Gun violence and the culture wars
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org
When I was 9 years old I lived in a northern Minnesota town that suffered through one of the first school shootings in the United States. At least I thought it was, until recently - more on that below. Anyway, the shooting happened on an October day in 1966 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a small town that to this day remains small enough to require only a single high school. On that day a 15-year-old boy brought a .22 pistol to school and shot a fellow student, then shot an administrator named Forrest Willey, who died 8 days later. The boy had been teased and/or bullied in school and his response was to shoot a classmate and kill an adult who was trying to keep him from shooting others.
Since then, the suffering, carnage and deaths from gun violence - both inside and outside the school room - has spread across the country. There are places in the United States where gun violence is rare, but now, in 2023, there is no place to go to escape it, not completely.
Why is this so? And more importantly, what can we do about it?
There are hundreds of ways to die in America. Why does gun violence rank so high as a cause of death?
In 2021 firearms were responsible for 48,293 deaths in the U.S. This was 1.4 percent of the total number of deaths from that year. It was also more than the 46,980 deaths resulting from motor vehicle accidents. In other words, if any random person - for our purposes, let’s just say it’s you or me - was alive in 2021, you had a slightly better chance of being killed by a firearm than by a motor vehicle.
Why is this the case? Let’s continue the comparison between the two causes of death and look back in time. Have they always been at these levels?
As a matter of fact, no. Motor vehicles used to cause many more deaths than firearms. From 1968-1978 there were over 560,000 motor vehicle deaths in the U.S., while there were just under 297,000 deaths from firearms, or about half as many. When I did the same comparison for 2006-2016 (I used these years to avoid the trend distortions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic) the situation changed dramatically: motor vehicle deaths dropped to 403,000, despite the large increases in the number of vehicles on the road and miles driven in the past 40-50 years, while firearm deaths rose to 360,000 a 21 percent increase. And as of 2021, we’ve arrived at the insane situation where firearms kill more people than vehicles do.
So why have motor vehicle deaths declined so dramatically? Changes in vehicle technology and driver behavior are the most direct causes, but many of those technological changes would have not come about without regulations enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). And many of those behavioral changes would not have happened without the adoption of a public health approach toward motor vehicle safety.
Given the dramatic changes in motor vehicle deaths, would taking a similar approach to reducing firearm deaths make sense? I think it’s safe to say that at least for the next few years (or maybe the next few election cycles) there probably won’t be any radical change in the politics around gun ownership that would lead to any major decline in deaths. If the politics stay the way they are, many thousands of people are going to be killed by guns every year. So is a combination of a regulation/public health approach possible? And might it be effective? Smarter people than me think it might work.
In a recent editorial the New York Times’ Nick Kristof outlined a constellation of measures that doubtlessly would prevent many deaths every year: restricting people under 21 with “red flag” violations on their records; going further than that by restricting gun sales to those age 21 and over (like we already do with cigarettes and alcohol); putting background checks into place that are more serious than those facing someone who wants to adopt a Chihuahua, and doing it universally, rather than on the state-specific piecemeal method that’s used right now; and finally, requiring people to get a license to own a gun. This constellation of measures falls under the umbrella of “harm reduction”, which addresses a problem by acknowledging that people aren’t perfect, so let’s work with that reality, rather than unrealistically trying to get rid of all privately-owned firearms. That ain’t gonna happen, and frankly it shouldn’t (People should be free to be hunters, for example. As long as they’re not hunting other people, which is what’s going on now.)
Kristof notes that the politics around doing this need not be as daunting as they may seem. For instance, Wyoming, hardly a hotbed of knee-jerk liberalism, prevents anyone under 21 from buying a firearm. I’ve spent a sliver of time in Wyoming and based on my limited experience, if it can be done there it can be done in any state in the country.
Kristof also reminds readers that the public health-associated notion of harm reduction has a couple of other characteristics. First, it won’t completely satisfy anyone because it doesn’t take an extreme position of, for example, getting rid of all firearms. Instead, it accepts that firearms are going to be a part of American life and simply tries to minimize the harm that they cause. Second, harm reduction, like public health in general,…
“… mostly is not about one big thing but about a million small things. To reduce auto deaths, seatbelts and airbags helped, and so did padded dashboards, crash testing, streetlights, highway dividers, crackdowns on drunken driving and zillions of tiny steps such as those bumps in the highway to help keep dozing drivers from drifting off the road.
Likewise, we need countless other steps to address gun violence, and many of these have been under discussion for decades.”
Kristof makes a few other points that should make some people, like me for instance, take a hard look in the mirror and juuuust sloooow dooowwwn when addressing gun laws.
He doesn’t explicitly say this, but my first takeaway is to back off on the heated rhetoric that relies on extreme solutions. It doesn’t help. In my case it lets me blow off steam when I’m talking to my wife about this, but it doesn’t help a damn bit. Instead, I’m going to TRY to keep a cooler head when talking about the issue.
Second, the harm reduction approach emphasizes that making one big change - like banning assault rifles - won’t fix the problem. Assault rifles account for a small proportion of gun deaths, while handguns kill far more people. An effective ban on assault rifles, which has proven difficult to design, would save lives, but there would still be far too many gun deaths every year.
Third, it’s going to be important to focus on non-gun related measures. These include things like getting lead out of drinking water, the presence of which has been linked to high violent crime rates 20 years later. They include supporting violence reduction programs and youth programs that try to break cycles of violence. All of these are a necessary part of the solution.
Kristof thinks we can do better in our attempts to reduce gun deaths, and I agree. How we try to do this matters. I’ll give him another word before talking about my mistaken idea that the 1966 shooting in my hometown was one of the first school shootings in the U.S.:
So let’s learn lessons, for gun violence is at levels that are unconscionable. Just since I graduated from high school in 1977, more Americans appear to have died from guns (more than 1.5 million), including suicides, homicides and accidents, than perished in all the wars in U.S. history, going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million).
We can do better, and this is not hopeless. North Carolina is not a liberal state, but it requires a license to buy a handgun. If we avoid overheated rhetoric that antagonizes gun owners, some progress is possible, particularly at the state level.
Gun safety regulation can make a difference. Conservatives often think New York is an example of failed gun policy, but New York State has a firearms death rate less than one-quarter that of gun-friendly states like Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana and Mississippi. Gun safety works, just not as well as we would like.
Harm reduction isn’t glamorous but is the kind of long slog that reduced auto fatalities and smoking deaths. If only gun policy can become boring, that may help defuse the culture war over guns that for decades has paralyzed America from adopting effective firearms policies.
The latest shootings were tragically, infuriatingly predictable. So let’s ask politicians not just for lowered flags and moving speeches but also for a better way to honor the dead: an evidence-based slog that saves lives.
The rest of the story on how Grand Rapids was NOT the site of one of the first school shootings in the U.S.
It turns out I was wrong when I assumed that the school shooting at Grand Rapids High School in 1966 was one of the first in the country. While researching this post I came across a site chronicling the University of Texas Tower mass shooting that killed 14 people and wounded 30. It happened on August 1, 1966, two months before the shooting in Grand Rapids. This site also reveals that both school shootings and mass shootings have haunted this country since at least the 1890’s:
On March 28, 1891 a man with a doubled barreled shotgun fired upon a crowd of students and faculty attending a school exhibition in Parson Hall School House in Liberty, Mississippi. The perpetrator wounded over fourteen people mostly children, with several being seriously wounded. This incident is perhaps one of the earliest reported school mass shootings in the country.
The site documents other shootings that occurred throughout the 20th century. It emphasizes the notion that guns have been a part of American culture throughout our history. Their influence has grown to the point where we now have a huge “gun culture” that celebrates them. It’s not going to diminish anytime soon, but we’ll have a better country if we can figure out ways to diminish its effects on our health and well-being.
Until next time, thanks for reading.
Thank you, Amy!
Great article and insights!