Tone down media, track magazine sales for fewer deaths
In my work at Ben Taub Hospital, one of only two Level I trauma centers in Houston, I help care for an extraordinary number of gun violence victims. I am the son of immigrants who refuse to touch firearms, but I am also a gun owner who took up shooting as a Boy Scout. I believe my background and training gives me a perspective on preventing mass shootings and gun violence that may find broad support in this divided time.
One way to lessen the number of shootings can be found in how media changed its reporting on suicides. To follow that example, which tamped down on copycats that occurred regularly after overblown coverage of suicides, news stories about school mass shootings should avoid sensational headlines and images of grieving family members, and they should not reveal the contents of a shoot-
er’s social media. This approach removes the attention and publicity incentive that many mass shooters crave, and mass shootings will become rarer.
The second proposal stems from a basic understanding of firearms — namely that a critical limiting factor in mass shootings is the number of magazines a shooter owns and is able to carry. Competitive shooters buy large numbers of magazines, but this is a small population. Rarely does anyone buy five or 10 magazines at a time or in close succession. This leads to an obvious screening tool, similar to that used for ammonium nitrate fertilizer sales, which have been tracked since the 1996 Oklahoma bombing. Anyone who buys a large number of magazines at one time or in close succession could be flagged for a police interview. To assuage privacy concerns, gun owner information entered in this database could be erased on a rolling basis every year, given that few mass shootings will be planned over such a long time frame.
I believe these approaches are superior to measures such as “high capacity” magazine bans, tracked ammunition sales or “assault” weapons bans. A thousand rounds of ammunition means nothing without magazines to rapidly load them. As for assault rifles, these are weapons with a range in the hundreds of yards and that use larger, heavier bullets. That limits how much ammunition a shooter can carry. Pistols, by contrast, can be just as lethal at close range and are also concealable. Note that Virginia Tech, the deadliest school shooting in the United States, was carried out with pistols. Finally, bans won’t work, if only because 3D printing technology enables production of untraceable “ghost guns,” which a California man under a court-ordered weapons prohibition used to kill five people in California last year.
Magazine-tracking and media coverage restrictions are two measures I believe will satisfy constitutional requirements and may actually help our nation reduce mass shootings, which, in fact, occur only rarely. Last year, 117 people were killed in mass shootings. As many as 15,000 other victims of gun violence were not. More than 95 percent of those people were killed with pistols.
Focusing on mass shootings is not helpful if it leads to laws that don’t fix the problem and that might make it worse, all at the risk of ignoring the biggest part of this country’s serious gun-violence problem.