Imagine three out of every 10 Americans owned a grizzly bear.
Not as pets. As protection.
We’d share sidewalks with grim-faced men leading their bears by a leash. Stores would have signs reminding patrons not to bring bears inside. Those that didn’t would have many frightened customers trying to evade the enormous beast blocking the aisles.
The leading cause of preventable death for Alabama children is guns.
Let me say that again in active voice.
Guns kill Alabama kids more than anything else we can prevent.
And we refuse to act.
We had just stepped into the makeup store when people began running. You could see them through the entrance, in groups of five and six, passing by every second, racing from the mall walkways into a nearby Nordstrom.
I couldn’t tell what was happening. Was the mall closing? Was there some flash sale taking place?
Then the metal gate crashed over the Nordstrom entrance. Then the employees in our store ordered everyone to stay put as they pulled gates across the front of the entrance.
Back in July, I wrote about a prefiled bill that would allow the governor and attorney general to appoint interim police chiefs for cities, effectively allowing the state to take over their police departments.
The bill from Sen. Will Barfoot (R-Pike Road) doesn’t name Montgomery explicitly. But lawmakers have signaled that’s who they have in mind.
Rep. Kenyatté Hassell’s bill requiring permits for assault weapons stopped me.
Not because there’s anything unusual or objectionable about the legislation. Instead, it was how it laid out the damage a modern, legal firearm can do.
Take the bill’s definition of “assault rifle.” At base, it’s a semi-automatic gun that can accept a detachable magazine. We should all be familiar with that. AR-15-type rifles can fire at least 30 rounds a minute. With training or weapon modifications, that number can go higher.
Gun violence is falling at a historic rate for the second year in a row after surging nearly 30 percent during former President Donald Trump’s final year in office. However, rather than build on the success of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act by passing stronger gun laws and increasing investments in the root causes of violence, far-right extremists are attempting to defund federal law enforcement and invalidate state gun laws that save lives. Their radical policy agenda would make the country less safe by making it easier for people who want to commit violence to carry guns and harder for law enforcement to solve violent crimes.
Starting in July 2024, California will be the first state to charge an excise tax on guns and ammunition. The new tax – an 11% levy on each sale – will come on top of federal excise taxes of 10% or 11% for firearms and California’s 6% sales tax.
The National Rifle Association has characterized California’s Gun Violence Prevention and School Safety Act as an affront to the Constitution. But the reaction from the gun lobby and firearms manufactures may hint at something else: the impact that the measure, which is aimed at reducing gun violence, may have on sales.
Every time the country is shaken by a tragic mass shooting and the loss of innocent lives, mental illness and its role in the actions of the mass shooter come under scrutiny.
Mental illness again became a central theme after the mass shooting in Maine on Oct. 25, 2023, in which records suggest that the shooter had a history of serious mental health issues. Months before the tragedy, the family of gunman Robert Card, as well as Army Reserve staffers, had contacted law enforcement expressing high levels of concern about his mental health and noting his access to guns.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among U.S. children and teens following a huge decade-long rise.
Analyses published on Oct. 5, 2023 by a research team in Boston found an 87% increase in firearm-involved fatalities among Americans under the age of 18 from 2011 to 2021.
Such an increase is obviously very concerning. But as scholars of adolescent health and firearm violence, we know there are many evidence-based steps that elected officials, health care professionals, community leaders, school administrators, and parents can implement to help reverse this trend.
Trends in firearm deaths
The latest study is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This data also provides information on whether firearm deaths were the result of homicide, suicide, or unintentional shootings.
We have seen increases over time in all three areas. The steepest increase has been in the rate of firearm homicides, which doubled over the decade to 2021, reaching 2.1 deaths per 100,000 children and teens, or about 1,500 fatalities annually. Firearm-involved suicides have also increased steadily to 1.1 deaths per 100,000 children and teens in 2021.
Whereas the proportion of youth firearm-involved deaths due to unintentional shootings is typically highest during childhood, the share of gun deaths due to suicide peaks in adolescence.
In 2021, homicide was the most common form of firearm-involved deaths in almost every age group under the age of 18, with the exception of 12- and 13-year-olds, in which suicide was the leading cause of firearm fatalities.
Racial disparities in firearm deaths, which have been present for multiple generations, are also expanding, research shows.
Black children and teens are now dying from firearms at around 4.5 times the rate of their white peers.
This disparity is the consequence of structural factors, including the effects of systemic racism and economic disinvestment within many communities. Addressing racial disparities in firearm-involved deaths will require supporting communities and disrupting inequity by addressing long-term underfunding in Black communities and punitive policymaking.
More research is needed to fully understand why firearm-involved deaths are universally increasing across homicide, suicide, and unintentional deaths. The COVID-19 pandemic and its exacerbation of social inequities and vulnerabilities likely explain some of these increases.
How to reduce gun fatalities
Reducing young people’s access to unsecured and loaded firearms can prevent firearm-involved deaths across all intents — including suicide, homicide, and unintentional shootings.
Gun-owning parents can help by storing all firearms in a secure manner – such as in a locked gun safe or with a trigger or cable lock – and unloaded so they are not accessible to children or teens within the household.
Data shows that only one-third of firearm-owning households with teens in the U.S. currently store all their firearms unloaded and locked.
In addition to locking household firearms, parents should consider storing a firearm away from the home, such as in a gun shop or shooting range, or temporarily transferring ownership to a family member if they have a teen experiencing a mental health crisis.
Families, including those that don’t own firearms, should also consider how firearms are stored in homes where their children or teens may spend time, such as a grandparent’s or neighbor’s house.
Community-based and clinical programs that provide counseling on the importance of locked storage and provide free devices are effective in improving the ways people store their firearms. In addition, researchers have found that states with child access prevention laws, which impose criminal liability on adults for negligently stored firearms, are associated with lower rates of child and teen firearm deaths.
Reducing the number of young people who carry and use firearms in risky ways is another key step to prevent firearm deaths among children and teens. Existing hospital- and community-based prevention services support this work by identifying and enrolling youth at risk in programs that reduce violence involvement, the carrying of firearms, and risky firearm behaviors.
While researchers are currently testing such programs to understand how well they work, early findings suggest that the most promising programs include a combination of reducing risky behaviors – through, for example, nonviolent conflict resolution; enhancing youth engagement in pro-social activities and with positive mentors; and supporting youth mental health.
Support structures
In addition to ongoing focused prevention efforts, hospital-, school-, and community-based interventions that support youth in advancing social, emotional, mental, physical, and financial health can reduce the risk of firearm deaths. Such measures include both creating opportunities for children and teens – building playgrounds, establishing youth programs and providing access to the arts and green spaces – and community-level improvements, such as improved public transportation, economic opportunities, environmental safety conditions, and affordable and quality housing. Allocating resources toward these initiatives is an investment in every community member’s safety.
Over the past decade, we have seen an 87% increase in firearm-involved fatalities among children and teens in the United States. But we also have the strategies and tools to stop and reverse this troubling trend.
About the authors: Rebeccah Sokol is an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan. Marc A. Zimmerman is a professor of public health at the University of Michigan. Patrick Carter is the co-director of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention and an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan.
This article was published by The Conversation.
A spate of high-profile mass shootings in the U.S. has sparked calls for Congress to look at imposing a ban on so-called assault weapons – covering the types of guns used in both the recent Buffalo grocery attack and that on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Such a prohibition has been in place before. As President Joe Biden noted in his June 2, 2022 speech addressing gun violence, almost three decades ago, bipartisan support in Congress helped push through a federal assault weapons ban in 1994 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.
After the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, psychology professor Paul Boxer and his colleagues reviewed research to see what could be learned from what they refer to as the “science of violence prevention.” In the wake of the May 24, 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Boxer has revisited that research anew – and other research conducted since then – for insights on what can be done to reduce the risk of school shootings in the future. Here he offers five policy changes – based on his findings – that can be implemented to achieve that end.
1) Dramatically limit access to guns
Gun regulation matters.
When my colleagues and I looked at gun regulations on a state-by-state basis, we found that more restrictive gun laws are associated with lower rates of homicides by guns.
Last month Americans marked the anniversary of the tragic loss of children and teachers at Sandy Hook.
After any mass shooting, Americans hear politicians make the ritualistic call for “thoughts and prayers.” Yet years after the killing of these 20 elementary students and six staff, school shootings continue to frequently claim young lives, most recently in Oxford, Michigan. There have been more than 30 in the U.S. during 2021 alone – and more than 600 mass shootings of any kind, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive defines a mass shooting as an incident with four or more people injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.
Four days before a 15-year-old sophomore killed four students and wounded others at a high school shooting in Michigan, his father purchased the firearm used in the attack.
That the teenager used a weapon from home during the Nov. 30 attack is not unusual. Most school shooters obtain the firearm from home. And the number of guns within reach of high school-age teenagers has increased during the pandemic – highlighting the importance of locking firearms and keeping them unloaded in the home.
Last month, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit against major U.S. arms manufacturers and distributors in a U.S. federal court, suing the companies for damages caused by the illegal flow of their guns into Mexico. The lawsuit not only looks for compensation—with some damages estimated at $10 billion—but also to change the commercial practices of U.S. gun companies that facilitate the flow of guns. Regardless of how the lawsuit ends—considering existing U.S. laws offer gun companies broad immunity from civil litigation—it is important to acknowledge the huge impacts of the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico. It is equally important to address disinformation surrounding this flow and recognize that America can and should do more to stop it.
It’s not expensive or difficult to produce large numbers of untraceable firearms in the United States. Whether for private use, sale on the criminal market, or arming violent extremists, it’s actually startlingly cheap and easy to mass-produce firearms that police can’t track – what are often called “ghost guns.”
For just over US$2,000, I can buy a machine – not much bigger than a desktop laser printer – that will do the trick. If I’m feeling handy, I can get it done with just simple power tools.
The need for federal action to address gun violence is more urgent than ever. 2020 was a devastating year for gun violence, with early data showing that there were more than 19,000 gun-related homicides, including 612 mass shootings in which four or more people were shot. According to one analysis, homicides increased 36 percent across 28 major cities, and communities of color bore a disproportionate burden of that violence. At the same time, there was an unprecedented surge in gun sales in 2020, with an estimated 20 million guns sold.
After four years of a presidential administration that was hostile toward efforts to address gun violence, the start of a new Congress and a new presidential administration presents an opportunity for serious action to address the many gaps and weaknesses in our nation’s approach to this public health crisis.
