H&R Block Bows to Grabbers (Two Bucket Vomit Alert)

Washington, D.C.-In a stunning defeat for the gun lobby, H&R Block, the nation's largest tax preparation firm, today severed a controversial marketing agreement it had entered into with the National Rifle Association (NRA). H&R Block's withdrawal from the program came as a result of widespread protests spearheaded by the Alliance for Justice's Gun Industry Watch, and supported by the Million Mom March united with the Brady Campaign and the Mid-Atlantic Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence.

"Let this send a loud message to other corporate partners of the NRA," said Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron. "If you support the NRA, we will work to make sure that your employees, customers, and all of your stakeholders know that you support an extremist gun lobby that is out of step with mainstream America."

"The termination of this agreement is a tremendous victory for everyone who was outraged that a reputable business like H&R Block would support an extremist organization like the NRA," said Michael D. Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence united with the Million Mom March. "Marketing your products to a specific group of people is an accepted business practice, but H&R Block crossed the line when it agreed to pay royalties to the NRA."

"Corporations doing business with the NRA should be very concerned by the large efforts of hundreds of gun safety activists that came out in defiance of H&R Block's agreement with the NRA," said Bryan Miller of the Mid-Atlantic Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence.

H&R Block had entered into an agreement with a marketing company called Memberdrive to market its products and services to NRA members. However, the agreement also provided for "royalties" paid by H&R Block, through Memberdrive, to the NRA. According an H&R Block advertisement that ran in the March issue of America's First Freedom, the NRA's magazine, H&R Block "will make a contribution to the NRA for every Member who becomes a new customer." Memberdrive's Senior Vice President of Marketing is Susan LaPierre, wife of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.

Gun Industry Watch, a student network, first exposed the agreement in late February, staging a protest outside of an H&R Block outlet in Washington, DC, and planning dozens more. Over the past two weeks, thousands of activists including those from the Million Mom March and the Brady Campaign joined with Gun Industry Watch and called, faxed and e-mailed H&R Block to express their objections to this agreement and to educate the company on the extremist positions that the NRA has taken in the past. With Gun Industry Watch recruiting students, Million Mom March recruiting its members and support from the Mid-Atlantic Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, protests of H&R Block offices in more than 50 cities had been planned for mid-March. These protests have now been called off.

"This victory shows the power of the gun control movement's grassroots," said Aron. "When you engage students and moms together, it's a potent combination."

"H&R Block now understands that, by areeing to this royalty scheme, it was furthering the reckless political agenda of the NRA's leadership," said Mr. Barnes. "Congratulations to Gun Industry Watch and to all of our Million Mom March activists and members for making their voices heard."

If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from Gun Industry Watch, go to http://www.GunIndustryWatch.org/mailer/remove.cfm?ID=915&Email=asa66@chart er.net

I just tried to post this but either FR has a malefaction or a new posting technique had gotten beyond me. Anyway there was no post option. Here is an article you will all probably enjoy.

Statistical Malpractice – 'Firearm Availability' and Violence

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Part I: Politics or Science?

"There is a worrying trend in academic medicine which equates statistics with science, and sophistication in quantitative procedure with research excellence. The corollary of this trend is a tendency to look for answers to medical problems from people with expertise in mathematical manipulation and information technology, rather than from people with an understanding of disease and its causes.

"Epidemiology [is a] main culprit, because statistical malpractice typically occurs when complex analytical techniques are combined with large data sets. The mystique of mathematics blended with the bewildering intricacies of big numbers makes a potent cocktail. ..." – Bruce G. Charlton, M.D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996

Once again, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) and the Violence Policy Center (VPC), two strident gun control organizations, have entered the gun and violence debate with renewed vigor.

You already know about AGS using the 9-11 tragedy to push its gun control agenda using the disingenuous cliché of "closing the gun show loophole." (1)

Needless to say, AGS continues to neglect the fact that the government's National Institute of Justice 1997 study "Homicide in Eight U.S. Cities" has shown that less than 2 percent of criminals obtain their illegally-possessed firearms from gun shows. (2,3)

Moreover, AGS has claimed it has found a link between terrorism and gun shows. The link has been shown to be fully immersed in deception, used, once again, to exploit the 9-11 tragedy to further push its gun control agenda.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has correctly tagged AGS "an anti-gun lobbying group with no members, no gun safety programs, and now, no credibility." (4)

Enter the VPC, citing a Harvard School of Public Health study published in the February 2002 issue of the Journal of Trauma. (5) According to the VPC's interpretation of that study, "The elevated rate of violent death among children in high gun ownership states cannot be explained by differences in state levels of poverty, education, or urbanization." (6) [Emphasis added.]

The authors of the study did not put it quite so bluntly; they knew better. Yet, according to the abstract of the study, they assert:

"A statistically significant association exists between gun availability and the rates of unintentional firearm deaths, homicides, and suicides. The elevated rates of suicide and homicide among children living in states with more guns is not entirely explained by a state's poverty, education, or urbanization and is driven by lethal firearm violence, not by lethal nonfirearm violence." (5) [Emphasis added.]

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton once rhetorically explained that no one could prove that he had ever established administration policy based "solely" on the basis of campaign contributions, although in the case of Red China, the communist Chinese got their share of high-tech, strategic, missile-launching technology to pose a new threat to the U.S.

In the authors' abstract, the words "not entirely" become the key to understanding the pre-ordained drift of their gun control agenda and the expected, result-oriented conclusions. The published study, indeed, is the typical, hackneyed public health, result-oriented gun research repeatedly published in the medical literature claiming that "gun availability is responsible for firearm violence."

Thus, perhaps, we should analyze further the meaning of the words "not entirely." What follows is a preliminary critique of the study while the primary, raw data is requested from the authors for further analysis.

According to the study, the five states with the highest gun ownership – Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia – were more likely to have children dying from unintentional firearm injury (gun accidents), suicide (with or without firearms) and homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership – Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware.

Why more western states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Utah, Nebraska, Alaska, etc., that have relatively "easy availability" have low firearm death rates for children is left unexplained.

In fact, the whole study revolves around using the phraseology "not entirely" to exclude the much more important reasons for violence with or without firearms: the levels of poverty and education, not to mention the related cultural factors and the utter breakdown of the family in those states by welfare and other government policies. (7)

I will explain, but before I do so, allow me to expound on two themes revolving around the subject of this study and make a couple of observations – observations that were overlooked by the public health researchers and their consorts at the VPC.

Mass Shooting Incidents

Three of the most notable mass shootings of the last several years occurred in the aforementioned states. Two of them, although they were adult, workplace shootings, occurred in Hawaii and Massachusetts, two of the states with draconian gun control laws and less "availability of firearms."

Likewise, several mass shootings, adult workplace and children school incidents, have taken place in California, despite the stringent gun control laws and the supposedly less "availability of firearms" in that state.

The Xerox workplace incident in Honolulu, Hawaii (Nov. 2, 1999), the San Diego, Calif., Santana School shooting (March 5, 2001) and the Wakefield, Mass., incident of Dec. 26, 2000, all took place in states with very restrictive gun control laws, where guns should have been less "available."

School shootings, of course, can take place in states where firearms are more available to law-abiding citizens. And when they do, armed, law-abiding Americans can respond and stop the shooting before more innocent victims are robbed of their lives.

This was the case in 1998 in Pearl, Miss., a state cited in the study, when a schoolteacher used his firearm to stop a school shooting by a student. Lives were thus saved. More recently, in Virginia, two law school students overpowered and subdued a gunman using their own weapons.

The point is that, as usual, the public health researchers ignored the beneficial aspects of gun ownership and concentrated only in obtaining supporting evidence for their long-known thesis that firearm availability is responsible for violence in our society.

The fact is that only the law-abiding obey the law, criminals do not. When the government passes restrictive gun laws, those laws interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens. Yet they do not stop criminals (or the mentally deranged) bent on breaking them.

While neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law has been associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed carry gun laws cut death rates from public, multiple shootings (e.g., those that took place in schools in San Diego, Pearl, Miss., and Littleton, Colo.) by an amazing 69 percent, according to Prof. John Lott, formerly of Yale University.

Television and Media Violence and Juvenile Delinquency

Another observation virtually ignored by the authors of the study, as well as their promoters at the VPC, is the effect of television and media violence on juvenile delinquency.

It should be of interest to the reader to learn that some of the most important, breakthrough research papers on this topic first appeared in the 1970s and '80s. The pioneering research was conducted and the paper written by Dr. Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Dr. Centerwall's studies found that homicide rates in Canada were not related to easy gun availability by ordinary citizens, as he had expected, but to criminal behavior associated with watching television.

He found that homicide rates, not only in Canada but also in the U.S. and South Africa, soared 10 to 15 years after the introduction of television in those countries. In the U.S., there was an actual doubling of homicide rates after the introduction of television.

Moreover, Dr. Centerwall noted that up to half of all homicides, rapes and violent assaults in the U.S. were directly attributed to violence on television. And that was when violence on TV was nothing compared to the rampant and graphic violence depicted today in the movies and on TV.

Moreover, Dr. Centerwall showed with elegant data that reducing gun availability did not reduce Canadian homicides. Homicide rates in Vancouver, for example, were lower before the gun control laws were passed in Canada, and in fact rose after the laws were passed. The Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after the institution of the 1977 Canadian gun laws.

This valuable research, though, was not made widely available and was virtually consigned to the "memory hole" of the public health establishment. Fortunately, Dr. Centerwall 's research pointing to the effects of television violence affecting homicide rates has been made available. (8)

In the summer of 2000, the media, including medical journalists, focused their attention on the associations of violence in television, music, video games and movies to violent behavior in children and adolescents.

To this end, a consensus statement of experts released on July 26 and sponsored by the AMA and other medical groups proclaimed, "At this time, well over 1,000 studies – including reports from the surgeon general's office, the National Institute of Mental Health and numerous studies conducted by leading figures within our medical and public health organizations – point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children."

Moreover, the report continued, "Its effects are measurable and long-lasting ... prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life." (8)

Why is all this background information being discussed about television violence and crime – virtually, life imitating art? Because, interestingly enough, the authors of the Journal of Trauma study ignored relevant and important data impacting directly on their research.

Let us look at Table 1. As clearly shown in this table compiled from government statistics (1994), it turns out that, among other factors, students in the "high levels of juvenile violence" states not only watch more television (24.2 percent) than those in the "low levels of juvenile violence" states (19.8 percent) but also do "less reading on their own time almost every day (39.6 percent vs. 44.2 percent)." (9)

We will be looking at the factors that Miller et al. claim were "not entirely" responsible for the high rates of unintentional firearm injury, homicide, suicide and overall violence in the mostly southern states. Incidentally, rather than using the biased, VPC shibboleths "highest" or "lowest gun ownership states," I have used the more objective terminology, "high" and "low levels of juvenile violence" states, for the purpose of this critique.

On Feb. 28, 2002, I wrote Dr. Matthew Miller, the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Trauma, and requested that he kindly supply me with the primary, raw data which he and his associates used in reaching their conclusions. (10)

As of the time of this submission, March 11, 2002, I had not received an answer to my request. Hopefully, I will conclude with Part II of this critical essay when I have had a chance to fully analyze that data. Stay tuned!

Sign the H&R Block petition link

From: KABA

Time to Put H&R Block on Notice
Tax Service Company Caves-in to Anti-Gun-Rights Extremists
March 13, 2002

Wide distribution permitted and encouraged.

This is not about the NRA. Even if you are one of those gun-rights activists who dislike the NRA, believing them to be too compromising, you need to take action on this.

This about businesses caving in to the political agenda of the anti-gun zealots at the Brady Campaign, Gun Industry Watch and others.

If we let this stand unpunished, more businesses will bow to the extremists.

The facts: H&R Block had an agreement with an organization called Memberdrive. Memberdrive made an agreement with the NRA by which the NRA got a royalty for each member who used H&R Block. The anti-gun-rights extremists threatened protests this Saturday in numerous cities. H&R Block caved, severing the deal.

See the joint Brady Campaign, Gun Industry Watch press release about the cave-in here. See the H&R Block letter announcing the cave-in to Brady here.

Action step 1: Sign the online petition I have created at link.

Action step 2: Write a letter to Linda McDougall, H&R Block V.P. of Communications (who wrote to Brady about the cave-in), telling her that H&R Block has lost your business. Fax or snail mail this to her – email gets ignored, but paper doesn’t, so if you email her, send paper too. A phone call wouldn’t hurt either. (My letter to Ms. McDougall is below.)

Whatever you do: keep it polite but firm, clean but frank.

Linda McDougall
V.P. Communications
H&R Block
4400 Main Street
Kansas City, MO 64111
Phone: 816-932-7542
Fax: 816-753-8628
Email: lmcdougall@hrblock.com

Action step 3: Go to your yellow pages. Call your local H&R Block branch and explain that you will not give it business because of this decision by headquarters.

Action step 4: A) If H&R Block already is doing your taxes – especially if you gave it business because of this deal – stop the process. Explain to your representative that you have decided to take your business elsewhere because of H&R Block’s decision. B) If you already have paid for these services, demand a refund – after all, now that H&R Block has changed the situation, you turned over your money under false pretenses.

[snipped by-line and letter]

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