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Ellen Alberding is president and CEO of The Joyce Foundation. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
The mass slaying of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers evokes a pain that is almost too hard to express. Compounding this pain is anger — anger at knowing that the deaths of these children, the families in Buffalo, New York, the churchgoers in California and the shootings that happen seemingly every day in Chicago are preventable.
My outrage is fueled by frustration with elected leaders who choose to ignore the will of the people to act on gun violence. It is a frustration that sometimes allows resignation to set in. Understandably, it is hard to be hopeful that things will change when, nearly 10 years after Sandy Hook, we are more awash in guns than ever before. The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other nation in the world. That is why we have the highest rates of lethal violence in the world.
And yet I still believe.
I believe in an America where we no longer have to live with the persistent threat of gun violence. Where we can send our kids to school and have them return to us unharmed. Where the elderly can go to the grocery store without having their twilight taken from them. Where we can enter houses of worship and not leave with empty thoughts and prayers for the dead.
For more than 25 years, The Joyce Foundation has invested in gun violence prevention research. And that research shows that change is possible. There are policies that can make a difference. The common denominator? Reducing access to guns.
Here are just a few things lawmakers can do right now to save lives:
Expand background checks to make it harder for potentially dangerous people to get access to a gun. Roughly 90 percent of Americans support this measure, and it works. When Connecticut strengthened its background-check permitting law, that state saw a 40 percent reduction in homicides and a 15.4 percent reduction in suicides. Another study showed that states with this type of policy, including Maryland, experienced an 11 percent decrease in homicide rates in their major city centers. In contrast, after Missouri repealed its permitting law and background check requirement in 2007, that state saw a 16.1 percent increase in firearm suicide and a 25 percent increase in firearm homicide.
Implement extreme risk protection orders that allow law enforcement to temporarily remove weapons from people who are identified as being a risk to others or themselves. In a 2019 study of California’s version of the extreme-risk protection law, researchers described more than 20 cases in which the orders had been applied, including threatened mass shootings. The authors concluded that policy can play a key role in preventing future tragedies. Another study of Connecticut’s extreme risk protection order law estimated that for every 10 to 11 orders issued, the policy prevented one firearm suicide.
Create law enforcement partnerships with community-based groups to intervene and reduce violence. A study of focused deterrence strategies, which combine law enforcement, community mobilization and social services to reduce criminal behaviors, showed that they consistently produced significant declines in shootings in several cities.
These and other evidence-informed policy solutions can have a meaningful, lifesaving impact on all types of gun violence, and all enjoy broad, if not near-universal, public support. Policymakers must enact these solutions now. We can’t wait any longer.
Record numbers of Americans have purchased guns since 2020. This comes as a growing body of evidence shows that gun ownership and possession is associated with higher risks of injury and death. And at any moment, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that is likely to expand people’s ability to carry even more firearms in public. I fear an even greater surge in gun deaths and mass shootings will follow.
We don’t have to live this way.
We have the tools we need to save lives, strategies that have been proved to work. The evidence supports these strategies — and so do the vast majority of the American people. Our leaders need to listen to us, follow the evidence and enact lifesaving common sense gun laws.
A vision of a safer America is still worth believing in — and fighting for.
