Good afternoon Katelyn / YLE,
This is my first comment on your Substack (I upgraded to “paid” specifically to post it) and I hope it’s taken with the spirit of constructive criticism that’s intended. A few details about my background are included at the bottom* of the comment for context.
I think epidemiology can add valuable insights to gun violence policy; you’re very correct that your profession is good at systematically noticing patterns. That said, there are several pitfalls that need to be strenuously avoided if you all want to have the best possible impact in this area.
1.Lumping “children and adolescents” or “children and teens” into a single category.
A naïve 5-year-old playing with a carelessly stored gun at home isn’t anything like a 19-year-old who chooses to join a gang and gets shot in public by a rival gang member. When gun violence epidemiologists describe both of these examples as “firearm deaths among children” – and prominently tout that statistic – they look less like serious analysts attempting to notice patterns, and more like charlatans engaged in linguistic sleight-of-hand to get the general public too worried about their young children to be properly skeptical of the facts presented.
2.Too much advocacy for “point-of-sale” gun control (e.g. background checks, “assault weapon” bans, and most of the other items in the Vox list you link) when “point-of-supply” (e.g. prosecuting straw purchasers to deter others from helping someone evade the point-of-sale restrictions) or “point-of-use” gun control (e.g. stop-and-frisk to detect a habitual criminal carrying an illegal handgun) are what’s indicated by the analysis.
You’re correct that a lot of point-of-sale restrictions are broadly popular*. But they’re also, not without reason, frequently perceived as something imposed on rural and suburban Americans (who, as more frequent gun owners bear the cost of complying) by urban Americans (who support gun control most strongly). By focusing so much advocacy on point-of-sale restrictions, it needlessly alienates rural and suburban gun owners and supporters of gun ownership – something that’s only made worse by the extent of the rural-urban partisan divide.
3.Going wobbly in order to avoid noticing the racial patterns in gun violence.
Bluntly, young Black men – as a statistical average, not as individuals – are around an order of magnitude more likely than young men generally to be perpetrators (and victims) of gun homicides. It’s not necessary to give ammunition to racists by speculating about the “why” of this statistical fact, but the fact itself needs to be widely known – because any policy developed to engage with the concentration of violence, no matter how good in principle, can be inevitably be expected to have a “disparate impact” on young Black men.
Unfortunately, given the degree to which statistical disparate impacts are seen as always morally indefensible (as opposed to, say, indicators that merit follow up and might require a defense of the policy that created them), professionals go far out of their way to avoid creating them. Public health has been no exception to this.
Again, I hope this is constructive to our shared goal of reducing gun violence.
*My personal background relevant to this comment: I’m a center-right professional working in a heavily quantitative occupation who lives in an affluent, left-leaning large metro suburb, generally votes for Republicans, served in the military including two deployments to a combat zone, doesn’t personally own guns but has plenty of family and friends who do, married with two young children.
**To be open about my own positions: mental health restrictions, background checks, and red flag laws are acceptable with a devil’s-in-the-details caveat; magazine capacity limits and assault weapons bans are demonstrably worthless.
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