I was going to wait until next week to start writing about firearm violence. During the day, I’m a violence epidemiologist so have some perspectives to share. But this week has been a lot. People need time to grieve, to react, and to process, so I was going to allow space for that. But I’m starting to see dangerous rhetoric bubble to the surface:
Thank you so much for your positive perspective on gun violence, Katelyn. I was one of those people who just threw her hands in the air and said "there's no hope" with our divided political landscape. I forgot that there were other avenues to try. Have a happy holiday weekend. And rest - you need it.
Thank you for pointing out that many gun shop owners and gun owners/users are willing to offer solutions and care about reducing mass shootings and unnecessary gun deaths. Too often they (along with Republicans, Christians, people from certain states) are lumped together with those who commit these horrific tragedies. Such misunderstandings and polarization prevent us as a society from listening to each other and solving this together. Thank you for all that you do.
You left out banning military weapons. The availability of military weapons is so obviously the main cause of the unending mass shootings. The Supreme Court in Heller held that the right to bear arms is limited, that military weapons are dangerous, and that military weapons may be banned. Banning military weapons is an absolute necessity. And it works-look at Australia.
We can reduce Gun Violence by voting out the Republicans.
We also need to disempower any other politicians like Joe Manchin who also gets money from the Gun lobby and the Gun manufacturers. Its really that simple. Until we do that Congress will talk about "compromises" for years as they have been ever since the Brady Bill and before.
The Republicans will never change - and they represent the minority by some 40 million votes. We need to vote them out and simply establish a Democratic Supermajority. Or sooner, simply do away with the Filibuster. We also need to Pack the Court so that it will support gun control legislation.
I can't say I disagree with you on any of your points, but perhaps you don't go far enough. Right now, we live in a country where a minority has locked in power. The anti-majoriarian institutions are the Electoral College and the Senate. Both need to be heavily modified and/or abolished outright. But that strips away the protections of minorities from being horribly oppressed by transcient majorities. That's what happened to many in the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court, with the aid of the Fifth Circuit under the leadership of Elbert Tuttle, and brave district judges like Frank Johnson and Julius Waring came to the aid of the minority. But if it had been left to the majorities, their governors, legislatures and magistrates, too bad. So to your recommendation of packing the Court. It's long overdue, but not so liberals or conservatives have their majority. It's overdue because the case load of the Court is fairly constant, even shrinking, at a time when cert-worthy cases are increasing as litigation is growing as well. It has been proposed to expand the Court membership to equal the number of Circuits and that would be a bare minimum expansion. The Court makes its own rules and could adopt the panel/en banc system used in the Circuits. We'd have a better Article 3 judiciary as an end product. Sorry to write at such length.
Thank you for this message of hope. I, too, appreciate your data driven approach. I like the idea of treating gun safety as a public health issue (“gun safety” vs. “gun control”). Automobile safety is a good analogy, and we don’t expect 18-yr-olds (or anyone else) to hop in the driver seat without first getting driver’s training or a driver’s license. Perhaps at the very least we could raise the age from 18 to 21 for purchasing assault rifles. Florida enacted this change after Parkland; this is the law in California. Red Flag laws and waiting periods might have helped in this situation too. Covid has taught me that a layered approach to risk reduction is helpful (i.e. vaccines, masks, monitoring community spread). Seems logical that a layered approach would help with gun safety too.
A gentle plea:. Why not make, using off-the-shelf technology already available conjoined with GPS, "smart guns" that will not allow themselves to be discharged in schools, hospitals, malls, etc. etc. They would also be programmable with local ordinances, such that if it were unlawful to discharge a firearm in city limits, the smart gun would not allow itself to be so used unlawfully. It sounds complex, but we have the technology to create such a weapon now and it wouldn't violate the Second Amendment.
In any case , looking at the planet from the Ukraine to Uvalde, perhaps it's time for the adults to come to our little sandbox and confiscate our toys. We're manifestly incapable of self governance.
I agree that a public health approach will work over time, but that ignores the more immediately effective strategies that other countries have taken to implement gun regulations. It is a “both and” situation. Assault weapons need to be much harder to acquire.
I don’t think that’s separate from public health. Everything Dr. Jetelina mentions here is part of public health, and that’s why she mentions that “On a state level, we see the positive impact of more restrictive laws. A recent BMJ article found that states with more restrictive laws have reduced the rate of mass shootings.”
As I understand it, Dr. Jetelina is saying that’s one of the public health solutions that we need, but “even if states don’t pass policies” there are additional measures that do help.
I'm sorry to say "we won't fix it" is the correct take, because the people who CAN fix things are telling us the filibuster is more important than fixing it. For some reason, we're not allowed to drop the filibuster, and we're also not allowed to upset Joe Manchin, because reasons.
Or as in the case of Senator Amy "I know how to get things done" Klobuchar, and Senator Eric Swalwell, among others: tweets imploring the law to change, even though they both have the power to actually do the thing they're asking for and are seemingly not using it.
I agree with all your points on HOW to fix it, but the will to fix it relies on people who seem to have no interest in changing things.
The Court is a highly political body and is always looking to windward on public sentiment. Now would be an optimal time to bring cases before it to trim back Heller. Otherwise, the Fabian tactics of 2nd amendment absolutists will be used again to ride out the storm of public outrage. Wish there was something equivalent to the old Inc. Fund and Thurgood Marshall to strategize and litigate this public illness.
While I appreciate your optimism, the fact that there is any framing of the COVID response as a “success” (particularly since the pandemic is ongoing, mutating, and continuing to kill so many, even 3x vaccinated folks) has utterly shot your credibility with me.
Also, I think you’re leaving out of the gun conversation that guns become a veritable religion for some. There are people constructing their whole identity around “guns and Jesus” in a way that was NEVER true about cigarettes or automobile fatalities. You’re comparing apples to oranges in not considering the cultish *identity* and fetishizing that has arisen around guns.
The environment has changed. We absolutely need to take a hard look at our nation’s obsession with guns. But it’ll never happen in this horrifically toxic, white supremacist reality.
If only the current policy wasn’t focused on intentional denial—“ prevention of infection is no longer a policy”— Jha, misleading CDC maps, failure to secure funding, “ let it rip”, public health has become individual risk assessment. I live in a blue state where our Governor has declared “ it’s endemic, preventable and treatable”— and when I spoke to the chief of staff for my progressive Senator, she agreed and shared that COVID was impacting her personally. I’m so disappointed in the current federal pandemic response, which has pulled out resources for our most vulnerable. It’s hard to find hope when the federal policy seems based on political concerns, rather than public health.
I agree. However, Death isn’t the only horrific outcome of COVID, transmission is out of control, messaging from leadership is atrocious and minimizing, people are being disabled every day by LC, and no kids under 5
have any protection while people blame dogs for pediatric liver failure. Any “success” that has occurred has been in spite of the conditions, not because of them.
In response to Karen and to amplify on the "smart gun" proposal: Using a nontamperable electronic triggerlock, this type of device, suitably programmed would simply not fire in places or times the law prohibited. Home defense use could easily be accommodated and using some type of biometric engineering the gun wouldn't function if children got a hold of it. Or thieves for that matter. So long as the gun knows where it is, what the laws are in that place, who is holding it, and lastly the current time (to function in hunting only during the legal hunting season), then it can't be used unlawfully. The 2nd amendment crowd can have no constitutional "militia" argument, as no Originalist is going to contend the framers intended unlawful use of arms, or mass murder of civilians. Everyone could have their "sacred" right to own guns, but they just couldn't misbehave with them.
Thank you for your continued work on this issue, and for sharing some realistic approaches and solutions to lowering the levels of gun violence. A public health approach, combined with other efforts that are ongoing, sounds like it could actually bring about change.
Again I would cite THE VIOLENCE PROJECT, a book, a website, and spreadsheet of almost all mass shooters by Jillian Peterson and James Densley who demonstrate that the vaste majority of perpetrators whose child history is known were abused as children.
I know you are from your past columns. I am tuned into their studies because I am very involved in child abuse prevention and policy. Going through their detailed spreadsheet I found they had documented abuse in the childhood of 60 out of 66 shooters that they had a childhood Hx on. From my point of view the epidemic of child abuse and the social, as well as mental and physical, harms it produces are largely overlooked by policymakers. Violence prevention discussions rarely mention child abuse. My point is we are all too siloed. BTW Child abuse trauma has been found in about 2/3 of unhoused people as well, but homeless management and treatment proposals rarely mention this factor. I appreciate your emailing me so I have the chance to encourage you to enhance attention to this factor in your day job as well as YLE.
Jeffrey, totally in agreement that we are way too siloed. I run a nonprofit and we are launching a non-siloed Consumer Information Exchange with bi-directional referrals, based on Social Determinants of Health. It's been fascinating to see those who want to eliminate the siloes for the common good, and those who want to retain due to power/money/control. I have a theory that with STEM training leading to bachelor's and postgraduate degrees, followed by jobs in same field and chasing funding for same, we have a generation of people who have been educated in siloes and therefore work in silos.
Karen & Jeoffry, I appreciate your comments about "silos." As an educational therapist- a discipline that requires background in education, psychology, and the neuroscience of learning- I am well aware that difficulties that result in a young person acting out in violence towards others or oneself are tied together in a web. Jeoffry mentions child abuse. Popular articles about mass shooters often mention difficulties connecting with peers and bullying by peers. One area that doesn't get mentioned often is that in prison populations that have been studied, ~80% of inmates are functionally illiterate due to any cause and ~50% have dyslexia, a neurobiological condition that leads to difficulty learning to read.
Failure to learn to read is a major factor in students giving up on school and giving up on themselves. If we want to move the needle in reducing violence of all kinds, we need to ensure that ALL schools use research-based methods to teach reading, screen ALL students for dyslexia, and ensure that students who have dyslexia- whether they qualify for IEP services or not- are taught in a manner that leads to reading success. When students have more complex profiles that include ADHD, autism, or other developmental disabilities, a team approach to meeting developmental needs is important. We must fund these services and ensure accountability for carrying out effective instruction. Unfortunately, in districts with high levels of risk factors, funding & the knowledge base needed are often insufficient. Other power-related factors as Karen mentions are often present, too. Making changes in the educational system is a longer-term investment, but it's just one more example of a field that needs to be connecting with other fields to improve violence-related outcomes.
To go back to my original concern, child maltreatment and child abuse trauma are an under-appreciated cause of social dysfunction and neuro-psych disability. Underappreciated partly because the American Psychiatric Assn does not define child abuse trauma as a DX in DSM. There are many studies on ACEs, mostly in the general population. When looking at people in the carcereal state (versus the general population), severe child abuse rises from 15-20% to 60%. There are many studies now showing MRI brain changes associated with child abuse. Child abuse trauma can present looking like ADHD. I wonder if it can produce dyslexia in a pathophysiologic fashion?
Thank you, Marie, for the info on literacy and other learning challenges. One of my Board members (I run a nonprofit) has a foundation focused on the re-entry population. I'll share this with her.
This one links to the abstract of the study I had in mind when I posted. It's an older study (2000) and I haven't done a complete search to look for more recent information.
This one is the DOJ December 2020 report on the First Steps Act, which included information on screening, treatment, and accommodations for dyslexia. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was responsible for getting the provisions addressing dyslexia added to this act.
Thank you so much for your positive perspective on gun violence, Katelyn. I was one of those people who just threw her hands in the air and said "there's no hope" with our divided political landscape. I forgot that there were other avenues to try. Have a happy holiday weekend. And rest - you need it.
I welcome your data-driven perspective. Hope has been in short supply; thank you for providing some.
Thank you for pointing out that many gun shop owners and gun owners/users are willing to offer solutions and care about reducing mass shootings and unnecessary gun deaths. Too often they (along with Republicans, Christians, people from certain states) are lumped together with those who commit these horrific tragedies. Such misunderstandings and polarization prevent us as a society from listening to each other and solving this together. Thank you for all that you do.
You left out banning military weapons. The availability of military weapons is so obviously the main cause of the unending mass shootings. The Supreme Court in Heller held that the right to bear arms is limited, that military weapons are dangerous, and that military weapons may be banned. Banning military weapons is an absolute necessity. And it works-look at Australia.
We can reduce Gun Violence by voting out the Republicans.
We also need to disempower any other politicians like Joe Manchin who also gets money from the Gun lobby and the Gun manufacturers. Its really that simple. Until we do that Congress will talk about "compromises" for years as they have been ever since the Brady Bill and before.
The Republicans will never change - and they represent the minority by some 40 million votes. We need to vote them out and simply establish a Democratic Supermajority. Or sooner, simply do away with the Filibuster. We also need to Pack the Court so that it will support gun control legislation.
I can't say I disagree with you on any of your points, but perhaps you don't go far enough. Right now, we live in a country where a minority has locked in power. The anti-majoriarian institutions are the Electoral College and the Senate. Both need to be heavily modified and/or abolished outright. But that strips away the protections of minorities from being horribly oppressed by transcient majorities. That's what happened to many in the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court, with the aid of the Fifth Circuit under the leadership of Elbert Tuttle, and brave district judges like Frank Johnson and Julius Waring came to the aid of the minority. But if it had been left to the majorities, their governors, legislatures and magistrates, too bad. So to your recommendation of packing the Court. It's long overdue, but not so liberals or conservatives have their majority. It's overdue because the case load of the Court is fairly constant, even shrinking, at a time when cert-worthy cases are increasing as litigation is growing as well. It has been proposed to expand the Court membership to equal the number of Circuits and that would be a bare minimum expansion. The Court makes its own rules and could adopt the panel/en banc system used in the Circuits. We'd have a better Article 3 judiciary as an end product. Sorry to write at such length.
Thank you for this message of hope. I, too, appreciate your data driven approach. I like the idea of treating gun safety as a public health issue (“gun safety” vs. “gun control”). Automobile safety is a good analogy, and we don’t expect 18-yr-olds (or anyone else) to hop in the driver seat without first getting driver’s training or a driver’s license. Perhaps at the very least we could raise the age from 18 to 21 for purchasing assault rifles. Florida enacted this change after Parkland; this is the law in California. Red Flag laws and waiting periods might have helped in this situation too. Covid has taught me that a layered approach to risk reduction is helpful (i.e. vaccines, masks, monitoring community spread). Seems logical that a layered approach would help with gun safety too.
A gentle plea:. Why not make, using off-the-shelf technology already available conjoined with GPS, "smart guns" that will not allow themselves to be discharged in schools, hospitals, malls, etc. etc. They would also be programmable with local ordinances, such that if it were unlawful to discharge a firearm in city limits, the smart gun would not allow itself to be so used unlawfully. It sounds complex, but we have the technology to create such a weapon now and it wouldn't violate the Second Amendment.
Michael, brilliant idea!
Thank you! I tried to respond using my mailer, but the result was the reply posting at the head of the thread! So sorry.
In any case , looking at the planet from the Ukraine to Uvalde, perhaps it's time for the adults to come to our little sandbox and confiscate our toys. We're manifestly incapable of self governance.
I agree that a public health approach will work over time, but that ignores the more immediately effective strategies that other countries have taken to implement gun regulations. It is a “both and” situation. Assault weapons need to be much harder to acquire.
I don’t think that’s separate from public health. Everything Dr. Jetelina mentions here is part of public health, and that’s why she mentions that “On a state level, we see the positive impact of more restrictive laws. A recent BMJ article found that states with more restrictive laws have reduced the rate of mass shootings.”
As I understand it, Dr. Jetelina is saying that’s one of the public health solutions that we need, but “even if states don’t pass policies” there are additional measures that do help.
Thank you for your optimistic thoughts. We need those.
As for solutions, to gun violence, one that is never discussed is requiring a license to purchase ammunition.
I'm sorry to say "we won't fix it" is the correct take, because the people who CAN fix things are telling us the filibuster is more important than fixing it. For some reason, we're not allowed to drop the filibuster, and we're also not allowed to upset Joe Manchin, because reasons.
Or as in the case of Senator Amy "I know how to get things done" Klobuchar, and Senator Eric Swalwell, among others: tweets imploring the law to change, even though they both have the power to actually do the thing they're asking for and are seemingly not using it.
I agree with all your points on HOW to fix it, but the will to fix it relies on people who seem to have no interest in changing things.
Thank you for giving me some hope this week - please get rest yourself this weekend ❤️
The Court is a highly political body and is always looking to windward on public sentiment. Now would be an optimal time to bring cases before it to trim back Heller. Otherwise, the Fabian tactics of 2nd amendment absolutists will be used again to ride out the storm of public outrage. Wish there was something equivalent to the old Inc. Fund and Thurgood Marshall to strategize and litigate this public illness.
While I appreciate your optimism, the fact that there is any framing of the COVID response as a “success” (particularly since the pandemic is ongoing, mutating, and continuing to kill so many, even 3x vaccinated folks) has utterly shot your credibility with me.
Also, I think you’re leaving out of the gun conversation that guns become a veritable religion for some. There are people constructing their whole identity around “guns and Jesus” in a way that was NEVER true about cigarettes or automobile fatalities. You’re comparing apples to oranges in not considering the cultish *identity* and fetishizing that has arisen around guns.
The environment has changed. We absolutely need to take a hard look at our nation’s obsession with guns. But it’ll never happen in this horrifically toxic, white supremacist reality.
Preventing 1 million deaths in 2021 is a public health success, but that doesn’t mean our work is done.
If only the current policy wasn’t focused on intentional denial—“ prevention of infection is no longer a policy”— Jha, misleading CDC maps, failure to secure funding, “ let it rip”, public health has become individual risk assessment. I live in a blue state where our Governor has declared “ it’s endemic, preventable and treatable”— and when I spoke to the chief of staff for my progressive Senator, she agreed and shared that COVID was impacting her personally. I’m so disappointed in the current federal pandemic response, which has pulled out resources for our most vulnerable. It’s hard to find hope when the federal policy seems based on political concerns, rather than public health.
I agree. However, Death isn’t the only horrific outcome of COVID, transmission is out of control, messaging from leadership is atrocious and minimizing, people are being disabled every day by LC, and no kids under 5
have any protection while people blame dogs for pediatric liver failure. Any “success” that has occurred has been in spite of the conditions, not because of them.
In response to Karen and to amplify on the "smart gun" proposal: Using a nontamperable electronic triggerlock, this type of device, suitably programmed would simply not fire in places or times the law prohibited. Home defense use could easily be accommodated and using some type of biometric engineering the gun wouldn't function if children got a hold of it. Or thieves for that matter. So long as the gun knows where it is, what the laws are in that place, who is holding it, and lastly the current time (to function in hunting only during the legal hunting season), then it can't be used unlawfully. The 2nd amendment crowd can have no constitutional "militia" argument, as no Originalist is going to contend the framers intended unlawful use of arms, or mass murder of civilians. Everyone could have their "sacred" right to own guns, but they just couldn't misbehave with them.
Thank you for your continued work on this issue, and for sharing some realistic approaches and solutions to lowering the levels of gun violence. A public health approach, combined with other efforts that are ongoing, sounds like it could actually bring about change.
Again I would cite THE VIOLENCE PROJECT, a book, a website, and spreadsheet of almost all mass shooters by Jillian Peterson and James Densley who demonstrate that the vaste majority of perpetrators whose child history is known were abused as children.
yes, i’m a big fan of the Violence Project! I cited it many times in my previous post “Epidemiology of Mass Shootings”
I know you are from your past columns. I am tuned into their studies because I am very involved in child abuse prevention and policy. Going through their detailed spreadsheet I found they had documented abuse in the childhood of 60 out of 66 shooters that they had a childhood Hx on. From my point of view the epidemic of child abuse and the social, as well as mental and physical, harms it produces are largely overlooked by policymakers. Violence prevention discussions rarely mention child abuse. My point is we are all too siloed. BTW Child abuse trauma has been found in about 2/3 of unhoused people as well, but homeless management and treatment proposals rarely mention this factor. I appreciate your emailing me so I have the chance to encourage you to enhance attention to this factor in your day job as well as YLE.
Jeffrey, totally in agreement that we are way too siloed. I run a nonprofit and we are launching a non-siloed Consumer Information Exchange with bi-directional referrals, based on Social Determinants of Health. It's been fascinating to see those who want to eliminate the siloes for the common good, and those who want to retain due to power/money/control. I have a theory that with STEM training leading to bachelor's and postgraduate degrees, followed by jobs in same field and chasing funding for same, we have a generation of people who have been educated in siloes and therefore work in silos.
Karen & Jeoffry, I appreciate your comments about "silos." As an educational therapist- a discipline that requires background in education, psychology, and the neuroscience of learning- I am well aware that difficulties that result in a young person acting out in violence towards others or oneself are tied together in a web. Jeoffry mentions child abuse. Popular articles about mass shooters often mention difficulties connecting with peers and bullying by peers. One area that doesn't get mentioned often is that in prison populations that have been studied, ~80% of inmates are functionally illiterate due to any cause and ~50% have dyslexia, a neurobiological condition that leads to difficulty learning to read.
Failure to learn to read is a major factor in students giving up on school and giving up on themselves. If we want to move the needle in reducing violence of all kinds, we need to ensure that ALL schools use research-based methods to teach reading, screen ALL students for dyslexia, and ensure that students who have dyslexia- whether they qualify for IEP services or not- are taught in a manner that leads to reading success. When students have more complex profiles that include ADHD, autism, or other developmental disabilities, a team approach to meeting developmental needs is important. We must fund these services and ensure accountability for carrying out effective instruction. Unfortunately, in districts with high levels of risk factors, funding & the knowledge base needed are often insufficient. Other power-related factors as Karen mentions are often present, too. Making changes in the educational system is a longer-term investment, but it's just one more example of a field that needs to be connecting with other fields to improve violence-related outcomes.
To go back to my original concern, child maltreatment and child abuse trauma are an under-appreciated cause of social dysfunction and neuro-psych disability. Underappreciated partly because the American Psychiatric Assn does not define child abuse trauma as a DX in DSM. There are many studies on ACEs, mostly in the general population. When looking at people in the carcereal state (versus the general population), severe child abuse rises from 15-20% to 60%. There are many studies now showing MRI brain changes associated with child abuse. Child abuse trauma can present looking like ADHD. I wonder if it can produce dyslexia in a pathophysiologic fashion?
Thank you, Marie, for the info on literacy and other learning challenges. One of my Board members (I run a nonprofit) has a foundation focused on the re-entry population. I'll share this with her.
Here are a couple of links for you.
This one links to the abstract of the study I had in mind when I posted. It's an older study (2000) and I haven't done a complete search to look for more recent information.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10876375/#:~:text=Abstract,than%20130%2C000%20Texas%20prison%20inmates.
This one is the DOJ December 2020 report on the First Steps Act, which included information on screening, treatment, and accommodations for dyslexia. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was responsible for getting the provisions addressing dyslexia added to this act.
https://www.ojp.gov/Attorney-Generals-First-Step-Act-Section-3634-Annual-Report-December-2020
Here is an article from a North Carolina Health News newsletter:
https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2022/03/21/reading-through-the-lines-the-correlation-between-literacy-and-incarceration/
These provide some good starting points to get anyone who is concerned about literacy in the prison population thinking.
I would like to know more about the Consumer Info Ex. Please Email me at paradocs21@gmail.com
Will do. Email will come from my work email kwilliams@211oc.org. We are also part of ACES work group in Orange County.