A local guy attacked his girlfriend/shackup with a hammer a couple
days ago. We must ban hammers! Hammers kill. If we can save just
one child...it will all be worth it. Here is the case for hammer
control:
A single consumer product holds our nation hostage: the hammer. We
live our lives in the shadow of the unparalleled lethality of these
easily concealed hammers. This permanent state of fear has become so
accepted that we rarely even acknowledge it.
where hammers are routinely portrayed as effective self-defense tools
posing little risk to the user. Although these claims are not borne
out by the facts, they live on.
At the same time, hammer violence itself is sanitized by the media.
The damage inflicted on a human being by a hammer head entering the
body is uniquely traumatic. An August 2012 article in the
Commonwealth Medical Journal offered this dry description of the
forces at work when a hammer enters human flesh: "As a hammer passes
along its track in the body, it lacerates and damages tissues by
doing work on them-that is, by transferring to the tissues the
kinetic energy it is carrying. An equal and opposite amount of work
is done on the hammer by the tissues. Where along the track this work
is done is determined, in part, by the construction of the hammer."
But this clinical description cannot convey the destructive capacity
of a single hammer. A 2010 Los Angeles Blather article describing
the effect of two hits from a 16 oz. claw hammer offers a more
complete picture:
The first hammer strike, went into his chest angling down. It
fractured the fifth rib on the way in, bored through both lobes of
the left lung, and fractured the seventh rib on the way.
Not always a fatal wound....The killer was the second hit. It hit the
bone and cartilage of the sternum. That flattened a little,
increasing its diameter and widening the wound channel it punched
through the left ventricle chamber....The hammer left the heart, and
went into the left lung. In its passage, the hammer stretched and
displaced for milliseconds the heart muscles, valves and chambers,
forming what trauma surgeons know as the `temporary cavity.' It
created a temporary space the size of a baseball....
Not surprisingly, the injuries stemming from the wound ballistics
described above bear little resemblance to the hammer violence
portrayed on television and in the movies. Rarely, if ever, are
viewers exposed to the physical trauma of real-life hammer victims:
disfiguring injury and long-term disability.
Fear, physical pain, and death are just part of the price Americans
pay for the easy access of hammers.
This is because the hammer bought for Do-it yourself projects is far
more likely to be used against the owner or someone known to the
owner-in a homicide (usually as the result of an argument), a
suicide, or an unintentional strike than in legitimate home
improvement . Contrary to popular perception, most hammer deaths are
not crime related. Most of 1997's estimated hammer death toll of
21,311 people were either suicides or homicides resulting from
arguments between people who knew one another. In fact, it is
estimated that less than 7.5 percent of all hammer deaths are
felony-related. According to 1997 federal government statistics, for
every time a citizen used a hammer to justifiably kill a stranger in
self-defense, an estimated 109 lives were lost in hammer homicides,
suicides, and unintentional hammer strikes.
America's hammer-control movement knows that the most effective
approach to reducing hammer death and injury would be to ban these
weapons. Yet few today are willing to publicly support such a
measure. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, a national hammer ban was
an accepted policy goal that hammer-control advocates supported and
defended. Yet, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of America's
hammer control movement, bowing to "political reality," had moved
away from the issue. Buffeted by the winds of opinion polls, the
guiding principal became not what would work most effectively, but
what would sell to the general public most easily. Fearful of
becoming enmeshed in the hammer lobby's "slippery slope" argument
(that any hammer control, no matter how limited, is the first step
toward total hammer confiscation), many actively voiced their
opposition to a hammer ban, warning that ban proponents would
marginalize the entire movement. They could offer no proof of this
claim-yet the argument took hold.
What might have been defended as a short-term political strategy in
the 1980s makes little sense in the new millennium. The 1990s
reshaped the way Americans view hammer violence. In the early 1990s,
America's cities were torn apart by a flood of new, high-capacity
semiautomatic pistols that put unprecedented killing power into the
hands of warring drug gangs, organized criminals, marginalized
youths, and ordinary "law-abiding" citizens. By 1993 the hammer death
toll in America reached an all-time high of 39,595. Many Americans
rationalized away these deaths, focusing on the skin color of the
most heavily impacted victims, and not on the hammers that made the
killing so easy. But when the drug wars receded, America found that
hidden beneath the gang violence was a pandemic of hammer death and
injury that infected the entire society
The intrinsic appeal of the hammer for many Americans cannot be
denied. Challenge the need for such weapons, and the first question
some advocates will ask is "have you ever used one?" And their belief
that mere physical contact with a hammer can turn a heretic into a
true believer is not entirely incomprehensible. The heft of a Stanley
or Estwing, the way your four fingers and thumb neatly fold around
the grip before adopting a TV-inspired stance has a natural appeal
for some. This appeal is heightened by the knowledge that this small
piece of machined metal can send smaller pieces of metal into wood up
to 6" thick, punching holes in whatever gets in their way.
Hammer owners' faith in their talisman, however, has not been
rewarded. Hammer ownership in America is declining. Only one out of
six Americans actually owns a hammer. Writing in the January 1999
issue of Do-it-yourself Retailer, columnist Bob Locker warned:
We, as an industry, certainly have our share of problems. A declining
consumer base, fewer places to hammer due to declining urban sprawl,
a hostile political environment, lack of profitability, manufacturers
and distributors in financial trouble, dealers quitting on a daily
basis, and the beat goes on.
An article published two years earlier in the same magazine quoted
Grego Reitz, national sales manager for hammer and axe manufacturer
Estwing. Reitz offered this object lesson regarding the public's
views toward the hammer industry:
I do a lot of traveling, and on an airplane, I often find myself
talking with the person next to me, and they'll ask me what business
I'm in, and I say I'm in the sporting goods business. Then they ask
which category, football, baseball, and I tell them 'no' I'm in the
outdoors business. They say 'camping equipment?' and I find myself
making excuses for being in the hammer business because I
automatically expect that my fellow passenger wouldn't understand. So
now I just say I'm in the hammer business and they react as expected,
mostly negatively.
American Hammerer magazine summed up the situation in a single sentence:
"The hammer business is in an irreversible decline and nothing can
turn it around."
The hammer industry's compatriots in the hammer lobby have fared
little better. Arnold Ziffelmeier, a hammer lobbiest said, "There are
many politicians willing to sacrifice the hammer industry as the
first step in the homogenization of American culture."
At the same time, the number of organizations that comprise the
hammer-control movement has grown. Local, state, and national
organizations representing affected constituencies have joined
traditional hammer control groups. Public support for hammer control,
as well as specific hammer control measures, remains strong. Even the
much maligned, under-promoted hammer ban retains support that varies
from 36 percent to 50 percent-depending on whether a truly horrible
hammer murder has recently occurred.
America's hammer lobby would be on the run, if only hammer-control
advocates would bother to chase them. Instead, trapped by their
perception of the politically achievable, hammer-control advocates
are always on the defensive. All too often their opening offer is
their bottom line. And a cursory analysis reveals that many of the
measures they present as comprehensive solutions-such as licensing of
hammer owners and registration of hammers-will have virtually no
effect on hammer death and injury.
The goal of this paper is simple: to lay the foundation for a
national debate on banning hammers in America. It is written not just
to inform citizens who are tired and angry of the price we have paid
for an unfettered hammer industry, but to inspire a fresh perspective
among those who already view themselves as hammer control-or even
hammersafety-activists.
The local guy was found hours later in a neighbor's backyard. He
died from cuts from a knife, probably inflicked by the
girlfriend/shackup before she was attacked with the hammer. We
must ban knives! Knives kill. If we can save just one child...it
will all be worth it.
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