What's Hot! on illegal guns
What’s Hot! Bulletin on illegal guns for Aug. 15:
1. CFS holds 2 more successful Traffick Jams
2. Great JP Gazette article on Traffick Jam, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and bad gun laws
1. CFS holds two more successful Traffick Jams
The Mayor, Commissioner and over 70 participants joined
a Traffick Jam workshop in the Egleston-Hyde-Jackson section of Jamaica
Plain on July 30. The diverse crowd included young people, parents and
grandparents, police and city employees from several surrounding
neighborhoods, all engaged in the fight to keep illegal guns out of
Boston. The breakout sessions provided great ideas for next steps, and
we’re looking forward to continuing to work with all of these energized
advocates.
CFS also held its first workshop with youth at Project
HIP HOP. I think this was one of our more important workshops to date.
It was a surreal experience talking about the origins of illegal guns
with a group of young people who are so profoundly and directly
confronted with this problem every day of their lives. BPD
Superintendent Joyce handled their questions with remarkable empathy
and candor. A young woman wanted to know what would happen if a friend
hid a gun in her purse. Many of the kids asked detailed questions about
the kinds of charges and penalties associated with gun possession.
Finally, there was a real sense that the system is screwy, allowing a
crop of bad gun dealers to basically get away with murder.
Throughout the presentation, there was an easel
positioned just off to the side. It displayed an array of pictures of a
handsome, smiling young man. “RIP Kelvin,” it said. Kelvin probably
would’ve been part of the discussion that day, but he was gunned down 2
weeks ago on Boston’s streets. http://www.ace-ej.org/in_memoriam_kelvin_lara_youth_organizer
We’ve been invited to work with this amazing group of young people to hold subsequent discussion groups and adapt
Traffick Jams for a youth audience. We’ll keep you updated.
2. Traffick Jams in the news
CFS was featured in the Boston Globe JP Gazette this
week. The JP article was so good—thorough, accurate, and
comprehensive—I’ve copied it here in its entirety. You can link (below)
to the Boston Globe article on Traffick Jam and to a related JP Gazette
story on an NRA spy outed last week.
Group revived to oppose illegal guns
By DAVID TABER August 13, 2008
JACKSON SQ.—Citizens For Safety, a recently reanimated
nonprofit with roots in Jamaica Plain dating back to the 1990s, made a
splash July 31, hosting a workshop at the Bromley-Heath housing
development on illegal gun trafficking.
Featuring presentations by Mayor Thomas Menino and
Police Commissioner Ed Davis, the “Traffick Jam” was the third in an
ongoing series of teach-in events the group is holding across the city
this summer.
“Most shootings on the streets in cities across the
country are committed with illegal guns,” Nancy Robinson, executive
director of Citizens For Safety told the Gazette. “By shifting our
resources and focus there, we can prevent a lot of crime and prevent a
lot of shootings. That is our whole M.O.”
Citizens For Safety this year merged with a group called
Massachusetts Against Trafficking Handguns, which Robinson also headed,
and moved its offices from the Metro West area to 31 Heath St.in JP.
Massachusettsalready has some of the strictest arms
sales regulations in the country, but Citizens For Safety is attempting
to build a grassroots base to tighten federal regulations, Robinson
told the Gazette.
“Really this has to be national,” she said. “Guns move in and out of states, across state lines, very easily.”
Since the spring, JP has seen at least 10 shootings,
four of them in the Jackson Squarearea, where Bromley-Heath is located.
Most recently, on July 27, a man was wounded at Bromley-Heath by an
unidentified gunman. On Aug. 5, four teens were wounded by gunfire in
nearby Egleston Square.
Menino has gained a national reputation for his
passionate advocacy for increasing federal regulation of the gun trade.
In 2006 he and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened the first
meeting of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of over 300 mayors
across the USthat advocates for regulation of the firearms industry.
“The issue is, where do the guns come from? Too many of
our young people have access to guns. Too many people are able to buy
guns,” he told the group of about 50 community members, most of them
Bromley-Heath residents, who attended the workshop.
In his comments, Davisapplauded the mayor, noting that
the mayors’ coalition boasts membership from “Texasand Florida, places
where it may put [elected officials] in danger for saying what is
right.”
That coalition owes its strength to Menino’s leadership, Davissaid.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2008
state-by-state gun laws scorecard places Massachusetts third in the
country—in a tie with Connecticut—in the stringency of its gun laws.
State laws here require firearms dealers and purchasers to obtain state
licenses, and require dealers to provide the state with detailed
accounts of their inventories and sales, among other things.
And, unlike in New Hampshireand Maine, dealers are not exempted from those rules at gun shows.
Still, between 30 and 40 percent of the firearms
recovered by the Boston Police Department (BPD) originated in
Massachusetts, Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce said in the
workshop.
Discussing current trends in illegal gun ownership,
Joyce said that while the average time between the purchase of an
illegal gun and its use in a crime was 3-4 years in the 1990s, it is
now 12-13 years, indicating that criminals are becoming more cavalier
about hanging onto their weapons.
Joyce showed a map detailing the locations of city
shootings in 2007. Eighty-eight percent were concentrated in Roxbury,
Dorchester, Mattapan and border areas including Jackson and Egleston
squares.
He also noted “we are no longer seeing large-scale
purchases” of firearms from federally licensed gun dealers. In the last
decade, so-called private sales by dealers who call themselves
hobbyists, as well as illegal sales, may have become more popular, he
said.
Robinson told the Gazette it is hard to track exactly
where crime guns are coming from because the federal Bureau of Alcohal,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is currently barred—by the annually
renewed Tiahrt Amendment—from sharing its tracking information with the
public. That federal law, originally passed in 2003, has been a
perennial target for Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
She also said that the ability of arms dealers to
conduct private sales is a major loophole in federal law regulating gun
sales.
In 1968, following on the heels of the assassinations of
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, laws were passed to require
federal registration for arms dealers. Federally registered arms
dealers are required to conduct background checks on gun buyers.
Shortly after that law was passed, though, she said,
largely due to lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA), the
Firearms Owners Protection Act was passed.
That law “created a new class of firearms sellers known
as hobbyists,” she said. Hobbyists are, by law, considered private gun
owners selling off their personal collections. They are allowed to sell
at gun shows and other venues without conducting background checks, she
said.
Because of that rule, referred to by some as the “gun
show loophole,” dealers are allowed to “table at gun shows, ostensibly
selling off private collections,” she said. “It allows people in the
business sell guns without requiring background checks.”
Citizens for Safety
The focus on the illegal gun trade represents new life
for Citizens For Safety. Through the 1990s, under the leadership of
onetime JP resident and current Bella Luna/Milky Way co-owner Kathie
Mainzer, the organization focused on things like after-school and jobs
programs for city teens as well as organizing the city’s first gun
buy-back program.
The buy-back program was “an education vehicle for
people to find out how dangerous it is to have guns in their homes,”
Mainzer, who currently sits on the organizations board and attended the
workshop, told the Gazette. “A lot of it was mothers, girlfriends,
grandmothers, younger brothers who knew where guns were and wanted a
safe, legal way to get rid of them.”
During Citizens for Safety’s peak years it worked with
other community organizations and groups like the faith-based Boston
Ten Point Coalition, as well as a BPD increasingly focused on community
policing, to accomplish what is widely known as the Bostonmiracle. The
1990s saw a reduction in homicides in Bostonfrom a record high 152 in
1990 to 31 in 1999.
By 2001, after years of federal funding for community
policing and a marked increase in the level of youth programming and
resources available throughout the city, Citizens For Safety, happily
“became a victim of its own success,” Mainzer said.
The luster of the “miracle”—also likely the result of a
booming economy in the late 1990s—has faded somewhat since then. In
2006 the city saw 75 homicides—a 10-year high—and 377 shootings, up
from 133 in 1997. And, last year, Robinson got in touch with Mainzer
and others from Citizens For Safety, Mainzer said. “She just felt
likeminded. She connected with a bunch of us from the original Citizens
For Safety and we all began working together,” Mainzer said.
She said the transition from broader community work
community-based advocacy work is a “natural transition,” for the
organization.
At the workshop, Davistook time to affirm that the BPD
is still committed to community policing. “We are all about community
policing,” he said, “educating the community, treating [you] as equals.”
For their part, the about 50 Bromley-Heath residents at the meeting seemed ready to be engaged.
When John Rosenthal of the Boston-based group Stop
Handgun Violence told attendees that US Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan
Democrat who is chair of the Judiciary Committee, “won’t even hold a
hearing on gun shows…and he knows what guns are doing in Detroit,” most
everyone whipped out pens or cell phones to take down the congressman’s
number.
Later in the evening, the meeting split into two
discussion groups to begin brainstorming for a possible firearms
regulation campaign.
One group discussed media strategy, and, particularly,
encouraging journalists to ask always ask where the guns came from when
reporting on shootings.
The other discussed potential campaign strategy,
including designing a pledge for gun dealers to sign. “We could build a
campaign around them and squeeze other dealers,” one meeting attendee
said.
Robinson told the Gazette that pledge could be based on
an agreement recently reached between Wal-Mart and Mayors Against
Illegal Guns. In that 10-point agreement, Wal-Mart pledges to videotape
all firearms transactions and, once it is developed by the Mayors’
group, implement a computerized system to log when crime guns are
traced back to their stores. That information is intended to help the
store determine whether to proceed with the sale.
The agreement, known as the “Responsible Firearms
Retailer Partnership,” also includes provisions for employee background
checks and training.
Other workshop participants said they are eager to start picketing gun shows in northern New England.
Robinson told the Gazette Citizens For Safety plans to
hold a meeting in the fall to begin discussing campaign strategy in
earnest.
The event was the first sponsored by the newly formed
Hyde, Egleston, Jackson Weed and Seed—a coalition of community-based
and tenant organizations along with other community members and the
Boston Police Department. The broad mandate of that group includes
weeding out criminal elements and seeding potential positive community
change in the area. Weed and Seed groups are eligible for federal
grants, and the local group will apply for funding in the fall.
Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation Director
Mildred Hailey, who is also a key organizer of the Weed and Seed
coalition, and who was recently named Crime Fighter of the Year by the
BPD, introduced the workshop. She said the workshop would “help us in
our community get together and organize so that we can make a
difference…Someone is putting guns in the hands of our babies.”
Robinson told the Gazette that Citizens For Safety’s
focus is exclusively on stemming the distribution of those guns. A
recent US Supreme Court decision overturning a Washington, DCordinance
that essentially banned legal ownership of handguns and, for the first
time, affirmed that the Constitution guarantees an individual’s right
to bear arms, was not discussed at the workshop.
“We are focused on keeping guns out of the hands of
criminals, not keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens,”
she said. “I think the Supreme Court decision allows for common-sense
policies to keep guns out of the hands of kids, criminals and the
mentally ill.”
There was one incident of friction between workshop attendees and the professional advocates who presented at the workshop.
Responding to Rosenthal’s presentation and noting that
some in the room had lost loved ones to gun violence, one meeting
attendee asked him why he had mentioned twice that Massachusettshas the
second-lowest rate of gun fatalities in the US.
“In the future you might want to put a little disclaimer on that,” the attendee said.
Rosenthal said he did not mean to minimize anyone’s
grief, but that the state’s low rate of firearm deaths is evidence “we
do things smarter in Massachusetts.”
Overall, Robinson said, the workshop was a great success
and she has high hopes for the future of Citizens For Safety. “It was
great to see everyone come together with the same focus and the same
goals in mind,” she said.
Jermaine Headlam, a JP-based street worker with the
Boston Centers For Youth and Families who attended the workshop, said
he sees promise in Citizens For Change’s new direction.
“It’s going to be a race to see who really follows
through—who floors it. I think it will work if everyone here comes
through and does what they are clapping about,” he said.
http://jamaicaplaingazette.com/node/2935
