We’ve all heard the tragic stories about parents who just look away for one distracted second while disaster strikes their helpless toddler. There’s the kid who got into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo, or the children in Texas who drowned while their mother was occupied with her cell phone. When I think about the damage that is being done to our society by the latest evolution of our gun culture, I can sympathize with those parents.

I’m not a gun aficionado, but, for a long time, I felt that 2nd amendment questions about gun ownership weren’t my first priority when it came to political activism – at least not in a society where we have had to fight every day to defend the economic and social progress we made in the 20th century. Social Security, reproductive rights, civil rights for minorities – all came before guns.

Guns, after all, just didn’t seem like that big a deal. When I was a child and we were living in a rural area, my father owned an old shotgun that was kept, unloaded, in the back of a closet. It was only used once that I know of, to stop the suffering of a pet dog that had been too badly badly mauled by coyotes to survive. Later, when we moved to a small city, few, if any, of our urban neighbors had guns, or, if they did, they were securely locked away and nobody thought much about them. So who cared if a few nuts were hot and bothered by the 2nd Amendment? Like those distracted parents, I looked away.

When I looked back again the disastrous view took my breath away. There are more than 300 million guns in circulation – in a country of 300 million people – although only about a third subscribe to gun ownership. In 2015 there were 372 mass shootings (i.e., four or more individuals shot) , which killed 475 people and wounded 1,870. Overall, excluding suicide, 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015, and 26,819 people were injured.

And make no mistake, this is an American phenomenon. In the U.S. 60% of all murders in 2015 were the result of gun violence, while only 31% of the murders in Canada, 18.2% in Australia, and just 10% in the UK were attributable to guns. I should add that Canada, Australia and the UK all have strict gun regulations.

Concomitant with America’s gun blood-bath is the rise of what Evan Osnos, a writer for The New Yorker, calls the rise of a “concealed-carry lifestyle,” a phenomenon that leaves me shaking in my (metaphorical) boots:

“Something really profound has changed in the way that we use guns,” Osnos tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Concealed carry, as it’s known, is now legal in all 50 states.”

Osnos, who writes about the evolution of concealed carry in the current issue of The New Yorker, estimates that there are about 13 million people who are licensed to carry a concealed gun in the United States — more than 12 times the number of police officers and detectives in America.

He says that gun manufacturers market a “concealed-carry lifestyle,” which uses fear to sell guns.

“If you are somebody who is considering buying a gun, or you’ve become part of this phenomenon of carrying a gun in daily life, you are constantly being reminded of ways in which you could encounter a threat,” he says.

This means that anyone in my neighborhood could be packing at any time. Couple this fact with a Missouri law awaiting the Governor’s signature that would extend stand-your-ground, and any paranoid lout or half-drunk old geezer who is offended by the way I allegedly looked at him, by an overheard conversation, by the political signs in my front yard, or just about anything that strikes his or her fevered imagination as threatening, can be inspired to fire off a few rounds in my direction. The possibilities opened up by concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws do not make me feel safe. They make me instead think about getting out of Dodge.

In his New Yorker article, Osnos describes how, in the interest of increased sales, the NRA uses racially-tinged fear of crime and populist fears that “powerful Americans are seeking to disarm and endanger less privileged citizens” to whip up the paranoia that fuels gun fervor. And to support this union of fear and guns, the NRA regularly pays off pet politicians. Politicians like Missouri’s Senator Roy Blunt:

Since 1998, no current member of Congress has accepted more in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt. A new analysis this week from The Washington Post, and highlighted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, showed that Blunt has received $60,550 from the NRA.

Go ahead. Guess where Blunt has come down on all the recent efforts to keep military assault weapons out of the hands of civilians – including suspected terrorists.

To be fair, Blunt did vote for two GOP-sponsored amendments that pretended to keep suspected terrorists from buying guns while doing nothing or even, according to some calculations, making the gun situation worse. Nothing like pretend government. Maybe Missourians should all just pretend to vote for Blunt next November.

A review of 130 research articles on the effectiveness of gun laws in multiple countries was just published in Epidemiologic Reviews, an important, peer-reviewed public health journal. Not surprisingly, the review concluded that the numbers of gun deaths, both homicides and suicides, declined significantly in countries that implemented comprehensive packages of gun control laws.

It may get your juices flowing to learn that research centered on Missouri is included:

One study, for example, looked at Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its law requiring a permit to purchase a firearm (essentially, it had reduced background check requirements). This study found that after 2007, Missouri’s homicide rate jumped by 25 percent. No other changes in law or circumstance appear to be able to explain the increase.

So, given the prevalence of this type of data what do you suppose Missouri lawmakers are proposing to do? According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, they’re going for broke in the other direction and two laws from the plethora initially filed that propose to loosen gun restrictions are likely to make it through the legislature:

As the legislative session enters its final two weeks, the House and Senate are considering making it legal for people to carry concealed weapons without a permit anywhere they now can carry guns openly.

And, the Republican-led majorities also are considering an expansion of Missouri’s self-defense laws by allowing a person to use deadly force in public places if they believe a reasonable threat exists.

You may be surprised to learn that the review concluded that specific types of gun regulation affect specific subtypes of gun violence. For instance, the survey article found that strong gun permit requirements, a control that would be loosened significantly under proposed Missouri legislation, are significantly associated with “lower rates of intimate partner homicides and firearm unintentional deaths in children, respectively.” Remember how the GOP got on the “No to domestic violence,” bandwagon before the last election? You might suspect that if any of our state-level pols were subscribing to this women-friendly rhetoric, they didn’t really care after all.

The research review also found that claims supporting concealed carry and stand-your-ground laws that are extended in pending Missouri legislation likely to be blessed by lawmakers don’t stand up to scrutiny:

By contrast, laws favored by the National Rifle Association (such as concealed carry or stand your ground), when implemented, either had no effect on gun deaths or increased gun violence. And Santaella-Tenorio found this by considering not just studies that reached this conclusion, but also studies that supported loosening gun laws.

Most of the studies that supported these laws were written by a handful of authors, like Florida State’s Gary Kleck and independent scholar/Fox News columnist John Lott. Scholars who reexamined their conclusions, sometimes even using their own data, generally came to the opposite results.

But hey! Don’t worry about what happens when any angry, ignorant Tom, Dick and Harry, who may or may not have the savvy to use a gun correctly, can, as they say on TV, pack heat – and can legally shoot you with no repercussions if you accidentally say “boo” to him and he gets scared. Missouri’s Rep. Eric Burlison (R-133) has it all figured out; “we do it in a responsible way,” he asserts, “we aren’t letting citizens carry in a place where they can’t carry today.”

I guess that makes it alright then – increase our already considerable risk as long as you do it in a “responsible” way.

N. B. Digby notes signs of a relationship between states where the gun culture is strongest and the current uptick in suicides. Whodda thought?

State Senator Kurt Schaefer (R-19) wants to be Missouri’s next Attorney General. He wants it a lot since he announced his plans to run in 2016 over a year ago. Consequently he’s been very busy  getting his name out before the public. But not just any public. His constituency of choice seems to be the reddest dregs of this increasingly red state. It’s  hard to think of just about any rightwing bandwagon he hasn’t tried to ride since declaring his candidacy, no matter how rickety:

Tax Cuts for Rich Folks: Evidence suggests that Schaefer supports the Kansas tax “experiment” and would be willing to beggar Missouri’s middle and working class in order to give big tax cuts to rich folks and their businesses. When state GOPers recently fêted Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Schaefer, who is currently the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, opined that the governor had “some really compelling numbers.” This is in spite of what Politico has dubbed the “Brownback effect,” observing that “Republicans once idolized Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as a tax cutting superstar – now he’s a lesson in what not to do.” Evidently Schaeffer didn’t get the message. Or else he actually takes seriously dishonest statistics of the sort that billionaire Rex Sinquefield published in Forbes Magazine in order to make the Kansas experiment look like it is succeeding, or at least not as disastrous as it is proving to be.

Social Spending Cuts: Schaeffer, like so many GOPers before him, seems to think it’s okay to fund tax cuts – favored by rich political donors like Rex Sinquefield – by cutting the ground out from under those who lack the wherewithal and the influence to fund his climb to the top of the Missouri political heap. He’s proposed cutting $130 million from the already meager amount allocated by the House to social services, health and mental health services. He says that the agencies are wasteful and that cuts are necessary to slow their growth.

It is true that Missouri’s social services are currently not functioning too well. Ill-considered cuts and the resulting “reforms” over the past few years have taken a steep toll, a situation that many take as evidence that they need more rather than less money. According to figures supplied by state budget officials, Schaefer’s claims of waste perhaps reflect his ideological biases rather than a close analysis of the real-life situation. As for out-of-control growth? Wouldn’t you expect that as Missouri continues its GOP-led transformation into a poverty stricken backwater, one might expect demand for services to increase – a demand, that folks like Schaefer are determined not to meet.

Guns “R”Us: Schaefer was one of the motivating forces behind Missouri’s Amendment 5, a constitutional amendment voted in by the gun-mad hordes who dominate mid-term elections in Missouri. This amendment, under the rubric of an “inalienable” right to own guns, was so badly written that it has made it impossible to bar convicted felons from gun ownership. As the St Louis Post-Dispatch described it, Schaefer’s decision “to start acting like a pandering fool” has had a scary, but entirely predictable – and predicted – result:

… .In a state in which there are more gun deaths than traffic deaths, in which toddlers are grabbing mommy and daddy’s guns and firing away, in which cities are being told by a Legislature there is nothing they can do about gun violence, now convicted felons can own guns and there is nothing the police can do about it.

Again, let me reiterate. This guy’s a lawyer – and he even wants to be the state’s main lawyer. If his legal acumen was insufficient to locate the problems in what was essentially his baby, a lot of other folks pointed them out before it was too late to fix them. Now Schaefer’s twisting and turning, trying to find a way to prove that “Amendment 5 doesn’t mean what it says.” Sadly, the courts don’t agree.

So stop and think. Either Schaefer is, as the Post-Dispatch implies, a spineless panderer, or he’s out-and-out stupid. He’s either taken in by or cynically peddling obviously failing, ideologically driven voodoo economic theories, GOP welfare queen vilification, and the Guns equal God ideology of hardcore gun crazies. Either way what rational, unbiased person could trust him to act in the best interests of the people of Missouri – either in the State Senate where he now works his backwards magic, or as Attorney General? Is the distinction even meaningful? If the sum of a politician’s major legislative efforts are stupid and harmful then it’s doesn’t make much difference if the motivation is incompetence or venality. For all practical purposes that individual is a fool.