America’s gun problem goes much, much further than mass shootings.
By
German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez
Los
Angeles high school student Edna Chavez proved to be one of the March of Our
Lives’ most inspiring speakers on Saturday — moving the crowd to chant her
brother’s name, Ricardo, as she fought back tears.
But
Chavez did not represent the kind of gun violence that’s been attached to the
march. Her brother was not taken in a mass or school shooting. Instead, as the
Los Angeles Times reported, her brother, who was in high school at the time, in
2007 “was killed in a shooting outside their home” — an act of everyday gun
violence.
“This
is normal — normal to the point that I’ve learned to duck from bullets before I
learned how to read,” Chavez said, in front of thousands.
This
routine gun violence makes up a huge portion of America’s gun problem. In 2016
(the latest year for which data is available), there were nearly 39,000 gun
deaths. More than 14,000 of those were homicides, and almost 23,000 were
suicides. In contrast, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as
those in which four or more people were injured or killed (excluding the
shooter), tracked 456 mass shooting deaths that same year — about 1.2 percent of
all gun deaths.
We
know, however, that many of the everyday gun deaths could be prevented with
stricter access to guns. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published
in the scientific journal Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal
restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in
gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save
lives.
Meanwhile,
a recent review of the best US-based studies by the RAND Corporation suggested
that, while much of the research is lacking, there is evidence that some gun
control measures — background checks, child access prevention laws, minimum age
requirements, and prohibitions associated with mental illness — are linked to
reductions in injuries and deaths.
The
research is actually a bit weaker for mass shootings, in large part because such
tragedies are, thankfully, somewhat rare, making them more difficult to study.
But the basic point is that we know restricting access to guns could prevent gun
deaths.
Still,
discussions about gun control laws only seem to come in response to about 1.2
percent of all gun deaths — the mass shootings — even though we know that all
types of gun deaths are preventable. It’s just that the other types of gun
violence largely go ignored in public discourse.
Why
does everyday gun violence go ignored?
It’s
hard to say exactly why Americans seem so apathetic to more typical gun
violence, but there are a few potential reasons.
Read
more
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