by Steve Prochniak
Steve is a political science major from Andover, Massachusetts. Steve’s experience in the military had given him an understanding of the practical aspects of the weapons he was trained to use, but his essay came out of a desire to understand the societal impacts of these weapons. Writing this essay both helped Steve develop a better understanding of this complicated issue, and helped him find his passion in exploring “issues and topics that face my community.” In addition to exploring these complex issues, Steve enjoys science fiction, exploration, and just hanging around in the city of Boston.
Firearms have been a significant portion of my career as an Army Military Police Officer. Blindfolded, I could disassemble and reassemble an M4, the military version of the prolific AR-15. However, in the last 20 years, the weapons of war have been turned on civilians at home. According to reporting by the New York Times, more than 40,000 Americans would be killed in incidents of gun violence in the year 2018 (Mervosh). Using my personal experience as a lens, I set out to discover the answers to the key questions: Who? What? When? Where? And most crucially of all: why? My search for information lead me many places; from roots and causes, to possible solutions. However, in order to break this down, we need to start at the very beginning:
In December of 1791, the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified. In its entirety it reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” (U.S. Constitution Amed. II). However, since the ratification, guns in America have changed. They’ve gone from a valuable asset to life on the colonial frontier, to a staple of our culture, both good and bad, in a civilized western power. Yet still, in the last twenty years or so, the culture of firearms is undergoing another evolution, as incidents and mass violence, and a recognition of the sheer toll of violence involving lethal force, has become commonplace in our media and prevailing conversation.
Much of the conversation regarding gun violence stems from the 1999 Columbine, Colorado High School massacre. It stunned the nation, due to the sheer violence and horror; which is perfectly captured in an Associated Press report, by reporter Solomon Banda: “The first SWAT team members to see the horror in the Columbine High School library had to step around bodies and ignore a wounded student’s plea for help as they searched for shooters they didn’t know had already died by their own hands” (Banda). Imagery like that left the national mindset scared beyond belief. Schools everywhere began to panic at every instance, as reported by Time Magazine that year:
A seven-year-old boy in Cahokia, Ill., is suspended for having a nail clipper at school. A 10th-grader at Surry County High School in Virginia is booted for having blue-dyed hair. A Minnesota high school nixes a yearbook photo of an Army enlistee in the senior class because it shows her sitting atop a cannon outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post (Cloud).
In a way, it was like a new virus, no one was certain how to react, and knee jerk reactions like that one were commonplace. Parents and faculty alike panicked and America was forever a changed place. Such would be the birth of the gun control movement.
However, it would be in recent times that the national conversation would balloon into the massive object it is today. Unfortunately, this would come in the wake of even more massacres, some even more devastating than the tragedy at Columbine. Instances of mass violence at Sandy Hook, Parkland, Orlando, Las Vegas, and many, many more would perpetuate an already volatile back and forth debate. Attempts by Congress and the President to regulate firearms failed, and left the nation wondering if there was any solution. In doing so, various organizations would gain extreme power and profit from the gun debate, such as the National Rifle Association (more on them later).
However, mass shootings are not the entire picture. As I had mentioned prior, there is a prevalent gun culture in the U.S. Using the 2018 small arms survey, the BBC News reported in October 2018, there were 120 firearms in the United States, for every 100 citizens (“America’s Gun Culture in 10 Charts”). This high weapons volume means they are readily accessible, and in that same report, using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations Homicide Office, that 64% of homicides in the United States involved a firearm (“America’s Gun Culture in 10 Charts”). Finally, using statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the BBC found that of 33,594 firearms deaths in 2016, 22,938 of them were suicides (“America’s Gun Culture in 10 Charts”). To many, these may just seem like a random assortment of numbers. However, one may observe an extremely troubling trend in the data: gun related violence in the United States of America is absurdly high, and getting worse. And, with a lack of any solution from the federal government this trend, as of my writing this, seems only set to worsen.
Having found myself at a point of understanding the general picture of gun violence in the United States, I had to take a step back. Violence is no stranger to me, but violence on this scale? It was sickening. I had answered the question of “what?” and the truth had horrified me. It’s clear that in the 20 years since Columbine the situation has only become more dire. That understanding left me with a new direction, from this point I found myself trying to understand: who was responsible for all this? And why?
As I mentioned earlier, the National Rifle Association has gained stature as the primary “gun rights advocacy group” in the United States. The organization itself claims to have about five million members, but according to the Washington Post, “Nobody really knows how many dues-paying members the NRA has, because it doesn’t publish annual membership figures beyond periodic allusions to ‘five million members’” (Ingraham). This discrepancy aside, they advocate on behalf of weapons manufacturers and gun owners, against any legislation that would limit legal access to firearms. After every massacre mentioned prior, the NRA is there to push against any reaction they would label as “anti-gun”. In doing so, they’ve become wealthy and powerful, as have the american weapons manufacturers who benefit from increased american weapons sales.
Alternatively, there is no centralized advocacy group for the victims of mass shootings, there is only that: the victims. In some of those more recent mass shootings, survivors and parents have banded together to bring change. Notably, the parents of children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and the Marjory Stoneman-Douglas shooting survivors in Parkland, Florida. Although their attempts at bringing legislation to pass through the federal government have failed, they remain public figures, driving for change. Together, the Parkland survivors founded the “March for Our Lives”, the leaders of which are cited by the Miami Herald as survivors “David Hogg, Emma González, Jaclyn Corin and Matt Deitsch” (Vassolo). Together, in 2018 they were awarded the Children’s Peace Prize for their efforts in leading youth activism.
However, those two groups, with all of their resources and power, exist in a cycle. There’s a shooting, it captures the national mindset, they rise, the public forgets, and they return to dormancy. So the question becomes, who does gun violence effect and harm on the day to day? Because if only a fraction of gun deaths are in mass shooting what’s actually happening?
Using data from the Centers for Disease Control dated 2017, the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation found that in almost every one of the 50 states, gun deaths per 100,000 people were far higher among African Americans than White Americans. In our own state, Massachusetts, that figure was 3.2 per 100,000 for Caucasians, and 9.3 per 100,000 for African Americans. These figures, comparatively, are not that high. By comparison, in Missouri that number was 16.0 per 100,000 for Caucasians, and a whopping 57.6 per 100,000 African Americans (“Number of Deaths Due to Firearms per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity”). In fact, this trend was continuous. In looking over the data myself it was easy to see that in poorer states such as Missouri, Kentucky, and Mississippi, these numbers were far higher than wealthier states, such as Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut. To quote David Leonard and his peer-reviewed academic journal “Illegible Black Death, Legible White Pain: Denied Media, Mourning, and Mobilization in an Era of “Post-Racial” Gun Violence”, “The relative media ignorance of the shooting tracks with a common theme: Gun crimes often occur in low-income neighborhoods with largely non-white victims” (102). Leonard’s issue is that media portrayal does not reflect the reality of gun violence. Often, they ignore the racial aspect.
Studies, like the CDC statistics, focus mainly on homicide. CNN’s Jacqueline Howard asked Corinne Riddel, “a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in Canada” who was a lead researcher in the study involving the aforementioned statistics, why the numbers may not give us the entire picture. She states,
The biggest limitation is that in our study, we only looked at fatalities, but non-fatal gun injuries make up a large proportion of the total burden of gun-related injury…When we’re talking about firearm suicide attempts, they’re about 80% to 90% fatal, but for firearm attempted homicides, they’re closer to being 20% fatal. So in our study, we’re missing most of the burden of firearm injuries associated with attempted homicide (Howard).
What that ultimately means is that, despite what we know to be true, African Americans face higher rates of firearms homicide, but none of the data we have can paint a true picture of the absolute depth and racial disparity of the issue. All of the data I see before me leads me to believe that gun homicide is an issue that unfortunately falls along racial barriers, however, as hinted at by Corinne Riddell in Howard’s piece, suicides are another extremely fatal aspect of the gun violence issue, and it’s one that in my time in the military, I have personally witnessed.
Suicide by gun is a wide ranging issue. However, the group it affects most prominently is not bound by race or color, religion or creed, but by their service. According to the VA National Suicide Data Report 2005-2016, there were more than 6,000 veterans suicides each year from 2008 to 2016. The statistic that is burned in my mind so much that it even pains me to write it, is that 69.4% of veterans suicides were related to a firearms injury. I’ve known some of the men who make up that number. The same report, using non-veteran suicides as a baseline, found out that firearms suicides only made up 48.4% of non vet suicide (8-11). There is a clear problem here, so the next big question is: How do we fix this issue?
Ask 10 people how to fix gun violence, and you’ll get 15 answers. If there was one clear solution to the issue, we wouldn’t be here. However, thus far, everything the federal government has tried to do to solve the issue has been ineffective. This problem is explored in depth in Alyssa Dale O’Donnell’s “Monsters, Myths, and Mental Illness: A Twostep Approach to Reducing Gun Violence in the United States” where O’Donnell specifically brings up the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (AKA The Brady Bill) as a perfect example of ineffective legislation. She writes, “[The Brady Bill] established a national instant criminal background check…However, because of the principles of federalism, state submission of mental health records to the NICS is voluntary, and states have been slow to submit records” (O’Donnell 3). This is a fatal flaw, because it basically means that criminals who have committed crimes at the state level may still have legal access to a firearm, which is counter to the entire point of the Brady Bill.
So if federal level regulation clearly isn’t working, what are some other possible ideas? In “Making A Killing” by Evan Osnos, he looks into several solutions that may work, and a few that don’t. One solution, popular with the NRA, is the concept of “guns everywhere” or that a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. However, in contrast, Osnos points out that “armed people everywhere has a seductive certainty, but having a gun at hand alters the chemistry of ordinary life— the arguments, the miscalculations, the perceptions of those around us” (45). That point is crucial, and one that, in my time as an MP, I cannot stress enough. Having a loaded firearm attached to my hip changed my perception of everything, and for an untrained person, that could make them a danger to their surroundings.
Another proposed solution proposed by Osnos is smart gun tech. In a nutshell, it would mean fingerprint sensors on firearms that could prevent an “unauthorized user” from flipping the weapon from safe to fire, and pulling the trigger. Osnos comments on the technology saying, ‘A smart gun would not prevent most gun deaths, but it could have a powerful effect on six hundred or so accidental gun deaths each year” (45). Sure, preventing an additional six hundred deaths is great, but I just found myself frustrated with this proposal. It doesn’t get to the core of the issue, in fact, none of them do. It won’t prevent most suicides, or even those mass shooters who obtain their weapons legally. Is there nothing we can do?
It was at that point I had come to a realization. There is no one size fits all solution, because there are too many angles to cover. If we are going to solve America’s gun violence we need many, many solutions working in tandem with one another: Smart Guns, the Brady Bill, state level gun laws, smart policing, all of these things working as one can make a difference. The problem is just coordinating the efforts at the federal level, and working our way down to the states. My position remains the same as it was at the start: We can’t continue to sit on our hands. As a nation we need to implement small fixes to solve the larger problem. However now, I find myself at a greater understanding of the problem, including those aspects I relate to, like veteran suicides; and those I don’t relate to, like the violence that the Black American community has to wake up and face every single day. The United States is facing a crisis, and we the people, in order to make safe our more perfect union, need to get together and start drafting solutions.
Works Cited
“America’s Gun Culture in 10 Charts.” BBC News, BBC, 27 Oct. 2018.
Banda, P. Solomon. “School Shootings Draw Attention to Officers’ Mental Health.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 17 Apr. 2019.
Cloud, John. “The Columbine Effect.” Time, Time Inc., 28 Nov. 1999.
Howard, Jacqueline. “The Disparity in How Black, White Men Die by Guns.” CNN, Cable News Network, 24 Apr. 2018.
Ingraham, Christopher. “Nobody Knows How Many Members the NRA Has, but Its Tax Returns Offer Some Clues.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 Feb. 2018.
Leonard, David J. “Illegible Black Death, Legible White Pain.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 101–109.
Mervosh, Sarah. “Nearly 40,000 People Died From Guns in U.S. Last Year, Highest in 50 Years.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2018.
“Number of Deaths Due to Firearms per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Underlying Cause of Death 1999-2017. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 11 Feb. 2019.
O’Donnell, Alyssa Dale. “Monsters, Myths, and Mental Illness: A Twostep Approach to Reducing Gun Violence in the United States.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 24 Jan. 2017, pp. 1–39.
Osnos, Evan. “Making a Killing.” The New Yorker, 27 June 2016, pp. 36–45.
“The Constitution of the United States of America”. Art./Amend. II.
VA National Suicide Data Report 2005-2016. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2018, pp. 1–11.
Vassolo, Martin. “Parkland Students Who Became Activists after Massacre Just Won a Prestigious Global Prize.” Miami Herald, Miami Herald, 20 Nov. 2018.