Gun Violence
Darren Vu
Want to talk about gun violence? Look no further than our nation’s capital. With the exception of 2012, when the city recorded 88 homicides, there have been at least 100 homicides here every year since 1999, guns being the chief weapon of choice. As of Aug. 23, there had been 112 murders — up 14 percent from the same date last year — and with four months left in 2019. The District’s gun violence, however, doesn’t draw the same attention as homicides that have occurred in places such as El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, or in Las Vegas; Newtown, Conn.; Orlando or Parkland, Fla. Our shooting deaths are spread over months and come with a regularity that allows the media to treat them as though they are part of normal D.C. life. Mass murders that take place within the space of minutes tend to concentrate the nation’s mind and skew the nation’s perspective on death. Almost all our anti-gun-violence proposals are developed with such horrific shootings in mind: background checks; “red flag” laws; bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. Those measures, in my view, are reasonable responses to the slaughter. They, however, have little bearing on the District’s gun-violence problem.
Serious Dangers of Gun Violence
At least 29 people were wounded — six fatally — in citywide shootings over the weekend. On Sunday, a 17-year-old boy was shot to death in Chatham on the South Side. Later that day, two men were wounded, one fatally, in Garfield Park on the West Side. On Saturday, a man was killed in a drive-by in Bronzeville on the South Side. A couple hours earlier, a man was fatally wounded in another drive-by in Garfield Park on the West Side.Friday, a shooting left one man dead and a woman critically wounded in Humboldt Park on the West Side. At least 18 others were shot across Chicago from 5 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — From huge rewards to calls for allowing Missouri cities to enact their own gun laws, leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City are grappling with a troubling rise in shooting deaths, especially those involving children. This past weekend was especially violent. In Kansas City, four men were killed Sunday, including two in a drive-by shooting in a popular entertainment district. In St. Louis, six people were killed in shootings, including 8-year-old and 10-year-old girls and a 15-year-old boy. Many of the victims of violence in the state’s two largest cities are black, and black Missouri lawmakers are asking Republican Gov. Mike Parson to allow the House and Senate to consider during a special session next month legislation that would let cities adopt their own gun control measures. In a letter dated Saturday, state Rep. Steven Roberts Jr. a St. Louis Democrat who chairs the 19-member Missouri Black Caucus, told Parson that local leaders need the autonomy to act as they see fit on “this pressing crisis.”
Javier Amir Rodriguez's family was among the crowd of mourners who gathered in a high school football field Monday evening to release white doves to remember him and the 21 other people were killed in Saturday's massacre at Walmart. The 15-year-old was the youngest victim in a shooting that police say was committed by a white supremacist who drove hundreds of miles from a Dallas suburb to El Paso, Texas. Police say they believe the suspect had written a document filled with hatred aimed at immigrants and Latinos, warning of a "Hispanic invasion" of Texas. El Paso's police chief said Sunday that it appeared that the shooting was a hate crime, and federal authorities have said they're treating the shooting as a case of domestic terrorism. Among those killed were parents, grandparents and spouses from both sides of the US-Mexico border. The dead include at least 13 Americans, at least eight Mexicans and one German. Two victims had both US and Mexican citizenship. The last moments of their lives before the shooting began could not have been more routine.
(D-Texas), whose district includes the El Paso Walmart where 20 people were shot and killed Saturday, said it "was not accidental" that the store – where many Hispanic Americans and Mexicans shop – was targeted "In this country, we have a gun violence epidemic but we also hate a hate epidemic," she said Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week." "Until we deal with that hate and until we confront the weak gun laws that we have, we'll keep seeing this. The families in this community deserve better. Families in every community deserve better." Escobar said her mother lives just blocks away from Walmart, where two dozen people were also wounded in the shooting, and that her family shops there frequently. She described a bustling store with families shopping for school supplies and where "a lot of our neighbors and friends and family members from across the border come and shop."
Thoughts on helping the Ills
We believe that the problem of mass violence in the United States can and should be addressed in part from a public health perspective and that the tools of public health research and practice should be fully deployed to help end it. Just as there is no single intervention to reduce tobacco use or obesity, there is no single solution or “silver bullet” to end our nation’s epidemic of mass violence. Instead, successful interventions will come from all of us working together with community leaders, business leaders, government leaders, and public health leaders to create workable and effective solutions within neighborhoods, communities, states, and across the nation. Just as tobacco use prevention includes clinical interventions that support an individual’s behavior change and population-based policy change that reduces access to tobacco, preventing mass violence will require a combination of strategic interventions that protect and promote health and well-being at the individual and population levels. These include discussions about firearm safety and mental health, as well as community-wide conversations about how to prevent all kinds of violence. In addition to being Arkansas’s chief health officer, Smith is president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Fraser is chief executive officer of the association. Approaching gun violence as a public health problem? It’s encouraging from someone on the public payroll of a state firmly in political control of the gun lobby.
President Donald Trump says the U.S. should begin building more mental health institutions to combat the nation’s ongoing gun violence. Speaking to reporters before a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday evening, Trump said many other Republican leaders and the public don’t want “insane people, dangerous people, bad people” owning guns. “Mental illness is something nobody wants to talk about,” Trump said, responding to a question about gun control. “These people are mentally ill, and nobody talks about that. ... I think we have to start building institutions again because, you know, if you look at the ’60s and ’70s, so many of these institutions were closed.” Trump would later double down on those remarks at the New Hampshire rally, saying the U.S. will need to “build new facilities for those in need.”
