America armed and dangerous. There are now some 40 million
handguns.
Firearms injuries represent an epidemic.
An epidemic of gun violence.
Join us in this campaign to reduce gun violence.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with another
mass shooting in America.
Good guy shooting off
316 people are shot every single day.
Gun violence a topic that's deeply divisive in America,
a country where guns are embedded in everyday life.
As of 2018, it was estimated that there are approximately
400 million civilian owned guns in America.
That means there are more guns than there are people
or cars in the US
By comparison, Americans own more guns per capita than any
other country,
accounting for about 40% of the world's total gun ownership.
And that number is likely to increase.
Since 2008, the US firearm industry's worth grew
232%, making it a $63.5 billion industry in 2020.
But the reason for division over gun ownership isn't just
because the US owns the most guns.
It's because it also has the highest rate of mass
shootings,
gun related homicides, and firearm suicides among similarly developed nations.
Our politics is just not being incentivized to pay attention
to the things that would actually reduce gun violence.
This is the job of public health,
to help the most vulnerable to stand up for them.
So how did we get here?
How has the right to own a gun become a
divisive American ideal?
And of all the proposed solutions,
what do experts say could effectively reduce gun violence?
In the US
around the 19th century, there were at least nine countries
that had the right to bear arms in their constitution.
But as years passed, most of these countries made changes
revoking or limiting gun rights.
As of 2021, only three countries cite the right to
bear arms in their constitution,
and the United States is one of them.
The Second Amendment activism was not at the centre of
early gun culture,
and for a long time
most people in the US own guns,
but it was really for hunting target shooting.
It was associated with masculinity,
so it was kind of a rite of passage,
but it was not about rights and the law.
The idea of gun control didn't really enter the national
conversation until
1934, following a mass shooting in Chicago.
Most gun regulation laws were passed without much opposition until
1968, when President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Gun Control
Act.
But this started to change years later when the NRA
became an advocacy organization centered on the Second Amendment,
bringing with it a huge influx of money.
It really changed after the Cincinnati revolt in
1977, when there was a coup inside of the NRA.
Second Amendment activists took the NRA over,
and then in the 2000s it switched again to being
a mostly Republican
gun lobbying organization. Nowadays the NRA spends between 2:00 to
$5,000,000 annually lobbying for gun rights,
and during the 2020 elections alone,
the association spent $29,000,000 in political campaigns
and we believe in freedom and liberty
and the right to keep and bear arms.
In 1983, the CDC really started looking at gun violence
as a public health problem when they created the Violence
Epidemiology Branch.
The NRA looked at this and they said
if you do this research,
it's going to end up in everyone losing their guns.
It's either the research or your guns.
You can't have both. You've got to decide
This was misinformation, but it was a powerful strategy for
the NRA.
Eventually, Congress deferred funding for gun violence research by passing
the Dickey Amendment in
1996, which prohibited the CDC from using federal funding to
advocate or promote gun control.
After its implementation, the CDC spent more than 20 years
without the resources to conduct significant research on gun violence.
It was a threat. It was a shot across the
bow that had big impacts,
particularly in the field of data collection.
If you're getting your data collection done by,
you know, a
private foundation or you know some other source,
you don't have what researchers have described to me as
the full faith and credit of the US government behind
it.
That makes it easier, if you have that full faith
and credit,
to get agencies and get states on board and get
that data collected.
The need for research was finally recognized shortly after the
mass school shooting in Parkland,
FL that left 17 dead in 2018.
A clarification was made to the Dickey Amendment allowing the
CDC to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.
This research is going to find those ways that we
can keep guns out of the hands of people who
shouldn't have them without infringing on the rights
of those people who should.
But in order to understand how we can potentially reduce
gun violence,
let's first dive into the numbers around it.
Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in America from firearm
injuries.
The US saw the peak of gun ownership in
1993, with an estimated 51%
of households owning a gun.
That same year, gun homicides also reached its peak.
You know, when all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail.
When you have easy access to guns and you have
lots of guns available to you,
more problems look like problems that can get solved with
them.
They're very much is a correlation between the number of
guns in a place and the number of gun deaths
in a place.
And that's something that you can see consistently across the
board
year after year. The places that have more guns have
more gun deaths.
But if you look at just the injuries and deaths,
you're missing a very big part of the problem.
For every individual life that's destroyed,
there's a family that's destroyed,
there's a community that's shattered.
The cost of anxiety, of fear and worry is tremendous,
and while most gun owners cite safety and protection as
the reason for owning A firearm,
research shows that having a gun in your home doesn't
necessarily keep you safer.
What we found was that
not only does having a gun in your home not
make you safer,
but it increases the risk that someone in your family
will be killed by a gun,
will be a victim of gun homicide,
and it increases it hugely.
Not by 10:15, twenty 25%,
not by 100%, by
200%. The risk that someone in your family will be
shot and killed with a gun triples,
and the risk that someone in your family will commit
suicide with a gun
goes up 400%. It's multiplied 5 fold
and suicides make up the largest portion of firearm deaths.
2/3 of all gun deaths in America are suicides,
and most of the people that are killing themselves with
guns in the US are older white men
who are gun owners. Then you have another one third
that are homicides.
When you're talking about the homicides and you're predominately talking
about younger black men,
and when you talk about women
being killed in homicides, you're predominantly talking about domestic violence.
When we shift to mass shootings,
they only account for a small percentage of gun deaths
each year,
but they've also become more common and more deadly in
recent years.
The politics of gun violence has,
you know, over the last couple decades really centered around
things like mass shootings,
terrorism, accidental gun deaths in small children.
But if you actually go and look at the data
again,
what you find is that those are not making up
the majority of gun violence deaths.
They're not even making up a significant minority.
ABC News combined forces with the Gun Violence Archive to
document a week's worth of gun violence and found that
in a single week in July
2021, there were more than 1000 incidents of gun violence
across 47 states.
That's about 1:00 every 10 minutes.
And in those incidents, more than 400 people were killed.
Despite the gap in federal research,
limited data shows that implementation of certain gun regulations and
laws have been effective at a state level.
For example, in Indiana, the Red Flag law has been
associated with a
7.5% reduction in firearm suicides a decade after it was
implemented.
Even other methods like permit laws or ceasefire programs have
had some success in individual cities.
But the research is mixed.
One study found that states can reduce homicide rates just
by implementing 3 laws.
Universal background checks are laws that prevent anyone with a
criminal record from buying a weapon.
May issue laws, give discretion to the police
to actually refuse to issue
a console carry permit. Violent misdemeanor laws basically prevent someone
who has been convicted of
an interpersonal violence misdemeanor from buying a gun.
We found that a combination of all three laws reduced
our homicide rates by
29% in 2019. It means that
4200 people would have been saved.
But none of these methods on their own are perfect.
And as some states loosen the reins on gun regulation,
expanding the research on gun violence could be our most
useful tool in reducing it.
Having more consistent data and more long term sets of
data,
those things really can help us find solutions.
Most Gunners actually support gun violence prevention laws.
Over 90% of gun owners support universal background checks.
They overwhelmingly support violence misdemeanor laws,
red flag laws. And really,
what's interesting is that they don't know that others do.
They're influenced by hearing the vocal minority
all the time. We can find ways to keep guns
out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them
without infringing on the rights of law abiding gun owners.
And that gives us so many ways forward.
If we work on it together,
if we use the science
and if we focus on prevention,
this is a problem we can solve.