Students in Broward County, FL reeling from the gun assault that killed 17 of their co-students and teachers February 14th, staged the first of a series of walkouts to demonstrate support for gun law reform. Students across the country joined them in solidarity. These young advocates are quickly learning how lawmakers of both parties have consistently blocked enactment of common sense gun laws over decades. Florida has extremely lax gun laws including no permit or registration requirements and no regulation of any kind concerning the sale of assault weapons of the type used in this most recent shooting event.
Survivors of the shooting are learning that the US tops the chart for most gun violence in the world. The Guardian reports that the United States vastly outpaces other countries in terms of volume and ease of access to firearms, and states:
More Americans have died from guns since 1968 than in all the wars in US history.
Despite these facts, government agencies are prohibited by Congress to effectively regulate firearms, or even track gun violence statistics. The Center for Disease Control is prohibited by law from assessing gun violence as a public health risk, and what little ability they do have to analyze the effects of gun violence in America has been willfully abnegated by most of the agency’s Executive Directors, according to the LA Times:
Infuriated by CDC-funded research suggesting that having firearms in the home sharply increased the risks of homicide, the NRA goaded Congress in 1996 into stripping the injury center’s funding for gun violence research – $2.6 million. Congress then passed a measure drafted by then-Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) forbidding the CDC to spend funds “to advocate or promote gun control.” (The NRA initially hoped to eradicate the injury center entirely.)
The Taihrt Amendment prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from creating a digital, searchable database to track firearms by serial number, incidentally hampering law enforcement efforts to connect guns to crimes. According to ABCNews:
Often, officers find themselves forced to comb through boxes and boxes of paper records, many of them barely legible, by hand. The antiquated system — which stretches the average processing time from hours to days — cost taxpayers around $60 million over the course of 12 years, the ATF Tracing Center estimates.
The National Rifle Association, which boast 5 million members, has a stranglehold on every public policy issue connected to gun ownership. It is an extremely aggressive lobby, working at every tier of government. If the gun lobby can’t get a national “stand your ground” law passed, it focuses on getting the law passed state by state, like it did successfully in Florida. That “stand your ground” law was used to justify the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
The National Rifle Association is trenchant in its denial that the ability to access guns has any relationship to gun violence. The gun industry increasingly markets military-style weapons to civilians, weapons like the AR-15 that was used in the Parkland, FL school shooting, and characterized any attempts at regulating these weapons as attacks on the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which upholds the right to bear arms.
Politicians at both the state and federal level vote consistently with the National Rifle Association, to deny common-sense regulation of guns.
President Obama put it very succinctly in this statement made during a Town Hall meeting in June 2016:
But with a conservative majority in Congress and many state legislatures, and a conservative President, the gun lobby has effectively halted gun reform initiatives many times, and no progress has been made. In fact, early in his tenure, President Trump reversed an executive order made by his predecessor which made it harder for people with mental health issues to access guns.
In Pennsylvania, reform advocates battle legislative initiatives to relax state gun laws. They focus not just on criminals using guns, but accidental death and suicide rates that increase because of access to a firearm, and they emphasize a well-known connection between deadly domestic violence and gun ownership. According to CeaseFirePA:
The chance of a woman dying in a domestic violence situation increases by 500% if there is a gun in the home.
CeaseFirePA, an organization dedicated to reducing gun violence, offers resources and fact sheets about gun violence in Pennsylvania, and actions citizens can take to influence their lawmakers to make commonsense reforms to the state’s gun laws.
