The high school students who survived our most recent mass killing are right that it’s time for action. Now. We should begin with what we know will work and continue improving gradually. But we’re unprepared to unite behind any course of action because we remain woefully uninformed about gun violence. Let’s focus on it and begin fixing the problem.
Mass shootings get lots of attention, but they are just the tip of the gun death iceberg. In 2016 America had 456 deaths in mass shootings. That’s similar to the 548 deaths caused by self-defense shootings. It is a totally different scale from the year’s 11,760 gun homicides. That is one American murdered by gunshot every 45 minutes. It gets worse. There were an estimated 22,000 gun suicides. Adding those to the others, we had 34,805 gun deaths in 2016. That’s one American life lost to gun violence every 15 minutes and the clock is ticking. The overwhelming majority of those deaths are caused by handguns rather than the more spectacular looking rifles generally used in mass shootings.
Gun deaths are now approximately equal to deaths from motor vehicle accidents. The carnage on our roads was awful but we worked on it and the death rate per mile is now 88 percent lower than it was in 1946. We began strictly enforcing DUI and other traffic safety laws, then in the late 1960s we began a very controversial national campaign to improve safety on the road. We required collapsible steering columns, padded dash boards, seat belts, air bags and other safety features in new cars. Now we have anti-lock brakes and collision avoidance systems.
Why is traffic safety relevant to guns? It shows how much progress we made by taking a public health approach to motor vehicle safety. We should be doing the same with gun safety but instead the congress reduced the funding of the Center for Disease Control as punishment for collecting gun safety data.
As with traffic safety, it will take many changes over a period of years to reduce gun deaths. That is not an excuse for doing nothing. Instead, as with motor vehicle safety, it is a reason for starting immediately. While we do things that we know will work we should also fund the CDC to study and report gun deaths and recommend actions to reduce the number.
Our first action step should be universal background checks for all gun purchases. Many people believe that we already have that, but we don’t. Gun shows and private internet sales by unlicensed sellers are exempt. The result is predictable. A survey of prison inmates in 13 states found that ninety-six percent of those who were already prohibited from possessing a gun at the time of their crime obtained the firearm at a gun show or from an unlicensed private seller exempt from background checks. We should fix that.
We should learn from the experience of states. The four states with the most strict gun laws (including universal background checks) are Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut. Their gun death rates per hundred thousand population range from 2.7 to 4.9. The rate for the total US is 10.5. The four states with the most lax gun laws, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have gun death rates ranging from 19.1 to 16.8. Since Connecticut tightened its laws in 1995 gun homicide rates there have dropped by 40 percent. Since Missouri repealed its license requirements in 2007, gun homicide rates are up 25 percent. Clearly the states with strict laws are getting better results.
The second action step should be a total ban on weapons designed for mass killing. That includes devices that turn semiautomatic weapons into fully automatic equivalents of machine guns, and it includes semiautomatic weapons with very large magazines. The only purpose they serve is mass killing. Other ideas can be researched and tested before national implementation. Beginning with universal background checks and banning weapons designed for mass killing would be a great start.
The student survivors are right that it’s time for action. Adults should support them right now. Begin with what we know will work and continue improving gradually. Do not fear those who resist progress by calling people names or threatening legislators. The only thing they have on their side is money to pay politicians to do nothing while more Americans die. We are too good a nation to allow that to happen.
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The “now” fixes are more doable and so we should all push for those at this time… universal background checks, ban on assault rifles, ban on “no-fly” persons.
The longer fixes, in my opinion, would be more difficult. Candidates have been talking about heavy restrictions on governmental lobbyists for a long time with no action. Curbing the flow of money to campaigns from big monies via lobbyists would stop those groups from dictating our laws and holding our lawmakers hostage. On that same note, the passage of Citizens United secured that easy flow of money to candidates. If the candidates don’t accept those huge donations from corporations, lobbyists, and the wealthy, they cannot win their next election.. they are trapped. We need to work on ways to fix this.
That’s a very intelligent approach Andrea, and it would improve our ability to address many issues.