Solutions:
Prevention is challenging, not impossible.
As horrific as it was — the crackling gunfire and the mayhem — many Americans will soon forget about the Las Vegas massacre. But the families of the 59 people who died in the concert chaos last Sunday night will remember. The loved ones of the estimated 95 others who died in gunfire the same day — unmentioned victims in the quotidian toll of “ordinary” U.S. firearm deaths — will remember, too.
Let their coming lifetime of heartbreak afford a moment of soul-searching for our country. What could we do to prevent mass shootings and meaningfully reduce gun violence? If we really could do something, then what is stopping us?
Preventing firearm deaths in the United States remains an elusive public health goal, for several reasons.
First, private gun ownership is highly prevalent, culturally entrenched, corporately sustained, constitutionally protected and politically radioactive.
Second, although our Constitution would brook no impediment to limiting the gun rights of truly dangerous people, our science cannot reliably tell us who all the dangerous individuals are.
Third, our 1960s-era gun-prohibiting criteria are both overbroad and too narrow, and we have few practical ways available to separate guns from risky people at risky times.
So, do we give up and get used to this? No.
Is there an easy solution that nobody has thought of ? Also no.
Gun violence prevention is like a jigsaw puzzle with a few missing pieces under the rug — challenging, but not impossible. Here are some pieces we could put in place. Fix the legal rules for buying a gun. To stop violence with guns, deny gun sales to people with violent records, including misdemeanor violent crime convictions and temporary domestic violence restraining orders. Too often, today’s fist and black eye become tomorrow’s gun and dead body. And with mounting evidence that problem drinking elevates violence risk, why not prohibit people with multiple drivingunder-the-influence convictions from buying guns? These gun purchase prohibitions could be time-limited: 10 years for violent misdemeanants, five years for multiple DUI offenders. Prohibit individuals from accessing guns for a period of five years after any brief involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.
We know that suicide risk is higher in people who have taken a non-optional ride in a police cruiser to a hospital emergency room, where a psychiatrist has found them to pose a danger to themselves or others. But many such cases do not progress to a gun-disqualifying involuntary civil commitment hearing. Our research in Florida found that 72 percent of psychiatric patients who died from gun suicide could legally have bought a gun on the day they died, even though more than half of them had a history of a short-term psychiatric hold.
To be clear, mental illness contributes little to the risk of interpersonal violence. Keeping guns out of the hands of people in a crisis — whatever its origin — might have a bigger impact. Pass a comprehensive backgroundchecks bill.
Conforming states’ gundenial criteria to reflect signs of risky behavior could save some lives, but many more if all gun buyers had to pass a background check. Enacting such a law is a job for Congress. States can do this on their own, but then they tend to attract unwanted gun traffic from neighboring states that don’t. Large majorities of their constituents across the political spectrum — hunters too — like the idea. Enact risk-based, time-limited gun removal laws.
Merely stopping a dangerous person from buying a new gun protects no one from the weapons that the dangerous person may already possess. Our national study found that nearly 1 in 10 adult Americans display impulsive, destructive, angry behavior and have access to firearms. Craig Stephen Hicks legally owned a cache of a dozen firearms when he shot three North Carolina Muslim young people in the head in 2015. Hicks frightened neighbors with his angry outbursts and display of weapons, but there was nothing they could do.
In 2014, a resentful and enraged Elliot Rodger shot and killed six strangers before ending his own life in Isla Vista (Santa Barbara County). Three weeks earlier, Rodger’s worried parents had informed police that their son had posted alarming videos and purchased handguns. Police had dutifully checked on Rodger, but found he had committed no crime and did not meet California’s legal criteria for an involuntary mental health evaluation. So they left him alone. Then people died. Later that year, California became the third state in the nation to enact a preemptive, risk-based, temporary gun-removal law that would have allowed police officers to search for, and seize, Rodger’s three handguns.
In Connecticut, the first state to enact such a law, for every 10 to 20 gunremoval actions, one life was saved through averted suicide. The law works because it tends to be applied to very risky people who own many guns. Also, gun removal from a person in crisis can open a door to timely mental health treatment. But even if the risk of self-injury stays the same, just taking guns out of the picture for any future suicide attempt could flip survival chances from about 10 to 90 percent. Do more to reduce social and psychological determinants of violence and self-harm.
Gun-violence prevention is not only about restricting access to lethal means.
We may never live in a world where no one is inclined to hurt themselves or others. We should not have to live in a society where dangerous people on their worst day have easy access to such an efficient killing technology as we saw in Las Vegas last Sunday night.
A piece here, a piece there. We might solve the puzzle of gun violence in America, and prevent many unpredictable shootings from becoming unimaginable tragedies.