Gun-control advocates light on ammo
Debate should refocus on more fruitful avenues
These are gruesomely interesting times in the American gun debate. The footage of Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez killing motorist Philando Castile wasn’t enough to convict him in a court of law, but it’s no less damning for that. The more these videos pile up, the harder it gets to rationalize American police forces’ objectively insane collective death count.
The circumstances of Castile’s death are particularly enraging for gun rights activists — or, rather, they ought to be. Castile calmly informed Yanez he was legally armed, just as he should have; Yanez freaked out and, seconds later, pumped seven bullets into the car. By rights, many have observed, the NRA should be leading marches through the Twin Cities. Instead it’s saying and doing bugger all. Not a good look.
On the other side of the great divide, the gun control movement is almost in hibernation — and understandably so. Theirs is a tough climb at the best of times; with a Republican House and Senate it’s a sheer cliff. In an interview with NPR after the attack on Republican lawmakers in Virginia last week, Mark Kelly, wife of the very- nearly- assassinated Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, said advocates were just trying to hold the fort against legislation that might make matters even worse: current proposals include loosened restrictions on concealed carry permits, gun-free schools and silencers.
A study in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics statistically profiles the child victims of America’s gun culture. Between 2012 and 2014, it finds an average of 1,297 child deaths from firearms injuries. That puts gunshots in third place on the cause- of- death table; second when it comes to injury- related deaths, behind only car accidents.
The report usefully illustrates where the meat of the problem is and where it isn’t. Notably, it is not in headline-gobbling mass shootings in public places. In the years studied, in total, around 30 children died in school shootings; 20 of them were at Sandy Hook. The total death count for children under 13 over that time was 687.
Reporting from 17 states suggests 22 per cent of those deaths might have been unintentional — “playing with guns,” so to speak, plus a few hunting and shooting range accidents. Ten per cent were suicides. And the rest, while classified “homicide,” were overwhelmingly incidents of domestic violence — either deliberate familicide or collateral damage.
Some commentators complain the study inflates or distorts the issue by lumping in 16- and 17- year- olds, whose gun deaths are much more likely to involve criminality, with the far less common and circumstantially different deaths of younger children. But it’s not a simple matter of lumping thugs in with kiddos. In fact, fewer deaths among 13- to-17- yearolds are classified homicide than 0- to-12- year- olds. Suicide, representing 44 per cent of gun- related deaths among 13- to- 17- year- olds, makes up the gap. The problem is more similar among older and younger children than it is different.
Gun control legislation could put a dent in all this, no question. “We (could) live in a safer place if we kept guns out of the hands of people that shouldn’t have them — domestic abusers, felons, people who are dan- gerously mentally ill, even suspected terrorists,” Kelly told NPR. The question of domestic violence looms especially large here, the study shows: “The vast majority of younger children ( 85 per cent) were killed in a home.” In roughly half of cases, there were multiple victims; 42 per cent of the perpetrators committed suicide.
But as I have argued be- fore, with or without legisl ation, basic gun safety measures — safes, l ocks, unloading the damn thing — would easily make as big a dent. Such measures would save scores of children from accidents and from suicide ( if only by removing the easiest means of committing it). Deft public health campaigns and interventions by family physicians might convince families struggling with violence and mental health issues to take basic (or more-than-basic) precautions.
It’s important to keep all this in perspective. The problem is not getting worse: child firearm homicides and accidental deaths declined significantly from 2007 to 2014, the study found ( though child firearm suicides increased). And guns aren’t the leading killer of younger children. “Kids ten and under are more than three times as likely to drown as to die from a gunshot ( accidental or otherwise),” Robert Verbruggen noted at National Review, “and more than four times as likely to die in a car accident.”
Of course, road safety and water safety have been the subjects of decades- long public health campaigns, and they have paid huge dividends in the form of much lower death rates. Some of that was legislation, too. But it simply isn’t in the cards for guns, federally at least, and there’s little point complaining about it. This dispiriting time for gun control advocates is also an opportunity to refocus their efforts in more plausible and unambiguously fruitful directions.