David Keene is the president of the National Rifleman’s Association. He is the former chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Harvard Political Review: The National Rifleman’s Association has placed a significant amount of blame for gun violence on what executive vice president Wayne LaPierre has called “a callous, corrupt, and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence.” Since many of the same video games and movies popular in the U.S. are also popular in Europe, where there are much lower rates of gun violence than in the U.S, what do you think accounts for this difference?
David Keene: It’s due to cultural difference, largely. Nevertheless, the kinds of people that can be influenced by these entertainments are the same here as in Europe, which we have seen in the example of individuals perpetrating the same kinds of mass violence that we saw at Newtown in places like Norway or Great Britain. These individuals tend to be severely mentally ill, and whether or not they have been picked up by the system before or after they engage in violence is not really the relevant point, as they are people with serious problems.
That is, most people can enjoy these games without impact whatsoever. But there are some who are on the edge for whom they do have an effect. If we want to get to the source of the problem, the kinds of mass shootings that took place in Newtown are invariably not perpetrated by criminals; they are perpetrated by people who are severely mentally ill.
We dismantled our mental health care system in this country, so that in every state in the union there are more severely mentally ill people in our prisons than there are in all of our public and private hospitals. We are going to have to put that system back together; we are going to have to discover ways in which you can deal with these people.
HPR: One of the solutions proposed in regards to reducing gun violence has been a ban on semi-automatic or large-capacity-magazine weapons. Generally speaking, your organization has stood against banning these weapons while citing the need for self-defense. How do you explain that?
DK: It is about more than self-defense. The Supreme Court in the D.C. v. Heller decision said that while the Second Amendment could be subject to reasonable restrictions just like the First Amendment, one of the things you can not do is ban a firearm that is widely owned and commonly used for legal purposes. There are over four million AR15s, the leading so-called assault weapon, in private hands in this country. These are the guns most used in training and most used in competition. They are the guns most used for hunting as well as for home protection. Unless the Supreme Court changes its decision, I would suspect any ban would be ruled unconstitutional.
Such bans are simply feel-good measures. They are bans based on cosmetics. The current legislation that Senator Diane Feinstein of California is proposing bans 157 different firearms. You know where they came up with those? They literally went through gun catalogs and said, “These ones should be banned,” and, “These ones shouldn’t.” The point is, Feinstein wants to ban a rifle that has a pistol grip but not the same rifle that does not have a pistol grip—a difference that is purely cosmetic. The question is, if somebody faces you with a semi-automatic rifle, do you care if it has a pistol grip or not? The answer is, you don’t.
HPR: Since your organization lobbied Congress to restrict funding for gun violence research within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), funding for such research has dropped 96 percent. Was this your association’s intention?
DK: We did not ban research. What we did was we created an appropriations rider that prevents such funds from being used for lobbying or promulgating gun control, because this is not research. The CDC was using its funding as advocacy money for gun control. There is plenty of research that is going on and that has already taken place regarding gun control, but the point is that such funding cannot be used for lobbying, which government officials are not supposed to do anyway as employees of the government.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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