How you can stop mass shootings
Four mass shootings in California in the past 10 days have left many wondering why this is still happening and what we can do to prevent it. In the Southern California city of Monterey Park, 11 people were killed in a ballroom by a man who was a frequent patron there. In Half Moon Bay, seven people were shot and killed at two agricultural sites by a coworker. In Oakland, one person was killed and four injured during a gun battle that sprayed bullets into a crowd of bystanders. South of Fresno in Goshen, six people were murdered execution style at home in the middle of the night, including a teenager and her baby.
When confronted with violence on this scale, we reflexively search for motives. If we could only grasp what drove someone to do something so horrible, we think, maybe we can divert the next person heading down that path.
But motives for mass shootings vary widely, when they can be isolated at all. The Buffalo supermarket shooter targeted a largely Black community because of his racist and white supremacist ideology. The Isla Vista shooter attacked a sorority as retribution to women who weren’t giving him the sexual attention he thought he deserved. The Washington Navy Yard shooter believed the government was sending ultra-low frequency radio waves to interfere with his sleep.
While details on the recent spate of shootings in California are still emerging, one appears to have been an incident of workplace violence, another a cartel-style execution, the third an apparent gang feud, and the fourth a grudge over being socially excluded. What these perpetrators had in common was a weapon that allowed them to kill multiple people quickly without interruption.
We should take a cue from successes in suicide prevention and focus on how these events happened, not why. Like mass shootings, suicides are not the result of a singular upstream cause that can be remedied with a simple, discrete intervention. Depression is one driver, but more commonly, people who attempt suicide have had a recent breakup, job loss, fight with a family member, or other life stressor. Alcohol, insomnia, hopelessness, and chronic pain contribute to risk, as do systemic factors like poverty, marginalization, and social isolation.
Fixing this panoply of individual and societal problems is a lofty (though laudable) goal that takes resources and time.
In the short term, the best way to prevent more deaths is to ensure that people in a crisis don’t have access to deadly weapons.
In the United States, the majority of suicides are by firearm. Guns are used in a relatively small percentage of attempts, but the survival rate is so low that nearly all who attempt suicide with a firearm die. Restricting access to lethal means of suicide is one of the few tried and true strategies to reduce suicide deaths, regardless of the reasons that drive a person to attempt.
This can also work for mass shootings, and California leads the nation in legislation designed to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people. Our mandatory waiting periods give potential purchasers 10 days to cool down from angry, destructive impulses. Our risk-based purchasing prohibitions are grounded in evidence and extend beyond federal law: we prohibit people under age 21, those convicted of violent misdemeanors, and those who have been psychiatrically hospitalized for dangerousness.
Our “red flag” law allows for a court to temporarily remove firearms from someone making threats and prevents them from buying more. Universal background checks ensure these prohibitions can’t be circumvented with a private party sale. And there is a process in place to remove guns from people who purchased them legally then subsequently become ineligible to own them.
Given the events of the past few weeks, it’s tempting to believe that these laws don’t work. But they do. Our 10year prohibition on purchases by violent misdemeanants, for example, is associated with a 25% decrease in risk of subsequent arrest for a firearm-related or violent crime.
Gun violence restraining orders (GVROs, or “red flag” orders) can prevent suicides and mass shootings alike. In a study released just this week, the National Threat Assessment Center found that nearly two-thirds of mass attackers “exhibited behaviors or shared communications that were so concerning, they should have been met with an immediate response.” GVROs provide the opportunity — and the obligation — for all of us to respond to such behaviors: to say something if we see warning signs of impending violence. Our research group at the California Violence Prevention Center at UC Davis has studied nearly 60 California cases in which GVROs were used in efforts to prevent mass shootings; not a single mass shooting occurred in those cases.
We believe that the aggregate effects of these laws are reflected in the fact that Californians have some of the lowest rates of firearm deaths in the country, and a 25% lower risk of dying in a mass shooting than residents of other states.
The paradox of gun violence prevention lies behind our misperception of these laws as ineffective. We learn about, and anguish over, the tragedies they don’t prevent. But when the laws do work, nothing happens.
California’s prohibitory criteria, age limits, waiting periods, and background checks stop many high-risk people from acting on their homicidal impulses. Our GVROs provide a new way for ordinary citizens — concerned family members, scared high school teachers, terrorized co-workers — to report and deter those who slip through the remaining cracks.
Success at making nothing happen depends not just on policymakers, law enforcement officials, and health professionals, but on all of us.
Amy Barnhorst is an emergency and inpatient psychiatrist and associate director of the California Violence Prevention Research Center. Garen Wintemute is an emergency medicine physician and director of the California Violence Prevention Research Center.