Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 16
This week, Devin and Caitlin talk about unintentional shootings in America... committed by dogs
On this week’s podcast (links below), hosts Devin and Caitlin from GVPedia talk about our new meme with a seemingly silly statistic that illuminates the importance of safe gun storage:
You can listen to the chat via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!
Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us here on the Armed With Reason podcast, brought to you by GVPedia. This week we are going to talk about something that, when you first hear it, you might believe that it is a joke, but in actuality it's not a joke, it's real. A few years ago, we published a meme, and we have recently updated that meme, and we wanted to share a bit of the backstory of that meme. And just to give you some insight. That meme is about the number of dogs that have accidentally shot people. That's what I said. Dogs shooting people.
So to those of you listening, maybe quickly in your head, come up with a guess of how many times this has happened in the past decade. And I have one hint for you. The number is greater than zero. Just in case you are wondering if it's zero. This is not a trick question, this is a legitimate question. So come up with that number. Obviously, it's just for the two of you to know, the two of you, just for you to know. And, if I didn't know the real answer to this, and I had to guess, I would probably say... I don't know what I would say. I guess I would say a handful, maybe 2 or 3, right? Like maybe a dog jumps up on a table, and there's a loaded gun there, and it falls off the table and accidentally shoot someone. Right? But what I'm going to do is pass this along to Devin so that he can answer this very random odd question for us, because now I'm sure that everybody listening to this is super curious as to what the actual number is regarding the number of dogs who have shot people over the past decade. So, Devin, that's the introduction for you, and please enlighten us.
Devin: Yeah. Thank you for the setup to what is not, in fact, a joke. And the actual answer -- and these are the number of confirmed cases, so it could technically be higher -- is that there have been 23 people shot over the past decade by a dog with a gun. And those occurred in 21 incidents, which means that there's two cases where the dog should somehow manage to shoot two people. Now, like the overarching point here is that this number should obviously be zero. Like dogs should not be able to shoot people. It should not technically be possible for the guns themselves to go off if they're bumped by the dog, or the dog steps sideways on the trigger -- like guns aren't supposed to go off. And manufacturers insist that their guns can't go off if that happens. Yet here we are with 23 people shot by dogs over the past decade. And it also should never happen because if a dog's able to fire a gun, it means that the owner of that gun has been grossly irresponsible with it.
You're not supposed to leave loaded guns lying around, regardless of when or where that is. Like, that's Gun Owner Safety 101. You do not leave loaded guns lying around, particularly with the safety off. So there's two ways in which this number should absolutely be zero. But it's not. And this is actually an increase over the previous decade, so we're not the first to look into this question. From 2004 to 2013, there were eight people who had been shot with guns by dogs. And that's now increased in the past decade, from 2014 to 2023 to 21 cases. And sadly, in two of those cases, the person actually died from the gunshot. In both of those cases occurred in 2023. So I'll just let that sink in for a minute.
Caitlin: I know, and I feel bad laughing, right? Because like you just said, two people died from from this. It's just, even as somebody who does work in gun violence prevention -- and sometimes we hear extremely outlandish things -- this to me just really punctuates the need for improvement when it comes to guns and gun storage here in this country. We in Connecticut, where I am located -- over the past couple of years, four or so years, five years actually now -- what's really been a stress here is safe storage due to Ethan's Law and Ethan Song losing his life just as a teenager, based on, a unintentional shooting that happened when he was with a friend and that was from an unsecured weapon.
So obviously, if a dog can shoot a gun we know that opens the door for individuals who shouldn't have access to guns for a myriad of reasons. In particular, children to have access to those guns. So, Devin, let's get into the numbers a bit more. Where exactly do these pups with firearms reside? And why is it that this sort of situation might happen specifically in these places?
Devin: Yeah. So there. Well, oftentimes it might be like, oh, 23 cases over a decade. Like those are just freak accidents that randomly occur. The data is actually not all that random, which is surprising. So, Texas had the most dog shoots person incidents over the past decade with three cases. Indiana, Iowa, Utah, and Wisconsin each had two. So it was weirdly concentrated. Now in these states there is a broad hunting culture, but also there tend to be weak gun laws. In the previous decade, probably to the surprise of nobody, Florida had four of the eight incidents. But in the past decade they've decreased that to one. So I guess there is one trend that's going in Florida's favor. Though it's only one trend. And as alluded to earlier, there is a distinct pattern of these incidents occurring in states with weak gun laws.
So, the Giffords Law Center ranks state or give states a grade from A to F, with A having the strongest gun laws and F having the weakest gun laws for a state. And of the 21 incidents, 11 of them were in states with an F rating and two of them were in states with A ratings. So while there's not enough incidents to provide a clear causal pattern, this is definitely indicative of where people are more likely to leave guns lying around irresponsibly, and those are in states with irresponsible gun laws. To dive a bit more into the data, the victims were overwhelmingly male. Out of the 21 cases, there were just three where a woman was reported shot. And in all three of those cases, the gun owner was a male and present at the time. So all 21 of these cases and 23 people shot it was basically a male gun owner's fault. Unlike most gun violence, which is predominantly committed with handguns, shotguns were fired in ten of the 21 incidents, with another four being hunting rifles. So unlike most gun violence, which again, handgun related, in these cases it's mostly shotguns and hunting rifles. Of the 21 cases, rather unsurprisingly, 11 involve hunting of some type. But that still leaves 10 where it was not hunting related. And two of those cases, the firearm owner was concealed carrying the weapon on them when the dog basically leapt up on them and the gun went off, meaning that they didn't have the safety on or precaution when laying with the dog and just had their gun on them. And in terms of the locations of where these incidents occur there's a pretty even mix. So seven cases occurred in a vehicle -- basically, the dog moving around or leaping up into, say, a truck or a car. Seven of them were outside. Those were typically, in hunting cases. And then there were six that were inside. And the remaining case, there's not sufficient data to determine where that incident occurred as reported. So that just provides a brief overview and, probably a much too deep data dive into a rather bizarre case of American gun exceptionalism.
Caitlin: Yes, this certainly punctuates that for sure. Devin, why do you think it's important to share a seemingly odd statistic, such as these are the number of dogs that have shot people over the past decade.
Devin: Yeah. So it might seem somewhat irrelevant or like, oh, all of these are freak accidents. But they do point to a couple things. First is that yes, these incidents are rare relative to the rest of gun violence. So, our data visualization project that GVPedia just went live with over the past month, and from 2014 to 2023, our data visualization, using data from the Gun Violence Archive, finds 389,000 recorded incidents, in which 167,000 people were killed and 324,000 were injured. Keeping in mind that this data does not include suicides. So compared to 389,000 incidents, 21 cases is not that large. But what's also not all that common, but the gun lobby would like us to believe it is, are good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns, in their nomenclature. So from 2014 to 2022 -- we don't have the data yet for 2023 from the FBI -- the FBI recorded 15 out of 303 cases of active shooter incidents in which a civilian with a gun successfully stopped that incident. So dogs shoot more people than good guys with guns stop active shooters.
Now, when we initially shared this meme with earlier data, there were a number of complaints from the pro-gun side that, Oh, this isn't fair that you're comparing dogs in active shooter incidents; it should be like the overall DGUs (defensive gun use), or like how many dogs stopped active shooters. And it's like, you're kind of missing the point here. Like this is dogs shooting people. Like, I don't know, like that number should be zero. I don't know how much more fair you want us to get here. Like this should be an impossibility, yet it's happening, and it's happening due to irresponsible gun ownership.
And that kind of leads to the other point that I think this highlights is that there is an epidemic of irresponsible gun ownership. I'm fully willing to admit that most gun owners are responsible. Many store their firearms safely, and these types of incidents would not be a possibility. But we also know that there are a lot of children out there who live in homes with unsecured firearms, and carrying around a firearm without the safety on, or just leaving a gun lying around that's loaded with no safety on, that is definitionally irresponsible gun ownership. Like period. And the numbers of children and teenagers and even adults who are killed or injured with unsecured firearms is vastly more than these 21 cases. And these cases, which are by definition absurd serve to highlight the problems here with secure firearm storage. And I think it's important to highlight that an impossibility is happening, and that one conclusion that can be drawn from here is that like, look, if your dog can be in a position to fire a gun you are not being responsible with that gun; and you need to take action to make sure that firearm is secure. In the very rare case that a dog brushes up against it and sets the gun off, or more likely, the child gets a hold of the gun. And we know all too often, sadly, that that leads to tragic circumstances. So from this, let there be a crystal clear message that you need to securely store your firearms, and safe storage is not a joke. And if this number of dogs with guns can help highlight that point with absurdity, like, then it's accomplished its goal. Securely store your firearms.
Caitlin: Yeah, I think it also draws attention to the false sense of security that the gun manufacturers lead a lot of gun owners into, right? This space where this gun isn't going to just randomly fire, and I don't have to worry about accidental shootings because it's been designed, and tested, and been proven that it's not as fragile as obviously it's proven to be -- if a dog, you know who's excited, your golden retriever is excited to see you when you come home from work and jumps up on you to give you a greeting, and the the gun in your pocket goes off. That obviously shows that the gun manufacturers, while they may be parading a sense of security out to those people who are purchasing their guns, it's obviously not nearly as strong as they would like you to think it is.
Devin: Yeah, and it points to like two fact. Guns are not toys. Like, if it goes off it can have devastating impacts even if somebody survives the case. And also that guns are not magic wands that you can just carry about and are inert until you decide to pull the trigger. Somebody else can pull the trigger, somebody can bump into it. And while firearm manufacturers tend to -- and I've seen this from pro-gun advocates as well -- like, Oh, like children can never pull the trigger of the gun, like they don't have the pull weight. Yes they do. Like, this has been proven by studies. And yeah, if you take the gun manufacturers at the word like the gun shouldn't go off if the dog brushes or like pushes on the trigger sideways, or bumps into the gun and the gun falls down. Like guns aren't supposed to go off with that, but they do. And that just underlines the lack of safety with them.
And also, like I can imagine many gun owners thinking like, Oh, this can never happen to me, like those idiots are like a sideshow, like it's just a freak accident, and so forth. But I guarantee you, every single person who is shot by a dog with a gun did not think it would happen to them. And that's the case in the far more frequent circumstances where a child gets a hold of a gun or like the gun goes off unintentionally in some form, like nobody thinks that it's going to happen to them. Because if they did think it would happen to them, they wouldn't have the gun in that situation. But they did. And it did happen. So it should serve as a warning that each time you have an unsecured firearm out there, you are running a risk. And it might be the lowest risk of a dog shooting you or some other pet.
As a as a brief side note, there seems to be only one case in the past two decades where a cat shot someone. So if you're deciding on pets based on how often they shoot people, cats are safer than dogs, and bunnies and tortoises are probably even safer than that. But like, yes, those are abnormal circumstances, but children getting ahold of guns and those guns going off are not abnormal. And as a responsible gun owner, it's your duty to make sure those cases never have the possibility of happening. And then even beyond that, there's the even more common circumstance of firearms being stolen. With more than 200,000 cases each year reported stolen; and estimates run up to 380,000 guns a year stolen. And that's very frequently due to irresponsible storage practices -- either just leaving it in the car... on like the passenger seat, or in a glove box, or something like that where it's easy access; or leaving firearms lying around the home that are easy access. Like not safely storing guns has a multitude of consequences. And like this absurd (dog) statistic just highlights the tip of that much larger iceberg.
Caitlin: Yeah. An important note about children and them accessing weapons -- and just a graphic content warning for anybody here listening before I proceed. In a conversation I had with an emergency room doctor years ago who worked in a city, he explained some of the gunshot wounds he was seeing, particularly on younger children. The theory being that because children don't have the ability to use like their index finger to pull the trigger, they tend to want to use their thumbs. And so to do that, knowing that the strength you have in your thumb, but to do that successfully you turn the gun towards you. Because your hand, you just can't manipulate your hand properly to be able to pull the trigger unless the gun is turned in your direction. So I remember learning that, and that was before I was a mom. But now, especially as a mom, it's just horrifying in many ways because... I guess we can argue like, Oh kids aren't strong enough to do that. But the numbers don't lie, right? The emergency room doctors who see these kids don't lie. I mean, some of these kids are very, very young, so it's obviously happening. And the kids obviously can figure out how to do it.
Devin: Yeah. And I think that's one of the, why there's that myth out there that children can't pull the trigger because people think like, Oh, it's just the trigger finger. And it's like, no, for your kids it's going to be the thumbs or the entire hand, or feet, or like anything else. Like if you've seen babies play at all, it's like something's going in their mouth, or like their feet are above their head, and just pushing/pulling on everything that they have access to. And it does not take much for just one wrong movement with an unsecured firearm to produce deadly results. And that's just for the youngest cohort. And then once you're getting into the five, six-year-old and above range, they definitely do have the power with just their fingers to pull the trigger.
Caitlin: Right? Absolutely. All right. Well, we can move on from that seemingly silly but actually very serious story about how many shootings there have been by dogs in the past decade. By the way, look out for our new updated meme -- we will have it on our social media, and feel free to share it with anybody that you would like to.
But one other thing that we wanted to cover this week was we were grateful to learn that Devin was cited by the New Orleans Police Deputy Superintendent Lawrence Dupree, while he was giving testimony in opposition to permitless carry. Although unfortunately this has passed both the Louisiana House and Senate and will be signed into law. But, Devin, can you tell us what first what GVPedia found, which was cited by the Deputy Superintendent? And also, even though permit lists carry will unfortunately become law in Louisiana, just like it has become law in others, why do you believe it's important to still fight to the bitter end, to work against this becoming law?
Devin: Yeah. So the statistic that the police chief cited was a study that we conducted a couple years ago on permitless carry states that had at least three years of data after they passed the law. And we went ahead and put the cutoff point at that period of 2019, because in 2020, as we all know, the pandemic happened and gun violence statistics just went crazy. And when conducting studies, you want to make sure that there weren't major external events that could explain the rise and fall of gun violence. And in 2020, we had a massive event like that. Now we will plan on updating the study in the next couple of years once more data from more recent states that have passed permitless carry arrives from the CDC. But as of now, the states that we have when we conducted the study, we found that they had a 22% increase in gun homicides in the three years after they passed the law. And that was compared to a 10% increase in gun homicides for the country during those time periods. And while we didn't control for a large variety of factors or tried to prove causality with it, it's definitely indicative that, at the very least, permitless carry is not making people safer, which is one of the primary arguments pushed by the pro-gun side in favor of passing those laws. They feel that any barrier --in terms of barriers they mean training and actually having undergoing a background check and stuff like that -- are too much, and that you want guns to be able go into people's hands as quickly as possible with basically no accountability. And that unfortunately seems to have tragic consequences. And the data, while for any one particular state might jump around, when you're looking at a dozen or so states the trend lines become fairly clear. And we had published that two years ago. We got into a back-and-forth with John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center, who was putting out, honestly, bogus data trying to convince states to pass the laws. Unfortunately, several of those states did pass those laws, and it looks like Louisiana is going to follow suit as well.
And, while it might seem relatively hopeless, particularly in deep red states -- and basically just a matter of time until all of the deep red states have some form of permitless carry -- we need to look at the future and what sort of message it sends if we just don't say anything and let the inevitable happen. Like, even if it is inevitable, it's still important to put up a firm stand and say, like, these laws are dangerous, they're encouraging irresponsible gun ownership, and they very likely cost lives. And having that record to when those states may eventually return to a saner state of being and re-look at those laws and recognize that it was a mistake. And we need to have the record now so that in the future people can point back to it and say, Look, we brought up these warnings. This happened. It was a mistake. It's not too late. Well, it's unfortunately too late for many people, but it's better now than never to repeal these laws. And so when fighting against these, like, even if it seems hopeless in the near term, recognize that the country and the states are not always going to be like this. And we need to help set the groundwork and framework for a better future. And doing that basically requires fighting to the bitter end, even if, you know, in the end that in this particular case you're going to lose.
Caitlin: Yeah, that's a really great point. Even when these efforts seem futile, history has shown us that speaking the truth never goes completely unnoticed. So whether it makes an impact the day you say it, or a month later, or a year later, or a decade later, or sometimes, as we've seen 100 years later, it still matters. And I think that's one of the most important pieces about what we do here at GVPedia is scraping up sometimes really random bits of information, typically not about dogs, but sometimes, and getting them to the right people who are sitting in the right committee meetings, who are writing the right testimony, speaking the right testimony, meeting with the right people, educating folks, advocating for a variety of different laws, and knowing that the movement is better than it was before by empowering people with those numbers and the statistics. Because again, as much as the the gun lobby and gun manufacturers would like us to think that certain statistics aren't real and that math isn't a thing, thankfully there are enough people in this country who know better than that.
Devin: Yeah. And kind of on that point as well, like in several of these states, and like Louisiana successfully held off permitless carry for a number of years. And so merely by delaying what seems likely inevitable, they're still saving lives there. And it also helps plant the seed of doubt for some of the lawmakers who are doing this later. And I remember when advocating against permitless carry in Oklahoma, and some of the Republican lawmakers who are very staunchly Republican, and going to their offices, and oftentimes they'd be like... Yeah, like, we're with you, like, this is nuts. But if it reaches the floor, we have to vote for it because they're scared of the power of the gun lobby and gun manufacturers. And I think that's probably more common than not. There's only an extreme few people out there who think that permitless carry is a good idea. The rest are just frightened and don't care enough currently to oppose it. And this shows up in polls all the time, like even in staunch red Oklahoma. We were going to do a ballot initiative to repeal permitless carry. Unfortunately, that got halted by the pandemic and not being able to see people in person. And so it was terribly unfortunate timing, but polls were showing 70, 80 plus percent of Oklahomans oppose permitless carry. And this is in a state where every single county, sub-county, and so forth basically went for Donald Trump in both elections. Like, our state house is a super super majority of Republicans, basically. There have even been bills to make it a requirement that if you were of age to potentially serve in the militia, that you'd be required to own an AR-15. That's right. Oklahoma is closer to mandating AR-15 ownership than banning assault weapons. So that's where the state is.
And yet there's still a lot of people who recognize that this is crazy, and just putting your flag in the ground and standing up and being the one to say that, yes, this is crazy, the data rejects it, common sense rejects it, it will be noticed. Maybe not by enough people now, but in the future, like, definitely. And we need to start building those sort of time capsules, as it were, across the country to prepare for saner times because like, even if things get worse in the near term, looking at the presidential elections this year, shudder. Like, it won't always be this bad. And if it always is this bad, well, you didn't make things worse. And, like, standing up is important for building the future that we want to see. And data is a critical way of doing that. Combining that with personal stories is the most effective way of persuading people.
Caitlin: Right. Hopefully time will tell us, show us that these laws were a terrible idea to begin with. They will eventually be seen as antiquated and in some ways probably barbaric because they lead to people being murdered. And we will look back on them and think, Wow, I can't believe these used to be on the books, the keywords they're being "used to." So hopefully that is much sooner than later.
But I am going to wrap us up here with just a reminder to everybody listening. Devin already brought it up at one point in this episode, but we do have our data visualization that is out. It is on our website, and we have been able to show it to a variety of folks and organizations over the past couple of weeks, and showed them how this tool can be used to help them tell a story with the data that we have in the data visualization, which is a decade's worth of data from the Gun Violence Archive. So we encourage anybody who is interested in looking at the maps, or the fact sheets, graphs, the charts, all the good stuff that's there to please do so. And of course, as always, please reach out to us if you have any questions, or you want us to jump on a zoom and go over some of the nuances of this with you and the folks that you volunteer with or work with. We know that it is a very useful tool, but it only does us so much good if we know that and just us. So the more people that we can empower to use it, the better it will be for everybody. All right, Devin, any final thoughts for us here today?
Devin: Not particularly. Just if you haven't already subscribed to our Substack -- armedwithreason.substack.com -- and check out the data visualization tool at dataviz.gvpedia.org, and thank you for listening.
Caitlin: The end of this always seems like a sales pitch, but I guess that's important as a nonprofit organization.
Devin: Yeah. And lock up your guns! Don't let dogs shoot people.
Caitlin: Yes, please. Yes. We love dogs, right? Don't anyone get any bad negative ideas about how we feel about dogs. But yes, if you have your guns secured, then we don't have to worry about bad things happening when your dogs are around. All right, Devin, thanks for joining me today. I'll see you soon.
Devin: See you.
Dog image by sianbuckler from Pixabay.