Leonard Korn, MD, is chair of the New Hampshire Medical Society Subcommittee on Violence as a Public Health Issue
Gun violence is once again unavoidably a focus of our concerns in America. Unfortunately, in America, we are all too commonly and quickly distracted by other events and issues, so the problem of gun violence is forgotten until the next huge tragedy of a mass shooting comes, as it always does. There are simple reasons why gun violence in our country has not been addressed and solved, but perhaps the most important fact about gun violence is that it can be solved. In fact, it has been solved in every western-type democracy throughout the world, just not in the United States.
Let’s begin with that undeniable fact that the incidence of gun violence in the U.S. can be solved. The reason we know that is that it has been solved in Great Britain, Australia, Canada and every western democracy except ours. So, the horrific mass shootings in Sandy Hook, Parkland, Buffalo and now Uvalde are not only senseless but avoidable and entirely preventable. We can’t stop all shootings, but the shear frequency and number of deaths can be prevented.
We must understand the problem of gun violence accurately if we are as a country to solve it, as all other western democracies have done. As physicians we talk of properly diagnosing the problem (which as a country we have not done as politics has always gotten in the way).
Simply, in the United States we have a culture of guns and if we are to solve the problem, we must change that culture. We have more guns in the US than we have citizens (approximately 400 million guns and 320 million people). Our children want safety, and our citizens want this change (poll after poll show that the people of our country want this problem of gun violence to be solved). The New Hampshire Medical Society, and just about every state and national medical, nursing and health organizations demand this change as well.
What must we do to stop or at least severely reduce gun violence? We need universal background checks for all gun purchases, registering of all firearms, eliminating all “ghost guns” (guns with no serial numbers, so they are untraceable and unregistered, and evade background checks). We need red-flag laws so guns can be removed from individuals who are prone to violence. We also need to ban the sale and ownership of all assault-type weapons (military weapons) by the public, as well as banning the sale and ownership of high-capacity magazines of more than ten bullets. We also need to reinstate permitting process for concealed weapons by the public, a safety feature that has been removed by New Hampshire and many other states in the last several years. And we need to require safe storage of guns, so that children or unstable or suicidal individuals can’t access guns accidentally or on impulse.
So, why won’t we do what we can to stop gun violence.
Unfortunately, the impediments to stopping gun violence are also quite well known, and they are all political in nature.
Simply put, the Republican Party in New Hampshire, Texas and so many other Republican controlled states and their supporters in Congress don’t want to admit the sources of the problem of gun violence are guns, lethal guns, and few meaningful restrictions to prevent unstable or potentially dangerous persons from access to guns. Indeed, a culture of guns is actively promoted in our country contributing correspondingly to the violence guns sustain in the U.S.
Guns are now the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., more for example than auto accidents or cancer. Although Republicans won’t admit it, they care more about guns than they do about the safety of children and citizens in general.
Indeed, at the NRA Annual Meeting taking place last weekend, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and others were promoting more guns, policeman at every school armed with guns, maybe even assault rifles, maybe even armored vests, hardened schools, teachers being armed. Their solution to gun violence is simply more guns, even though we have more guns in America than we have people. And we’ve clearly seen that criminals with assault rifles outmatched the 19 policemen who waited outside the school in Uvalde for about one hour while 19 eight- to ten-year-old kids were gunned down by a young man who had purchased a Daniel Defense assault rifle on his 18th birthday just days before the shooting, apparently with magazine clips holding 30 bullets each.
Some statistics are illustrative of the extent of the problem of gun violence in the U.S. compared with other countries. The U.S. has about 25 times the incidence of gun homicides than other high-income countries and on an average day 110 Americans are killed with guns, with many more injured. Australia had four mass shootings between 1987 and 1996, and the Australian people and government were motivated to act by passing restrictive gun laws within six months including banning assault rifles; there has been one mass shootings in Australia since then. In New Zealand in 2019 when 51 people were killed in Christchurch in two mosques, New Zealand banned semiautomatic weapons in Parliament 26 days later: there have been no mass shootings since then. In the U.S. assault weapons are the weapon of choice in just about all the deadliest mass shootings for obvious reasons, as they are military designed weapons of war with the purpose of killing humans as rapidly and effectively as possible. The havoc they leave in their wake is too horrendous to allow photos to be published.
Let me also emphasize what won’t work to stem the tide of gun violence, because such ideas keep being offered by Republicans who want to shift the conversation from the true reasons for the gun violence in our country. It won’t help to shift the conversation to mental health issues because all countries of course have mental health issues. More attention to mental health issues is certainly warranted in our country (universal health insurance would certainly help!) but shifting the conversation there won’t solve the problem of gun violence.
Nor will shifting the conversation to the decline in church attendance, bullying on social media, violent video games, or even the “evil” in our society or the world. All the above issues are prevalent throughout the world, but not the gun violence common in our homeland alone.
The answer to the problem of gun violence in the US is thus both simple (too many guns and too few restrictions) and yet currently not possible to accomplish because of the resistance of one of our major political parties (the Republican Party) to make the changes necessary. For gun violence to become manageable in the U.S. Republicans will either change their position favoring guns over the safety of children and other persons (doubtful in this current political environment) or be voted out of office (also seems doubtful). My fear is that there will be no change and gun violence will continue to be a unique and horrific part of our American experience. I hope that I am wrong.