get them to back off?

No it won’t. They can’t if they want to keep their industry thriving rather than becoming financial road kill. It is not just of matter of piling up the profits, it is one of company survival. Both in the short term – sales typically rise just after the big shootings – and more importantly the long term. Even as they proclaim the guns they churn out are the way to protect individuals and society from murder enmass, the reduction of murder to first world norms would correspondingly reduce the American gun business to what it is in Canada, Europe and Australia. Which is not a whole lot.

In their narcissistic process of surviving and thriving through more murder, the GI has not only done more than has any other factor to kill over a million Americans over the last 50 years – in the area of those lost in all US wars combined. A business whose yearly cash flow of tens of billions makes up just a fraction of a percent of a national economy of trillions, has made an enormously outsized contribution via pursuit of its financial self-interests to inciting and polarizing the nation to the degree we have become the most dysfunctionally operating democracy among the prosperous nations. It is a quite an achievement.

The Christian Factor

Many Christians believe guns to be Godly because the Biblical Jesus comes across as pro personal weaponry. That is correct in that the Jesus of the Gospels is clearly a man comfortable with weapons and willing to use them to commit violence.

Returning to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, being an openly devout mainstream Christian often chastises progun Christians for being hypocritical. That is probably because Reid like most center-left Christians has not carefully read the Gospels she claims to adhere to, and bases what she thinks about the character on the sanitized version of the Son of God promoted endless from mainline pulpits by ministers who know their flocks are not particularly Bible literate. By focusing on the talk of brotherhood and turning the other cheek. But the brotherhood item rests on the conformity of adherence to the dictates of the one God. The turning the other cheek thesis is not consistently applied even by God’s divine son.  

The Prince of Peace line is not actually about Jesus, that is Old Testament prophecy of the Jewish warrior king who will bring peace to Israel by expelling its enemies. In the Gospels Jesus says he came to earth not to bring peace, but to bring the sword, fire and division, and turn relatives against one another. As he and his entourage enter Jerusalem he is asked if they have enough swords – the AR-15s of those days – and says yes. While those two items are rather obscure and known only to those who take the time to read scripture, it is well known that Jesus fashions a whip, a device of terrorizing pain and fear, and uses it to assault the people and animals at the temple. The Jesus of the Bible is no Gandhi or King who disavows the carrying or use of weapons in favor of strictly pacific tactics. Those who try to portray the Christ character as some sort of radical person of peace are folks with an theoliberal agenda doing so by cheery picking the Bible lines they like and ignoring or explaining away the rest.

So telling a gun totting conservative Christian that they are not in accord with the ways of Jesus whose disciples bore swords and used a whip to commit a hate crime at a religious site will backfire because it just causes theocons to roll their eyes at the liberal who does not actually read the inerrant Word of God. And Jesus is God in any case, and the Old Testament God orders the Israelite warriors mass execute errant Jews such as after the golden calf business, and to wage a genocidal war of conquest on nonJews including dispatching all the enemy women and children infants and preborn included. Trying to use the Jesus character as a great promoter of societal peace sans lethal devices is not going to fly, so time to drop it, and admit that the Judeo-Christian scriptures are a big part of the problem, not the solution.

America is God blessed, more so than any other nation according to right wing Christians. America was built on the gun, from the divine liquidation of the native opposition, to the breakaway from the British Crown, to the many wars of freedom and justice – including seizing vast tracts of Mexico – we have had to engage in. The Constitution is inspired by that righteous God whose Son who is God was fine with personal arms, ergo the gun is Godly and any effort to use government power to regulate the devices in against the Lord Creator and patently un-American and downright unConstitutional.

It is no accident that theocons label gun rights sacred and therefore divine in origin. The Christoright did not used to be so big on firearms, they are now gun mad. Semi-automatics have become a thrilling fashion statement and lifestyle choice for the American religious right to the financial delight of those who make and sell the dangerous devices. This is made brazenly apparent in all the campaign ads in which Christoconservative candidates proudly display and use assortments of high power weaponry to blow away targets of various types, normalizing the idea that the God ordained way to deal with problems is violence and firepower and the more of that the better. So they voted for gun rights promoting hardly ever attends church Trump who is careful that the crowds at his rallies are not bearing weapons in his presence. He’s not dumb enough to allow that.

But not all gun promotion is a theocon thing. Libertarians are big on the liberty to own and carry firearms, and a lot of them are atheists in the tradition of key founders such as Ayn Rand. Most Christians, those of the center-left, and good with some degree of controls, as is the Catholic clergy.

In no nation is murder kept in check primarily by popular religion, it is always via major, practical secular limitations on gun possession and use that does that trick.

The Constitution

About the 2^nd Amendment. It is quite peculiar. Few know that the original 12 Bill of Rights were not all about personal rights. The first two clauses concerning mundane issues of operating Congress were bumped during the effort to get the states to ratify them, reducing the amendments to 10 by pushing 3 up to 1 and 4 up to 2. None of rights that are specifically assigned to individual persons in the BoR is predicated by a government need as is the 2^nd because they actually are about individual rights. The 2^nd Amendment begins with the necessity for states to be able to maintain a well-regulated militia for the security of a free state because that is what it really concerns. Some of the original 13 states initial constitutions (https://gun-control.procon.org/state-constitutional-right-to-bear-arms-2) include a clause maintaining the right of the state to have a militia, and some (MA, NC, PA, SC, VA, VT) go on to warn against the formation of a central government military because of the risk it could be used to establish a nationwide tyranny. Because the new federal government would be able to raise taxes to sustain an army, the firearms amendment was designed to get nervous states to go along with the new Constitution by assuring said states they could continue to arms themselves against the federal government (DE, GA, MD, NJ, NY had no gun rights clause). There is not a record of serious discussion of individual gun rights at the convention, which is why the clause discusses the rights of the “people to keep and bear arms,” people being a collective word, and bearing arms a military term. Had the writers actually meant individual rights and wanted to be clear about that there was nothing stopping them from dropping the business about state militias, and/or saying something along the lines of the “right of persons to possess arms” shall not be infringed, or the “right of individuals to possess arms for their defense” as did some of the first states (AL, CT, NH, PA, VT; among states that have a firearms clause MA, ME, NC, RI, SC, VA did not mention an individual right). As it is the configuration of the amendment indicates it was either not intended to be a personal right, or was a deliberately ambiguous compromise on the matter – the latter would not be surprising in view of the differences in views in the states). In any case the writers of the document had no clue that guns would evolve from being able to fire once every 20 seconds via an easily disrupted intricate reloading process on a good day, with minimal accuracy, to a few rounds per second with precision accuracy. By citing American traditionalism as a justification for loose firearms regulations SCOTUS, aside from brushing aside the well-regulated line in the 2^nd Amendment, while down playing a long history of regulations, greatly hinders the country from adjusting to the radical modernization of modern weaponry.

Thus courts including Supreme were ruling that gun rights were collective not individual, until a SCOTUS with new hardline conservatives on it nominated by presidents who had ascended to the White House on minority popular votes, and a Senate skewed conservative by demographics, appointed enough radical right justices who ignored the actual language of the amendment and the views of those who devised it to invent an individual right to own an assault style weapon with a high capacity magazine at age 18. That’s worked out amazingly well for the domestic tranquility of the nation the Constitution mentions, don’t you think?  

Here is a question for those who cherish the 2^nd Amendment. What if there was no such clause? Would you then be fine and OK with guns being tightly regulated like Australia which imposed a drastic national reduction in personal weapons of mass production awhile back and enjoyed a drop in homicides as a result? Or like how Canada is moving to ban new acquisition of handguns in part as a response to an influx of such from the gun saturated USA?

I thought so.

The Tyranny Con

The gun adoring right goes on about how they need to be armed to the teeth as per the 2^nd Amendment to be able to prevent the imposition of a tyranny. What they specifically mean is a tyranny by the left. What they do not say so much is that that many of them are bent on using their AR-15s et al. to help impose a tyranny of the right. If not for the strict gun laws of the District of Columbia, the January 6 seditionists would have assaulted the capital with semiautos (although it is possible that had the crowd been so heavily armed, Capital security may have been much heavier, as it will be in the future when any big crowd with possible violent intent meets in DC).

The Personal Responsibility Con

Conservatives and libertarians like to go on about personal responsibility. Which does little good for the kid who has just taken a bullet in their gut and is bleeding out.

This con is similar to that operated by the plastics industry as it became apparent that their product was causing a bunch of environmental problems. Instead of taking responsibility for the difficulties they were creating the PI mounted a long term ad campaign that urged consumers to save the situation by recycling plastics. It was a scam because the industry knew and knows recycling is not a practical solution for used plastics for a host of reasons, but it diverted attention away from the corporations while making it seem that it was up to consumers to take care of the issue. No nation with low homicide levels pretends that gun violence can be handled at the level of individuals because only a very small percentage of those who have firearms need to go bad to create an enormous death toll. The only practical way to keep murders rare is by collective restriction of guns. 

We Don’t Need More Science as Much as We Need Fewer Semiautos

There is an argument being offered up these days by some on the center-left that we need to do more scientific research to better address the mass slaughter of Americans by fellow Americans. Being a publishing scientist I concur that more science is a good thing. But when it comes to the gun/murder connection the core science has already been done. It is the epidemiological science of comparing rates of gun possession and total homicides in democracies of broadly similar prosperity and seeing what shows up. If there was little or no correlation between the two factors, then there would not be a solid reason to argue for gun control and libertarians would be right. If more firearms were associated with less homicide then the theocon case for guns and more of them would be verified.

As it is the massive data set accumulated over decades leaves no doubt that a population packing many tens of millions of semi-automatics is a population that is going to kill off often via agonizing pain and terror a lot of one another, and when death does not result often leads to long term disabling and painful injuries, while traumatizing survivors and relations, as well as the nation as a whole, all that while degrading its image on the world stage. With so many super lethal devices around and about they are so easily obtained by means legal and illegal that it is inevitable they will be misused often enough to dispatch many thousands. Lots of rapid fire guns around and about simply make murder too easy. No nation with such high gun density has a low murder rate. None of the nations with prudent, pragmatic gun policies that keep rates of gun possession on the low side has a high murder rate. There you go. Alternative theories are reckless and wild speculation and propagandistic misdirection.

It is similar to how population demographics were used to firmly establish that higher rates of consumption of tobacco products resulted in higher rates of premature death. The tobacco industry enjoyed a good amount of success countering that for three decades with bogus counter claims. A difference, however, between the weed and heaters is that the first dispatches adults who can avoid the adverse effects by not smoking or chewing, the latter kills off victims by the hands of others, with firearms now being the leading cause of death of children, which are starting to wipe themselves with the blood of other kids to try to avoid being targeted by school killers. Which inspires many to promote the or participate in the acquisition of more firearms to better protect the children while further enriching the firearms industry while more kids die.  

About doing more science, the idea is that by carefully studying the problem we can devise better means to cleverly suppress murder by bullet to at least some degree. Such as doing a better job of preventing those who appear to be at high risk of going gun lethal from acquiring firearms, or by seizing those they already have. Or further hardening locations packed with large numbers of vulnerable targets – such as would locking all but one door at so that it cannot be opened without a key in either direction (to prevent a door from being unknowingly left unlocked as at Uvalde) result in fewer school children being lost when doing so violates basic fire codes and students would be incinerated in fires enmass. And what if the shooter wipes out the main door guards and students cannot flee? How about banning assault style rifles? Doing seems to have suppressed mass shootings, which rebounded after the ban was lifted with 20 million AR-15s sold since – that is approaching 20 billion in sales FYI. Would that work again? How about open carry states compared to those who ban the practice. Gun licensing? Would requiring gun owners to have firearms insurance work? Of course there is the question of high capacity magazines. Universal background checks seem like a good idea. Same for waiting periods. Tamping down on straw sales and trafficking. And raising the minimum age for owning certain classes of guns.

Doing some of the above may have some impact. Especially on the endless mass shootings that are freaking the country out. But it is likely to be a peripheral effect. And such efforts risk diverting attention from what we know will work – the weak Senate compromise is a practical political example of taking what one can get under the circumstances, but it is unlikely to do much to improve the situation, and may be misused by gun advocates as showing the futility of gun restrictions. That the likely to be not very effectual legislation is being hailed as of landmark level, merely because it is the first to be passed in decades, shows just how poorly the nation is running in part because of the GI’s efforts to politically weaponized the weapons that they sell. If the American majority actually truly wants to drive the intentional homicide rate down to 2 per 100,000 or less, then that will almost certainly require that the gun possession level be dropped to below 0.4 per person, an extreme national dearming of the country that would greatly exceed that in Australia in the 1990s.

That would do it. The gun adorers like to say that the bad guy will always be able to get a gun or an alternative weapon even if firearms are heavily regulated and largely banned. They contend that would leave law abiding citizens unable to protect themselves if legal gun possession is strictly regulated. If that is so then why is homicide so rare in all other nations with low levels of gun ownership? That when their overall rates of crimes are not necessarily much lower than in the US (it is inherently difficult to compare crime rates between countries aside from homicide because of differing definitions of, and public and police attention to, nonlethal crimes). When the general pool of legal guns in on the small side, then criminals do not have a sufficient supply base and pipeline courtesy the gun manufacturers to work from via theft, or buys with illegal intent – to put it another way, the American gun trade benefits from the illegal sales that so often result in the murders than keep gun purchases high in the nonvirtuous cycle. If legal firearms become a lot less common, then illicit guns become much scarcer too, and with market forces operative much more expensive. Many career criminals cannot then afford them. Same for otherwise law abiding citizens who want to go rogue, but are unable to readily do so if bullet firing devices are too hard to obtain by means legal or illegal. A virtuous cycle ensues in which fewer guns results in less murder which drops demand for firearms so there are fewer homicides which decreases gun sales……

With guns so abundant that they are easy to acquire, a dysfunctional gun culture has built up in an unvirtuous cycle in which a quite small yet much too large minority of folks get the idea that the way to deal with their personal problems is to inject bullets into others, from one on one in a living room, to spraying machine gun rounds into an outdoor concert crowd. With guns not abundant in more sensible countries the Cult of the Gun does not exist, with much better results.

The Gun Industry Propaganda Myths

While doing serious science to try to alleviate the American homicide crisis has its limits, it is far superior to the tobacco industry style disinformation deceptions devised by the firearms concerns and gun cult adherents to shift the primary blame away from the guns they make money off of.

One alternative they offer up proposes that as Americans have lost their belief in a moral God – church attendance has nosedived from over 70% when Reagan and Bush 1 were president to less than half and heading down fast, while the nonreligious are growing by a tenth of the total population every ten years (http://americanhumanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/art-1-Paul-The-Great-and-Amazingly-Rapid-Secularization-of-the-Increasingly-Proevolution-United-States.pdf) — we have become more lethal. But the homicide rate was a super high 8 per 100,000 in the 1980. The Bible Belt states have long been prone to having high killing rates. And all the other democracies with much less murder are less religious than is the USA ; .

How about all the divorce and single parents leaving their kids prone to go rogue? Countries with similar family issues endure far less homicide. And a number of mass shootings are by kids from two parent homes, or by adults. Digital tech driven social isolation? Folks have the same hi-tech devices everywhere.

Our hyper violent media? That too applies across the prosperous democracies. Some relations of mine went on about how family TV shows in Father Knows Best days used to be little morality tales that taught kids how to be respectful citizens. Those shows helped raise the too often murderous baby boomers that moralists complain about.

One of the most cynical efforts to evade responsibility by gun makers and sellers is to fob off solving the problem on already put upon mental health care system (that conservatives keep trying to cut funding for). No other nation dumps the task of keeping murder individual and mass primarily onto psychiatrists because it cannot be all that effective, reliably sorting out the tiny percentage of those with mental issues who that are at serious risk of killing others out of the many millions of those with mental illness who are not not being practical. Relying on the mental care community to take the lead in dealing with this calamity is insane.  

Especially rich – as in money grubbing — is how the gun industry and supporters are saying how we need to harden soft targets such as schools by turning them into mini-forts with security and already over worked and stressed teachers armed with semi-automatics — I remember how I could enter my schools through any door I choose, and the notion of the faculty bearing heat was beyond thinking. Those benign days are long past as the gun business makes the big bucks militarizing our fearful society as it pushes to address the school shooting problem they did the most to create by having school staff purchase yet more revenue generating product from that same industry. Money that could otherwise be used to say better educate kids. Quite the clever trick that one.

The list of myths perpetrated by the gun producers and sellers in their search for profits over bankruptcy is a long one.

The Mythos of the Law Abiding Citizen

The good guy with the gun versus the bad guy with gun is dangerously simplistic thinking that ignores basic psychology. Humans are complicated.

The vast majority of legal gun owners of course never do anything seriously inappropriate which is a reason a lot of them get ticked off at the idea of gun restrictions. And there are indeed people who are serious criminals willing to kill for their aims.

Problem is that it is not always viable to tell who is who, and the GGWTG can swiftly devolve in the BGWTG.

You can have a person who has abided by the law their entire life. Never caused trouble. Never threatened anyone much less attacked others.

But then things go south. Maybe a brain tumor that seems to have driven the U of Texas tower shooter that was the first campus mass shooting back in 1966. Maybe they lost their job and saw their career ruined for reasons they feel are not justified. They think their mate is cheating on them. The doc is not giving them enough pain meds. Perhaps they turned 18 after years of being bullied and could legally purchase an AR-15. Or there is an incident between drivers and they confront one another.

In Australia, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Norway not so much a problem because no one is likely to be armed. Here in the USA the armed has been a good guy until now can — and too often does – go very bad. And pull the trigger. Once, twice, thrice……

The Mythos of the Skilled Good Guy with the Gun

We all, or at least a lot of us, end up imaging that we are the one, the GGWTG happening to be carrying a semiauto pistol, that we are reasonably well skilled at using, that John Wayne style when the bad guy with the gun shows up at the school, or workplace, or retail outlet, or church, is the one who before the police can arrive uses our heater to bravely and skillfully take out the shooter before he can deal out yet more damage and death.

Some contend that it is the duty of all capable adults to be constantly armed by the GI and ready to defend themselves and others in public against the criminal shooter. Never mind that is what the industrial gun complex that has created the constant danger by packing the nation with their product.

Sometimes the armed citizen defender thing works. Other times it does not. Had the crowd in Las Vegas all been sporting semi-autos it would not have done them any good against the automatic gun wielding sniper from his high rise nest. How does a kid, or adult, walking how from school or work, or sitting in their living room, get protected from a stray bullet by a GGWAG? There is the problem of confusion. Some with guns who were expected to intervene in a mass shooting have told how they could not locate where the shooter was — gun shots can echo, and if the shooter is in a large building, or there are a number of buildings, the good person with the firearm can end of going to the wrong place. The GGWTG may mistake another GGWAG for the shooter and take out the wrong person. People fleeing the shooter may get in between the GGWTB and the BGWAG preventing bringing down the cop from firing at the killer – at the Texas school students directly behind the shooter seems to have prevented the latter — or one of those fleeing can end up being hit. When police arrive they may have trouble sorting out the GGWGs from the BGWGs, hindering their efforts.

A citizen GGWAG is not a trained professional. They may be inept. Even if they have spent considerable time at the firing range, under the sudden pressure of an actual event they may find themselves overwhelmed with nerves, unable to operate their weapon properly, or not able to draw a bead on the BGWAG. Then there is the fear factor. Imagining and training going up against a rogue person with a rapid fire gun is one thing. Hearing the real bullets supersonically cracking past one’s head, or seeing the bodies of those already hit and in agony or dead, can cause the best intentioned to balk at the presence of sudden death or painful maiming. Or, the GGWTG is not especially afraid, but cannot bring themselves to kill another human being. Saying that people should be courageous and resolute is fine, but not reliably realistic as a defense strategy against BGWGs. It is well known that in combat newbie soldiers trained for months on how to kill often prove unable to cope with the real deal and fail to engage the enemy – there’s a scene in the European front version of Band of Brothers on that – and mass shootings are always newbie situations for civilian GGWTGs. It is easy to demand that armed first responders be brave and capable, but many GGWGs will panic and shy away, and that does those being shot at no good. They can’t be counted upon.

As shown at Uvalde, even the professional GGWTGs can screw up.

But say — as does occur — that the civilian GGWTG coolly and calmly, tamping down their fears and following their training, has a clear shot at the shooter, pulls the trigger, and lands a shot right on the chest of the murderer. But gosh darn the latter had armored up, and unhurt and hearing the shot sprays semiauto return fire at the GGWTG and blowing out her brain continues on his rampage, leaving her children motherless.

Oh well, that is the hellish nation the GI has left us with. But not to fret too much. Eventually a GGWTG will save the day. They always do – at some point. With up to 60 dead and hundreds wounded in a single incident.

What if a person is blind, or otherwise too disabled to wield a weapon to defend themselves and others? Would it not be better to keep the possibility of gun violence to a minimum from the get-go? 

The core idea pushed by the GI that has ladled the country with high power weaponry is that when the bullets they produce start flying it is time for the GGWTGs to step in. That is of course madness in the sense that it is far far far far better to prevent the death dealing projectiles from flying in the first place. Which all other advanced nations do a much better job of by simply by limiting gun ownership.

Many modern Ameroconservatives are radical zealots who have forgotten the wise and prudent old adage of a pound of cure is not worth an ounce of prevention.

The Mythos of the Skilled Gun Owner

One way to better see how the gun interests have fooled almost all of us into buying into their line without even gun control advocates fully realizing how gullible we are, is their mantra that if one does have a gun or more, that such persons should of course be well instructed and trained in their safe and effective use.

That seems to make sense, right? But does it? Who does not know without instruction that guns are lethal. And if someone someday is pointing a Glock or AR-15 at you and is good and ready to take you out, would you not prefer they be an idiot when it comes to properly maintaining, loading and aiming their gun? I know I would. A heavily armed citizenry well practiced with their arms in not at all a safe citizenry, as the stats are showing all too well.

The Problem with Keeping Guns Safely Secure

A basic part of best gun education and practice is the advice and need to store weapons in a secure location that kids cannot access, all the better with the ammo not with the gun. That might work in a household in which guns are for sports rather than protection, but most purchase firearms partly or entirely for protection, including against home invaders.

Assume that a resident is awakened at 2-3 AM, and realizes there is a criminal or more inside their residence, and they are in serious danger and have to act FAST. Still foggy from just being asleep adrenaline driven fear and anxiety flood the brain. Going to the gun storage and unlocking the weapon takes time, perhaps all the more so as the shaking resident tries to find and work the key, or worse the combination, if they manage to get the gun out now they have to obtain the ammo, it too perhaps locked up, and having done that properly load the device which can be tricky in the dark and with trembling nerves, by then it may be too late.

So what was the point of having the gun?

Many realize this. Which is why many keep their gun loaded and ready to go, in the bed side drawer. Good for being ready to blow away the intruder if necessary – but FYI pointing a gun at a bad guy with a gun pointed at you increases the chances that the intruder with the unmoral criminal mind will take you out in their own defense. And a family member in a fit of rage gets it out and blows a relation away. Or a kid thinks it is a toy with dire consequences. Or decides to use it to finally deal with the bullies at school. You get the drift. I hope.

The Middle Class Gun Death Problem

Until of late it has been to the great advantage of the gun makers and sellers that most murder by personal weapons of mass destruction has been an item of the impoverished, often minorities, much of it in the inner cities. So the White middle class, especially rural, has not been so upset that they advocate for gun control. But the risk of pushing a lethal product too far is that its impact can spiral out of control, until it begins to damage the interest of its promoters. That is happening as firearms misuse increasingly edges up into the White middle and upper middle classes with mass shootings at well-off establishments including schools – you may remember when slaughters were called “going postal”, but that minority/working class moniker has become obsolete – and road rage incidents. Those living in say the boonies of the Dakotas did not need to worry all that much about firearms deaths. That was then, this is now with their school kids having to go through mass shooting drills. That has the advantage of boosting the fear factor that boosts firearms sales, but it also risks a shift towards gun regulations as it becomes apparent that the GI cure-all of citizens buying more and more of the guns they churn out is producing increasingly bad results. 

A Question for the Conservatives

You call the USA the best nation on Earth. And it certainly is exceptional in being the most Christian, socially conservative, gun friendly and heavily armed, school hardened, highest prison population, least socialistic, smallest government, most free-enterprise of the developed democracies. Has been that way since its founding, and still is.

And America has always been suffering exceptionally high rates of murder (as detailed in L Beeghley 2003 Homicide: A Sociological Explanation).

You theocons keep saying that something is wrong with our culture. That is true. But exactly what is it that we are doing so wrong, while the other advanced nations are doing so well? Enough is enough. At long last please tell us, in a comprehensive explanation that actually makes sense for once thank you very much, why this greatest of nations has perpetually suffered the worst homicide rates, and do so without resorting to the tropes of us being too Godless, under gunned, lacking in family values, lenient on criminals, liberal, socialistic, and the rest when those nations that are such are doing so much better at not having the civilians rub one another out. Cite the problem/s that causes hundreds of thousands of bullets to be shot towards intended victims in this most God Blessed of Countries?

To put it another way, if going to church enmass, traditional family and media values, more meritocracy driven free markets and rugged cowboy individuality, mental care and police interventions, private gun possession and carriage, and hardening targets are the ways to minimize murder, then how and how is it that no nation that enjoys low rates of murder are utilizing those proposed theocon and libertarian solutions?

(Be careful deploying the notion that ethnoracial division is at the core of the American problem, other peer nations being as diverse as the USA or more so these days.)

Hmmm?

Not holding my breath on that one.

The South of the Border Mass Death and More of it Equals More Guns Sales Connection

Gang violence in Mexico and Central America is screamingly high to the point of they are failed states to varying degrees, fueled by guns, which are largely illegally imported from the USA in exchange for the drugs many citizens of this greatest nation are addicted to. The extreme level of societal violence is a major reason so many are fleeing Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to here.

This works very well for the GI. With so many guns heading south it increases sales in the US to supply the illicit trade. All the ensuing immigrants, most escaping the dysfunctional societies the gun trade contributes to, some arriving with ill intent having been gang trained with the guns we send them, increase many American’s fear of the other, resulting in more gun sales. The large scale immigration also fuels the right wing politics that promote gun possession. It’s yet another sweet financial feedback deal for a delighted GI.

Yet More Guns and More Death

The SCOTUS packed with theoconservatives is broadly expanding the facility of people to carry firearms in public cross the nation, in turn severely limiting the ability of the government to well regulate gun deployment in order to minimize the resulting carnage. So far the left and minorities have not gunned up as much as the White right in the hope that gun restrictions like those in the rest of the modern world would take care of the lots of guns kill lots of people problem. Meanwhile White conservatives, many of them racists, have been proudly toting their beloved semis to demonstrations, sometimes occupying state capitals while the largely white police stand by. Heavily armed Whites have been confronting minority and leftist protestors, leaving the latter feeling intimidated. But how long will that disparity last? Now that White conservatives know they can shoot and kill protesters they disagree with on the street and get a free pass if they claim self-defense – both when police tend to not immediately arrest white shooters and they are later judged not guilty at trial — there is growing talk in an increasingly outraged and fed up left that they will have to resort to using armed guards and protestors to protect their side while maintaining their rights to protest under the 1^st Amendment. And rising crime is encouraging minorities to get their guns.

With both sides armed to the teeth it is tempting to say it will be the wild west all over again. But frontier towns tended to have strict gun regulations — events near the OK Corral were sparked when lawmen tried to disarm outlaws. The town of Deadwood was so violent because it was illegally in Indian territory and there was no law.

Gunned up Deadwood, not firearms regulated Tombstone, is the modern national model for the GI.

Death, Death and More Death by the Gun, It’s What the Gun Industry Runs On, So How Do They Get Away with It?

Far from offering a workable solution to the American homicide nightmare, no other business is as dependent on premature death of adults, teens, and little kids. Tobacco, alcohol and prescription opioid interests produce products that kill a lot of people (including children in car drunken accidents). But that is a nasty side effect that does them no financial good – liquidating chunks of your consumer base is a bad business model if it is not vital to keeping up sales in the first place. For the addictive products it only makes it worse that the premature deaths scare off a lot of potential customers from even trying their offerings, or being sure to be moderate in their use (while the alcohol industry pretends to be very concerned that consumers drink responsibly, half their sales go down the throats of over drinkers [https://www.newsweek.com/americas-heaviest-drinkers-consume-almost-60-all-alcohol-sold-1520284] – so if all drinkers actually did so moderately then the alcohol business would contract by half, the booze producers and sellers have a situation that parallels that of gun manufacturers). But gun sales are unique in that they can only be sustained at high levels by the fear factor generated by the high rates of chronic death caused by those devices.

The last thing the firearms people want is for the populace to realize how deeply dependent their business is on high rates of murder. If that ugly immoral truth finally comes out and becomes widespread knowledge, it has the potential to finally outrage enough voters to institute the heavy duty gun regulations that keep murder in check in the rest of the west. Just as bad is if the populace decides to allow large scale suites against the industry for being reckless and actually dependent upon a massive death toll to avoid financial collapse.

That the homicide produces profits connection is rarely explicitly made is a national scandal. And national obtuseness the correlation being so screamingly obvious as it is dreadfully immoral and unethical as well as reckless. But how have they pulled it off? The firearms business is by far and away more responsible than anything else for making the USA the murder capital of the developed world while making major profits off it. Yet hardly any even their opponents go directly after the gun companies. That is because the private weapons industry has been amazingly successful in diverting attention away from they, the actual producers and sellers.

The Brilliant Diversion – the National Rifle Association We All Know and Love

Perhaps you have noticed that I have not yet mentioned the NRA. I have referred to the gun industry, or gun business, and the like. That is because not only is the NRA not the actual problem, but the lobbying group has served as the industries deceptive dazzling diversion from the actual source and creator of the actual crisis our nation finds itself in, the people who actually make and sell rapid fire guns.

It is a strategy that has been marvelously successful. All that folks chat about, even the gun safety advocates who should know better, is the damn NRA this and the damn NRA that. With particular focus on its leader Wayne LaPierre, back in the day Charlton Heston, and currently the financial scandals afflicting the organization that has served its purpose spectacularly well to the point of packing SCOTUS with their people.

What you hardly hear about is what should be the main focus, the Browning, Colt, Springfield, Savage, Winchester, Smith & Wesson, Kimber America, Ruger et al. that actually produce the deadly devices, and those who sell them. Can you name the head of any of those companies, most of which are not public investor entities? Of course not, because they use the NRA as their diversion away from themselves. It is similar to how folks rant against the prime time personalities on FoxNews, and used to about Roger Ailes, when it is Rubert Murdoch that owns and runs the entire show that among other items promotes gun rights. Rupert is laughing all the way to the bank. So are the folks running the gun industrial complex.

The let-em-point-to-the-NRA-not-us-gun-makers-and-marketeers-who-are-actually-providing-the-critical-tools-needed-to-generate-the-horrendous-murder-toll-that-is-necessary-for-us-to-make-sales-targets has been fabulously successful. So much so that the very gun concerns that have over armed our population that is slaughtering one another kids included, is not being regularly laughed at and condemned for saying – with a tone of being Ted Cruzian shocked, shocked that any would think otherwise – things along the lines that of course the way to solve the school shooting problem is by having school security and teachers purchase yet more revenue generating product from the industry that already made money as it created the damn problem. Over the decades the firearms business has cobbled together a very shrewd cash generating scheme that has all too well, and all too easily. To the extent that the industry that garners tens of billions in cash flow cannot be sued for the deadly results of their recklessly selling hundreds of millions of personal weapons of mass destruction to a nation that is a chronic hell of constant mourning and kids who are afraid to attend school and churchgoers are at risk.  

Back in the day the tobacco producers and sellers enjoyed a good deal of success in diverting attention via the Tobacco Institute that promoted the notion that the industry products were not as bad as claimed. But even so, the tobacco companies such as Philip Morris, R. J Reynolds, Ligget and Brown and Williamson were household names that were regularly condemned for growing and selling a toxic product. Culminating in a notorious testimony in front of Congress in 1994 when company heads obviously lied through their teeth that they did not think their product was addictive while under oath. A reason the companies were well known was because they advertised their brands bigtime in mainstream venues including television and major magazines, so they were not able to better hide themselves behind a diversionary lobbying screen. That the gun companies have not been advertising in mainstream venues for a number of practical reasons has helped them go under the radar of societal awareness to their tremendous benefit. (The attempt by Daniel Defense to raise the public profile of the industry by placing a hardball gun ad during the 2014 Super Bowl was correspondingly not the best idea).

There is the claim that the gun industry did not control the NRA, that it was the public relations craving NRA that effectively controlled the and radicalized the industry. What the exact synergy between the two was is not critical. It is the homicide rate that has done far more than the NRA could to get Americans to gun up, and it is the firearms trade that has benefited the most from the disaster of death, with the GI and the NRA doing all they can to keep that under wraps.

It’s the Gun INDUSTRY Stupid

Stop going on and on about the NRA which is to a fair extent passé anyway, with new information showing that Wayne LaPierre is rather a wimp who can barely shoot a gun straight while he has lived high on the hog of membership dues and contributions by the gun interests that have made a superbly effective investment in the diversionary bobble that is the NRA.

That the mainstream media, center-left politicians, and even gun safety advocates have for decades obsessed over the spectacle that is the NRA while pretty much ignoring the gun companies as it with little attention manufactured and distributed vast numbers of guns is a major failing. One due to a startling degree of unprofessional gullibility mixed with the wild and wacky stuff going on at the entertaining NRA being a way better story than taking an in-depth look at what a set of dour firearms CEOs are up to. This mishandling of where the real story needs to stop.

Focus like a laser on those who profit from making firearms, and/or sell them. It is time to put the persons who run and profit from Murder American Style on the spot for selling a product so toxic that the industry cannot thrive without epidemic homicide. The news media needs to start to approach the head of the gun companies and press them on the issue. If they refuse to reply tell the nation that they are dodging legitimate questions as their products make it easy to kill tens of thousands each year. If they agree to interviews ask them up front if it is not true that if murder, the great majority of via the gun, becomes uncommon their companies will be going to way of Remington, and that therefore far from a gunned up populace being the cure for homicide, the survival of the industry depends upon mass premature death. Make them squirm

But don’t necessarily stick to the gun industry elites. Ask the owners of the mom and pop gun stores what would happen to them if murder were rare like it is in the rest of the west. They’re a big part of the problem too.

To better get why holding the gun trade to account over the public relations bobble that is the NRA is important, consider what would happen if Wayne LaPierre were asked if gun sales are dependent on the rate of murder. He would be able to dodge the point by stating that the NRA represents gun owners, not gun producers and distributers, so he does not have the information to answer the question. Those running the companies cannot utilize that mode of evasion.  

As for the political, the number of people killed by firearms per annum is probably similar to those who are dying from inappropriate use of prescription opioids, which has long been a matter of public outrage and Congressional action involving hearings in which the commercial entities who are alleged to have knowingly profited from the calamity are dragged in to appear at hearings. So bring those who own and run the firearms trade to Congress and ask them is it not true that if murder implodes so will their companies?

Turning to advocacy groups get your strategy in gear and make how the gun people profit on murder a lead talking point of the debate. I know you are not doing so on a regular basis because I keep up on your material. Enough with the NRA, go after the industry,

Will it Work?

No doubt many of you have been thinking well Mr. Paul even if what you say is correct about how the only way to drive down murder rates to the level seen in Canada or lower requires trashing three quarters or more of the guns out there, that such is just not going to happen for a whole lot of reasons. So what do I have to say to that?

It may well be true that a big chunk of Americana is so hooked on guns that the nation will not be able dramatically reduce the number of semiautos by the needed amount. If that is true then the country is condemned to continue to suffer from atypically elevated rates of homicide for decades to come.

Isn’t America a great nation, or what?

That said there is some hope. If the rise in the middle and upper middle class shootings where White parents are increasingly afraid to send their children to fortress schools where the students are chronically scared, can be combined with the center-left getting its act media-political-act together and exposing the more murder produces more profits correlation then it may just be possible to tip the balance against the American right and its love for the gun. Maybe.

It is even possible that some of those involved in making guns and selling them may not realize how dependent their financial success rests upon murder being common. And upon realizing that some could decide to get out of the business and promote tighter gun regulations. There have been some in the tobacco and opioid industries who got disgusted with what was happening, got out and went public and some case activist about it. Ryan Busse has gone from being an industry insider to a gun limitations activist.

Most of the gun companies are privately owned and not subject to shareholder objections to what they are up to. Sturm Ruger is an exception and shareholders have voted to force the company to study the lethality of its product and issue a human rights report on the issue . Smith and Wesson and Winchester may be subject to such shareholder efforts.

A major goal of those who wish to make murder American Style as uncommon as it is in most countries needs to be to make the GI as vulnerable to large scale lawsuits has have been the tobacco and opioid industries. That could bankrupt the manufacturers and sellers and permanently preclude large scale gun sales. At the same time require that those who own guns have to be insured the same way as those who own cars. Also good would be very large federal taxes on semiauto pistols and rifles to help make them too expensive for most to purchase legally or illegally. Even better would be bans on at least sale of such. As functioning guns become scarcer homicides should fall, further decreasing demand for the killing machines until we are a normal, more pacific democracy.

No point in not trying.

Vote Dammit

A big reason a disciplined minority movement has gotten so far pushing the Big Gun Lie with shockingly deadly success is because they are doing one thing very right — voting at high per capita rates — while a major portion of a perpetually electorally slack center-left has treated voting as a maybe will do it or maybe not option, rather than the urgent civic duty of all citizens it is. Young adults who are prone to be progressive are particularly likely to not vote. As a result theocons outvote the rest of us by about 10% per head, enough to reinforce the right leaning bias of the Senate and electoral college, which in turn allows the GOP to better control the election system – this is why the demographic predictions of permanent and solid Emerging Democratic Majority predicted a couple of decades ago has yet to come to pass. Thus a White House the theocons hold about half the time while winning the popular vote only once, a closely divided Congress that flips back and forth, a 6/3 SCOTUS, and most states run by increasingly fanatical Republicans bent on keeping the GI financially fat and happy and to hell with the sky high murder rate while establishing a Christian Dominion Republic. One thing theoconservatives do dread is the center-left finally getting their electoral act together and making the Democratic Party the dominant party of the nation and most states, and if necessary reformulate the Supreme Court to bring it more in line with majority opinion.

If you think we really should and need to do something about the country being awash with heaters, then realize that protests as exciting as they may be and lobbying only do so much. Most critical is for the solid majority who more firearms restrictions to vote at least at the per capita rate as do those who adore and live by the gun.

Do that and maybe we can crash the gun business into mass bankruptcy. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Appendices

Compare Gun Possession Rates to Total Homicide Rates

It’s common for opponents of the bloated firearms industry to casually compare levels of gun possession to gun murders. Mistake. That allows the gun rights crowd to claim that if people cannot get guns to fulfill their murderous ways they will use other means, and being killed by knife of poison or strangling is no better than by gun. The way to abort that argument is to compare all murders regardless of mode. That shows that the vast majority of homicides in the USA are by the bullet, and that the latter are entirely responsible for the extraordinary level of deliberate killings compared to other peer nations.

Are You Kidding?

About comparing American murder to peer countries, those who favor whether they know it or not keeping the GI in the big money are prone to instead compare our level of homicide to “civilized players like Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Jamaica” (https://www.newsweek.com/were-not-outlier-targeted-solutions-will-make-america-safer-gun-control-opinion-1711251). Really? Seriously? You progun folks think that we should aspire the match the death rates of 2^nd world societies that citizens are fleeing from? Gosh, silly me, I thought it would be a vastly better idea to try to achieve the marvelously low levels of murder seen in the rest of the advanced democracies. But what do I know?

That gun believers are pushing that line is a sterling example of how they are striving to define that nation downwards by normalizing the slaughter. I would be ashamed to sink to such a level.

Suicide by Gun

I do not discuss suicide via firearms — which kills somewhat more persons than are murdered by the same – in the main text because lots of self-killings by bullet does not significantly boost sales of the weapons. Some may instead be deterred from acquiring guns because the risk of suicide is one of the reasons forearms are more likely – along with accidents, guns being used by angry relations, guns grabbed and used against the owner, etc. – to harm an owner than protect them .

Not long ago the USA was typical among developed nations in suicides, now it is the worst off exceeding even Japan that used to be the most suicidal. Both because self-death rates are rising in America, and because they are lessening in some other nations. Because half of US suicides are by firearms, which are much more efficient in resulting in death than other commonly used means, it can be concluded that guns are the primary cause of the increase. Bringing suicides in the USA down to first world norms will almost certainly require sharply reducing the number of households that contain firearms.

Mass Murder Via Bump Stock

The Las Vegas shooter used bump stocks attached to about a dozen AR-15s to main and slaughter a large portion of an outdoor crowd. This led to questions of why bump stocks, which convert a semi-automatic rifle into an even faster firing automatic, were legal up to then. One reason has to do with recoil. Firing a gun full auto is not easy, the constant recoil makes it hard to stay on target. Adding a BS to the back end of the original stock of the gun degrades the proper balance designed into the weapon, so it is harder to aim an automatically firing AR-15 with a BS compared to the military version, the M-16 (which was designed to minimize the recoil problem, each round only being a little over 0.22” in diameter).

The other reason is heat. Civilian semi-autos AR-15s are cheap and mass saleable because the firing chamber is designed to cope with the blast and heat of a round detonating only as fast as the trigger can be humanly pulled. If the rate of fire is boosted by a factor of four or more to full automatic with a BS then the speed at which bullets are going off is so high that the chamber gets hotter than it is designed to handle and the gun will fail when auto fire continues beyond a magazine load or two. M-16s have higher quality firing chambers crafted to better resist the heat of full auto, and are more expensive to produce.

The Las Vegas shooter knew the above. So he did not use just one or two AR-15s with a BS and load it with a series of magazines because he understood the gun would quickly be ruined and jam. Therefore, he had a number of AR-15s each fitted with a BS ready to go, used one until the magazine was empty, dropped that rifle, and went to the next.

After that demonstration bump stocks were banned.