In the US, the gun control conversation feels set in stone. We’ve fallen into a pattern: inevitably, a high-profile gun death leads to an outcry from the pro-gun-control crowd, to which anti-gun-control advocates respond with an amendment that’s existed since 1791. Partisan gridlock and interest group funding has made it hard to pass national legislation on guns, but our conversations share part of the blame. For as long as I can remember, arguments regarding gun control have relied on the same statistics, laws, talking points, and stories. These stale discussions seem unable to make a dent in the American gun violence epidemic–so what should we be talking about? For more productive discussions (and hopefully, solutions) I propose we make the following three changes to our conversations about guns in America.
Change 1: Talk about shooting rates, not gun-related death rates
The most common measure of harm done by guns is the number of gun deaths in a given year or area. This is the number most people are familiar with, the number that identifies cities or neighborhoods as most dangerous, and the number that tracks how gun violence changes over time.
Yet there is a glaring problem with measuring gun violence by fatalities: medical care influences which gunshot victims live or die. For example, while data on this subject is hard to find, one study found that only ⅓ of gunshot wounds were fatal [1]. This skews our perception of gun violence in several ways.
Before exploring how our understanding is skewed, I must acknowledge that it is hard to draw reliable quantitative answers to these questions. This is part of the problem. Gun-related deaths are tracked, reported, and compiled into reports; it is much harder to find statistics on gun violence or medical care for victims. Shifting the conversation toward gun violence rather than gun deaths could lead to more data on the true degree of gun violence in America today.
That being said, based on other medical advancements, it’s reasonable to assume that doctors’ ability to treat gun wounds has improved in the last 50 years. Thus, changes in gun deaths over that time may not reflect any meaningful change in the amount or severity of gun violence; it may instead reflect more people recovering from what would have once been fatal.
Second, because the quality and accessibility of medical care varies dramatically by community [2], communities with similar amounts of gun violence may have different amounts of gun-related deaths. This may lead us to think gun violence is worse in one city/neighborhood/group than in another, simply because people who get shot in one community get to a top-tier hospital quickly, while people who get shot in the other community die on the commute or on the operating table.
Finally, because US hospitals have the experience and equipment to handle gunshot wounds, comparing our country’s gun-related death rates to global death rates might not tell the full story. The US has more gun deaths per capita than other high-income countries [3], but there are several developing countries whose rates are even higher than ours. How might this statistic change if their medical care was as advanced as ours? How would our rates of gun-related crimes, injuries, or hospitalizations compare to those in developing countries?
Change 2: Broaden the focus beyond mass shootings
Mass shootings are terrible tragedies, and Americans are getting far too used to hearing about them in the news. However, compared to other forms of gun violence, they are uncommon. Because of their brutality, mass shootings leave a disproportionate impact on the national consciousness, but their victims account for only a fraction of the gun violence in America. According to the Pew Research Center, 48,830 Americans were killed with guns in 2021. If a mass shooting event is defined as an incident where four or more people are shot, there were 61 in 2021 (the most ever recorded in one year), leading to 706 deaths. By comparison, there were 26,328 gun-related suicides and 20,958 gun-related murders [4].
America has to find a solution for the ballooning number of mass shootings, but we also need to find a solution for gun violence in general. Proposed solutions for mass shootings (such as limiting access to automatic or semi-automatic weapons or arming teachers in schools) will make no dent in the tens of thousands of lives taken by suicide, domestic violence, or gang violence. These shooters tend to use different weapons and have different motivations than the mass shooters we hear so much about, and our gun control policies need to account for them. Focusing our gun control conversation on the most prevalent types of violence is the first step to those improved policies.
Change 3: Examine the racial implications of gun laws
As this article makes clear, I believe gun violence is more widespread than our gun fatality numbers report and more commonplace than our focus on rare mass shootings leads us to believe. In general, I want solutions to this crisis and I am personally in support of more gun control. However, as we propose and debate gun control legislation, we often fail to consider how the laws will be implemented. In particular, we ignore the effects implementing gun laws may have on people of color.
In practice, a ban on possessing a certain type of weapon is a ban on having that weapon in your possession when you are searched by authorities. Yet, as is common knowledge that minorities–particularly Black and Hispanic men–are pulled over or investigated by authorities at much higher rates than other people. One study found that Black people were blacks were about 95 percent more likely than white people to be stopped by police officers while driving and 115 percent more likely to be searched [5]. If laws are written and enforced incorrectly, the war on guns might end up having a similar effect as the “War on Drugs”, making illegal gun possession a party trick among rich white kids and a hefty prison sentence for young black men.
This effect is already observed with the gun laws in place today. The Harvard Law Review cites this sobering statistic: “seventy percent of all defendants convicted of federal firearms offenses were minorities” [6]. While the prevalence of gun violence among minority communities warrants discussion, it is beyond the scope of this article. this statistic certainly does not mean that seventy percent of all people violating gun control laws were minorities. Instead, it shows that law enforcement is already over-policing minority communities, and we have no reason to believe this practice would stop if we created harsher gun control measures.
Above all, the American gun violence epidemic cannot be left unchecked. Something has to break the stalemate that has permitted hundreds of thousands of people to die, and I hope that changes like these will pave the way, clarifying our understanding of the status quo so we can finally change it.
