Okay........

That is the dumbass redneck response of the year.....did you know the Shuttle was called "Orbiter"....? Hilarious........

Okay....if that is how you see it....I won't even go into how contingencies such as racism and discrimination stifles self-responsibility efforts......

what is YOUR way of having everyone covered, or do you not want that?

Of course I am known for my social skills, professionally and academically...and even in those arenas, I am known not to do well with the anti-social, recalcitrant, OPP types..my co-workers and students both find me to be a hoot....and I remind them that it is by design, especially since now I can retire any day I choose. .I am known as a talented non-conformist who is tolerated because I bring a lot to the table and can make very relevant and significant organizational contributions........ Mayor Riordan solidified that perception for me........

Black People Still Aren’t Living As Long as Whites: Study

Alice Park


May 02, 2017


People in the U.S. and beyond are living longer thanks to better health care, but gaps between whites and other groups, including African-Americans, persist, according to a new government report. However, those health disparities appear to be getting smaller.

In the latest issue of Vital Signs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers studied death rates among white and black populations in the U.S. from 1999 to 2015. They broke down the information by cause of death and age.


MORE: What Race Has to Do With Breast Cancer

Overall, death rates from any cause declined more sharply among black people—by 25%—than for whites, which dropped by 14%. That helped shrink the gap between mortality rates among the two groups from 33% in 1999 to 16% in 2015. That's good news, because younger and middle-aged black people are dying of heart disease, cancer and HIV infection at a lower rate.

Still, the higher death rates among African-Americans for most age groups show that their health needs aren’t being met in the same way that they are for whites. More black people than white people, for example, said they had less than a high school education, which is one of the primary factors in determining employment and health insurance. As a result, more black people than whites were unemployed, living below the poverty level and lacking health insurance.

Those socioeconomic factors also contributed to poorer health through obesity and less physical activity, in addition to less access to doctors for regular checkups. In 2015, black people had a 40% higher death rate than whites from any cause in every age group for people under 65.

The study also highlights areas where health education programs could do a better job serving black populations, especially on issues like the dangers of obesity and inactivity and the importance of prevention to avoid chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and hypertension.

poor troubled apple....like your ignorant ass inbred half-brother ao.....you take cracks at my education but then turn stupid when asked relevant questions that display your own knowledge level...what a squaw!!

why would I show up, kill you and ruin a great life.....do you know how long and how much effort that education and experience took to get just to waste it over someone who every time they see a white racist....asks them to drop their pants so they can get shit on their tongue and a throat full of semen?

Because I don't know how to give a sissified pussy ass apple any other type of response.........especially one that wants to stereotype then bitch out as if that is not racist itself........

at least he is not the kid of right wing parents who are failures that cause their kids to want to shoot up the school because they were not raised to have social skills.....

Barkley will bring bite to ‘Race’
The blunt-talking ex-NBA star vows to ask tough questions. No doubts there.
CHARLES BARKLEY will discuss fiery topics on “American Race.” (Jessica Chou)
LORRAINE ALI TELEVISION CRITIC
Charles Barkley has a new TNT series, “American Race,” and, no, it’s not a reality triathlon competition.
It’s about that other kind of race — the black, white and brown kind — that Barkley always seems to be getting in trouble for bringing up on that other TNT show, “Inside the NBA.”
“I knew I’d catch … for this going in,” said Barkley, 54, of his new docuseries exploring hot-button topics such as undocumented workers, Black Lives Matter and Oscars So White. “People say, ‘These jocks won’t stand up for anything.’ Then when you do stand up, they complain too. Which one is it?”
This is vintage Barkley, the cranky yet comical old- school commentator that’s made him a media superstar talking about sports and all else. He’s a handful — and he’s just getting warmed up.
“Did you see last year when that thing happened with [Colin] Kaepernick?” he continued, referring to the San Francisco 49er quarterback who took a knee during “The Star Spangled Banner” to protest racial injustice. “It was like WWIII. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. I’m smart enough to not let this stuff bother me. I’m just trying to do the right thing, and people are just going to have to deal with it.”
What they must deal with are four hourlong episodes airing over two nights — May 11 and 12 — when Barkley tours the country to answer some of his own questions about the relationship between law enforcement and the black community, Islamophobia in the Trump era and why America is so divided.
And it’s presented in a very Barkley-equse format. Prime example: the intro for the fourth installment in the series, “A Country Divided”:
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” says Barkley in the opening moments, “but America has lost its mind. … We got a bunch of cry babies out there who are upset ’cause their candidate lost, and the other side, they’re just gloating over their victory. … This is just plain stupid. What forces are keeping us apart?”
Or the episode exploring racism in Hollywood: “Last year’s Oscars, everyone went crazy because they were so white,” muses Barkley. “The Oscars have always been so white. I don’t know why last year became such a big deal. I think people get carried away. No one’s entitled to an Oscar. I’m from Alabama. They got real racism in Alabama, not just the fuddy-duddy stuff you got out here in L.A. This year’s Oscars had the most black winners ever, but people are still cautious. I want to know if people are overreacting, or is Hollywood racist?”
To answer Barkley’s often basic but honest questions, the hulking commentator travels across the country to sit at the dinner table with a Muslim family in Dallas, an undocumented Mexican family in Atlanta and chat in the kitchen of conservative white couple in the South.
While taping the show last year, he stopped at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Hollywood to be the celebrity guest for a night of improv sketch comedy. Barkley told stories of things he’d said in the past that had got him in trouble such as: “I’d never buy my girl a watch … she’s already got a clock over the stove” and that Col. Sanders is one of the black community’s most revered heroes. The troupe spun pointed and hysterical sketches out of those statements that are either hilarious or appalling or both.
After the show, while watching a football game in the green room, he said he’d said some things over his career that he probably should have thought about a little more before “opening his mouth.” But the point of dropping by the theater and shooting part of the show there is to get people talking.
“If you look at politics and people on television, they tell us what to think, the way things should be, but nobody ever asks us for our opinion,” said Barkley as stunned fans in the hallways ogled at him — he’s not your typical hipster comic who weigh about as much as one of his legs.
The 6-foot-6 mountain of a man was dressed in pedestrian black slacks, an office-appropriate button-down shirt and lace-up black shoes so huge they barely fit under the coffee table. He spoke seriously and passionately about why he, of all people, wanted to launch a series about race (“my daughter’s been a victim of stereotyping at the private school she goes to”) yet still found time to steal glances at a game. “The whole objective of the show is to have a civilized conversation. I didn’t want yelling and screaming, which is fine, but we’ve got a lot of yelling and screaming right now. The objective was like, let’s just have an honest discussion. We can agree to disagree.”
On “American Race,” Barkley’s sensibilities live somewhere between old-school crank, live-and-let live pragmatist and unpredictable loose cannon. He asks what many people are too afraid to — what’s the big deal? — and with the unapologetic candor that helped launch his post-game career into the stratosphere. He’s mixing it up nightly with the “Inside the NBA” crew of E.J. Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny (“The Jet”) Smith, who aren’t afraid to rip into each other. That’s the attitude he brings to “American Race.”
“If you want to have a one-sided opinion, you can go to Fox News and you know how they will be no matter what,” he says of the angle he takes on “American Race.” “I didn’t want to do this show from any one perspective.”
No matter who he’s talking to, whether its Ice Cube or an undocumented Mexican father (whose name was withheld for his protection) or extreme-right, white nationalist activist Richard Spencer, the reaction to Barkley was almost identical. School-boy crush mixed with nervous elation. They can’t quite believe they’re in the same room with Sir Charles.
Barkley may not have the political savvy of “United Shades of America’s” Kamau Bell, or the patience of Morgan Spurlock in “30 Days,” but as a unifying figure, there’s no one else who could do the job like Barkley.
“I grew up poor in Birmingham, near Montgomery and Selma — that’s like right in the middle of all that [civil rights] stuff. That’s why it’s important and significant in the future. Plus I just got too many questions that need answering.”
lorraine.ali@latimes.com

I wonder if all are liars like these OPP types. Check this out CB:
GOP’s big lie: It will protect the sick
DAVID LAZARUS
Last-minute wrangling over the Republican healthcare bill, approved by the House on Thursday, centered largely on what’s known as the MacArthur Amendment. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said it “strengthens” the legislation and “protects people with preexisting conditions.”
It strengthens the bill only from the perspective of maintaining support from far-right lawmakers who have sworn blood oaths to undo the healthcare-reform legacy of former President Obama.
And it protects people with preexisting conditions much as starving people may be welcome at a restaurant, but only if they order the most expensive dishes on the menu.
“The MacArthur Amendment is a Band-Aid on a very bad plan, and it likely won’t staunch the bleeding,” said Dana Goldman, director of the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
I spoke with the amendment’s namesake, Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.). He painted a sunnier picture.
“We have to make sure the most vulnerable are protected, but we also have to bring down costs for everyone else,” he told me. “I think we’re doing that.”
This much is clear: Republican lawmakers have provided a textbook example of how not to enact major legislation.
They’re aiming to radically overhaul the $3-trillion U.S. healthcare system yet have shunned the input of major stakeholders such as medical organizations, hospitals and patient-advocacy groups, which are uniformly against the measure.
A key focus of the GOP has been a provision of the Affordable Care Act that people with preexisting conditions not be discriminated against in any way by health insurers. Prior to Obamacare, insurers could deny coverage to such people or charge premiums beyond most people’s ability to pay.
The MacArthur Amendment would empower states to waive protections for those with preexisting conditions as long as they come up with some alternative way of making insurance available.
The catch, however, is that the amendment would not require insurers to charge the same rates that healthy people enjoy. That’s why the likes of the American Medical Assn. and AARP have warned that, under the Republican plan, sick people could face rates so high that they’d be unaffordable for any but the wealthy.
Dr. James Madara, chief executive of the AMA, said in a letter to Congress last week that claims the MacArthur Amendment would protect people with preexisting conditions are “illusory.”
The reason he can say this is because the Republicans would rely mostly on so-called high-risk pools to provide coverage for the sick. This means such people would be grouped together for insurance purposes, which would relieve healthy people of the financial obligation of covering their needs.
While that would lower premiums for the healthy — which, along with tax cuts, appears to be the Republicans’ primary goal in tackling healthcare reform — it would cause rates to soar for those in the high-risk pool.
We know that because this isn’t a theoretical idea. High-risk pools have been tried in nearly three dozen states, and in almost all cases resulted in limited access to coverage and skyrocketing costs.
California’s high-risk pool was the Major Risk Medical Insurance Program, which was intended only as insurance of last resort for the up to 400,000 people with preexisting conditions who, prior to Obamacare, kept having doors slammed in their faces by profit-hungry insurers.
The program was chronically underfunded, meaning that it eventually had to limit the number of people covered to only about 7,000 — a small fraction of the state’s uninsured. Thousands languished on the waiting list.
And even when people obtained coverage in California’s high-risk pool, monthly premiums would run as much as $1,000, annual coverage would be capped at $75,000 and there would be a lifetime limit of $750,000. It was, in other words, too little coverage at too high a price.
The Republican bill now includes a potential $130 billion in subsidies over a decade, plus an additional $8 billion over five years, to fund high-risk pools. But some experts say that’s nowhere near enough.
The Center for American Progress estimates that, depending on the number of states involved, an additional $200 billion could be needed.
Jennifer Kent, director of the California Department of Health Care Services, told me the Republicans’ $138 billion might sound like a large amount until you face the actual costs of covering people with serious conditions.
“We had one person, a child with hemophilia, in Medi-Cal who cost $21 million last year,” she said. “We had five other people who cost over $10 million each. Put them together and that’s just six people costing almost $100 million.”
The simple fact, Kent said, is that any risk pool composed solely of sick people will be very, very expensive.
“The problem with California’s high-risk pool was that there was never enough funding,” she said. “We had to close enrollment because the money ran out.”
This shouldn’t be news to MacArthur, the Republican lawmaker. He’s a former insurance executive who got rich selling his company, York Risk Services Group, for about half a billion dollars in 2010.
MacArthur told me the Republicans are prepared to make “a tremendous down payment” on funding high-risk pools. “If we find that things have to be tweaked, we’ll make adjustments,” he said.
That’s a surprising commitment to flexibility considering the Republicans adamantly refused to consider even a single tweak to Obamacare. It also displays an optimism about taxpayer funds being used for the sick that doesn’t seem warranted.
Republicans currently say that healthy people shouldn’t have to cover those with preexisting conditions through higher premiums. Yet those same healthy people will be willing to shoulder a possibly higher tax burden?
MacArthur insisted “we’re not leaving people high and dry.” And the GOP bill does contain responsible-sounding language that makes it seem like people with preexisting conditions have little to fear.
The reality, however, is that it lays the groundwork for the sick to be ghettoized. It punishes people not for misdeeds but for medical misfortune.
That’s not healthcare. It’s an act of cruelty.
David Lazarus’ column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz . Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com
.

When mass shootings occur, Californians buy more guns
HANDGUN sales in California rose by 53% and 41%, respectively, in the six weeks after the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and San Bernardino, a study shows. (Allen J. Schaben Los Angeles Times)
By Melissa Healy
Long after the victims are laid to rest and the shell casings are collected and cataloged, new research shows, mass shootings have a lasting ripple effect: For several weeks after the mayhem stops, a shooter’s deadly rampage pumps a higher-than-usual number of firearms into general circulation in the United States.
A study published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that in the six weeks after the 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., acquisitions of handguns in California alone ticked 53% higher than usual rates.
And, in the six weeks following the 2015 shootings in San Bernardino , in which 14 were killed and 22 others seriously wounded, handgun purchases in the state increased 41% over normal sales volumes.
In and around the city of San Bernardino, the spurt was especially dramatic: Gun sales there rose by 85% in the six weeks following the rampage by American-born Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani-born wife, Tashfeen Malik.
The additional 53,000 handguns that found their way into California households following the Newtown and San Bernardino assaults represent a tiny fraction of the estimated 30 million firearms privately owned statewide. But the study suggests that mass shootings are prompting the introduction of handguns into households that had never had them before, and spurring gun ownership among people — including women and Latinos — who have rarely bought them in the past.
As mass shootings continue unabated, the additional gun sales they spur have the power, bit by bit, to nudge the nation’s arsenal of privately held weapons — estimated to be 310 million in 2009 — ever higher.
“A large number of smaller spikes could add up to a major addition to the number of guns in a community,” said Stanford University injury-prevention researcher David M. Studdert , the study’s lead author.
The new findings, drawn from gun acquisition records in the Golden State, may well be a conservative gauge of how much mass shootings drive increases in gun sales and ownership. In California, would-be gun buyers must clear many more hurdles than exist in most states, including a 10-day waiting period, a purchase limit of one gun per month and a safety training requirement.
In an editorial published alongside the new study, Daniel W. Webster , director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, wrote that in states with fewer restrictions and a more robust culture of gun ownership, “it seems likely that gun acquisitions inspired by mass shootings would be greater.”
The new findings didn’t just document increases in gun sales. They compared sales in the brief period following a highly publicized shooting to well-established patterns of gun sales, which vary seasonally and with events such as national elections.
The finding that gun sales exceeded expected levels jibes with less rigorous observations by gun researchers and journalists, who frequently chronicle runs on gun stores following mass shootings .
But the motives that drive those purchases are a matter of intense debate. Some have argued that those increases are largely driven by gun enthusiasts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the wake of mass shootings, many gun owners fear the adoption of new limits on access to firearms. These consumers act quickly to buy or stockpile controversial weapons while they can.
That impetus may only be part of the picture. Instead, the new research offers evidence that in the wake of mass shootings, some citizens — probably rattled by the randomness of these events — conclude that owning a gun will make them safer.
The new study’s dissection of gun sales following two widely publicized events points to self-defense as an important prod to gun buying after a mass shooting. In particular, gun acquisition among two groups of people — women and first-time gun owners — bolsters that conclusion.
As buyers of handguns, men typically outnumber women 10 to 1. While men continued to be the leading buyers of handguns after a mass shooting, the bump in handgun purchases by women was 75% higher than usual after the Newtown shooting and 50% higher after the San Bernardino attack. (For men, the sales increased 48% and 38%, respectively, after the two shootings.)
People who had never bought a gun before were disproportionately more likely to buy a gun in the aftermath of a mass shooting as well. Handgun purchases by first-time buyers rose 72% more than expected after Newtown and 52% more than expected after San Bernardino, compared with increases of 35% and 29%, respectively, among established gun owners.
In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, the National Rifle Assn.’s Wayne LaPierre famously asserted that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
“The research says exactly the opposite,” counters Dr. Garen Wintemute , an emergency department physician who directs the violence prevention research program at UC Davis. A welter of research on households and states has found that higher rates of gun ownership are consistently linked to increased risks of suicide, of death or injury resulting from domestic violence and of firearms-related violence and injury, he noted.
That so many consumers react to mass shootings by bringing a handgun into the home means “we have been unable to translate our research knowledge into public awareness,” Wintemute said.
The new analysis did not consider rifles, which in 2014 and 2015 accounted for 45% of all ?rearm acquisitions in California. State data suggest, however, that before and after San Bernardino, the acquisition of such “long guns” saw increases that tracked with those seen in handgun sales. So handguns “may represent only about one-half of the total ?rearm acquisition response in California” to the San Bernardino shooting, the study authors suggested.
Regardless of how they are defined (whether three or four people must be killed, for instance), mass shootings have become a regular — some say escalating — feature of American life. If they drive even modest bumps in handgun ownership, “the cumulative effect of such ‘shocks’ ... may be substantial,” the authors concluded. “These events may drive nontrivial increases in overall ?rearm prevalence, which may in turn increase the risk for ?rearm-related morbidity and mortality in the long run.”
As “durable goods,” Wintemute noted, handguns can be expected to last for decades. And so might the risks that come with owning them.
“Someone may buy a handgun in his 20s and use it to kill himself in his 60s,” said Wintemute. “There’s the potential for long-lasting harm every time one of these events occurs, and there’s this excess in purchases.” That’s especially true, he added, when that post-shooting boost in purchases extends gun ownership to households that had never had a firearm.
“It just ratchets the risk up one extra notch,” Wintemute said.
melissa.healy@latimes.com

State settles Confederate flag lawsuit
Agreement clarifies that ban on display does not apply to individuals, even on government property.
ARTIST Timothy Desmond sued after his painting depicting the Confederate battle flag at the 1864 Battle of Atlanta was barred from the 2015 Big Fresno Fair. (Emily Ladeairous/Timothy Desmond Via Associated Press)
associated press
SACRAMENTO — California’s ban on displaying the Confederate flag doesn’t apply to individuals even if they are on government property, state officials said this week in settling a free-speech lawsuit.
Fresno artist Timothy Desmond sued after his painting depicting the flag was barred from the 2015 Big Fresno Fair. His painting shows Confederate soldiers fighting in the 1864 Battle of Atlanta, led by a soldier carrying the battle flag.
California’s 2014 law says the state cannot display or sell the battle flag of the Confederacy or any similar image unless it appears in a way that serves an educational or historical purpose. Fair officials used that law to ban Desmond’s painting a year later, but they let him display the painting during the 2016 fair.
The settlement signed by the state attorney general’s office on Monday says that the ban applies only to the state government and not to private individuals. Individuals are still free to carry, display or sell the flag on private or government property.
“The First Amendment is clear: The state may not ban the expression of certain points of view simply because some find them distasteful,” Center for Individual Rights President Terry Pell said in a statement Tuesday. “Freedom of speech has costs, whether in the form of hurt feelings of those who are forced to listen or the cost of police necessary to protect against the riots that sometimes result.”
The nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., represented Desmond in the lawsuit.
Spokesmen for California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra did not return repeated requests for comment.
Desmond himself wasn’t commenting on the lawsuit or the settlement, a spokeswoman for the center said.
The center’s website describes him as a retired high school science teacher who regularly enters his paintings in local art fairs.
It says his relatives fought for the South during the Civil War, so he became interested in their lives and the battles in which they might have fought. He found that his great-grandfather’s brother may have fought in the Battle of Atlanta.

After mass shootings, firearm sales surge to first-time buyers
A GRAND TERRACE store owner, Frank Cobet, shows a customer a rifle days after the 2015 shootings in nearby San Bernardino. Many who buy in response to such attacks are new to gun ownership. (Barbara Davidson Los Angeles Times)
By Melissa Healy
Long after the victims are laid to rest and the shell casings are collected and cataloged, new research shows, mass shootings have a lasting ripple effect: For several weeks after the mayhem stops, a shooter’s deadly rampage pumps a higher-than-usual number of firearms into general circulation in the United States.
A study published this week in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that in the six weeks after the 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., acquisitions of handguns in California alone ticked 53% higher than usual rates.
And, in the six weeks following the 2015 shootings in San Bernardino , in which 14 were killed and 22 others seriously wounded, handgun purchases in the state increased 41% over normal sales volumes.
In and around the city of San Bernardino, the spurt was especially dramatic: Gun sales there rose by 85% in the six weeks following the rampage by American-born Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani-born wife, Tashfeen Malik.
The additional 53,000 handguns that found their way into California households following the Newtown and San Bernardino assaults represent a tiny fraction of the estimated 30 million firearms privately owned statewide. But the study suggests that mass shootings are prompting the introduction of handguns into households that had never had them before, and spurring gun ownership among people — including women and Latinos — who have rarely bought them in the past.
As mass shootings continue unabated, the additional gun sales they spur have the power, bit by bit, to nudge the nation’s arsenal of privately held weapons — estimated to be 310 million in 2009 — ever higher.
“A large number of smaller spikes could add up to a major addition to the number of guns in a community,” said Stanford University injury-prevention researcher David M. Studdert , the study’s lead author.
The new findings, drawn from gun acquisition records in the Golden State, may well be a conservative gauge of how much mass shootings drive increases in gun sales and ownership. In California, would-be gun buyers must clear many more hurdles than exist in most states, including a 10-day waiting period, a purchase limit of one gun per month and a safety training requirement.
In an editorial published alongside the new study, Daniel W. Webster , director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, wrote that in states with fewer restrictions and a more robust culture of gun ownership, “it seems likely that gun acquisitions inspired by mass shootings would be greater.”
The new findings didn’t just document increases in gun sales. They compared sales in the brief period following a highly publicized shooting to well-established patterns of gun sales, which vary seasonally and with events such as national elections.
The finding that gun sales exceeded expected levels jibes with less rigorous observations by gun researchers and journalists, who frequently chronicle runs on gun stores following mass shootings .
But the motives that drive those purchases are a matter of intense debate. Some have argued that those increases are largely driven by gun enthusiasts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the wake of mass shootings, many gun owners fear the adoption of new limits on access to firearms. These consumers act quickly to buy or stockpile controversial weapons while they can.
But that impetus may be only be part of the picture. Instead, the new research offers evidence that in the wake of mass shootings, some citizens — probably rattled by the randomness of these events — conclude that owning a gun will make them safer.
The new study’s dissection of gun sales following two widely publicized events points to self-defense as an important prod to gun buying after a mass shooting. In particular, gun acquisition among two groups of people — women and first-time gun owners — bolsters that conclusion.
As buyers of handguns, men typically outnumber women 10 to 1. While men continued to be the leading buyers of handguns after a mass shooting, the bump in handgun purchases by women was 75% higher than usual after the Newtown shooting and 50% higher after the San Bernardino attack. (For men, the sales increased 48% and 38%, respectively, after the two shootings.)
People who had never bought a gun before were disproportionately more likely to buy a gun in the aftermath of a mass shooting as well. Handgun purchases by first-time buyers rose 72% more than expected after Newtown and 52% more than expected after San Bernardino, compared with increases of 35% and 29%, respectively, among established gun owners.
In the wake of the shootings in Newtown, the National Rifle Assn.’s Wayne LaPierre famously asserted that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
“The research says exactly the opposite,” counters Dr. Garen Wintemute , an emergency department physician who directs the violence prevention research program at UC Davis. A welter of research on households and states has found that higher rates of gun ownership are consistently linked to increased risks of suicide, of death or injury resulting from domestic violence and of firearms-related violence and injury, he noted.
That so many consumers react to mass shootings by bringing a handgun into the home means “we have been unable to translate our research knowledge into public awareness,” Wintemute said.
The new analysis did not consider rifles, which in 2014 and 2015 accounted for 45% of all ?rearm acquisitions in California. State data suggest, however, that before and after San Bernardino, the acquisition of such “long guns” saw increases that tracked with those seen in handgun sales. So handguns “may represent only about one-half of the total ?rearm acquisition response in California” to the San Bernardino shooting, the study authors suggested.
Regardless of how they are defined (whether three or four people must be killed, for instance), mass shootings have become a regular — some say escalating — feature of American life. If they drive even modest bumps in handgun ownership, “the cumulative effect of such ‘shocks’ ... may be substantial,” the authors concluded. “These events may drive nontrivial increases in overall ?rearm prevalence, which may in turn increase the risk for ?rearm-related morbidity and mortality in the long run.”
As “durable goods,” Wintemute noted, handguns can be expected to last for decades. And so might the risks that come with owning them.
“Someone may buy a handgun in his 20s and use it to kill himself in his 60s,” said Wintemute. “There’s the potential for long-lasting harm every time one of these events occurs, and there’s this excess in purchases.” That’s especially true, he added, when that post-shooting boost in purchases extends gun ownership to households that had never had a firearm.
“It just ratchets the risk up one extra notch,” Wintemute said.
melissa.healy@latimes.com