Reframe adolescent firearm fatalities in public health, not politics

As a future educator, making sure students learn and grow safely in and out of school motivates me to serve young adults well in their formative years — it’s all about the kids. I ground my teaching by valuing the students’ progress, their futures and their communities. One looming threat to the safety and growth of young students and their learning is the menacing presence of gun violence. 

My fellow education classmates, family friends or random acquaintances sometimes accept the threatening presence as inevitable. One peer even went as far as telling me, “Welcome to the profession,” following a lockdown during my student teaching. But, I need my students to live and learn without a norm of fear. The danger guns impose on students stretches beyond schools and pervasively towers over the lives of adolescents. 

Since 2020, firearms have been the leading cause of death for children between ages one and 17. In 2021, about 4.6 million children lived in homes that stored guns loaded and unlocked, even though firearms are the leading injury method of accidental deaths. In 2021, of the nearly 17,000 high school students surveyed, 3% reported bringing a weapon to school at least once during the previous 30 days.

As adolescents begin to experience a developmental stage of risk-taking, irregular impulse control and increased independence, guns are a dangerous and extraneous variable. Gun control’s political gridlock fails to remedy a weapon-based epidemic, so governmental officials must address the prevalence of gun deaths during adolescence as a public health issue instead. Americans can prevent incidental and intentional gun injuries, and this effort must move toward a scope of public health that promotes research, interventions and reasonable regulations. 

While politics traditionally act as an agent of change, the partisan approach to gun control continues to fall short, as numerous policies lose momentum on Capitol Hill. Mass shootings stretch back decades. While international governments have passed comprehensive gun control following such events, the United States has failed to do the same. This isn’t for no reason, though. Many pro-gun organizations incentivize American politicians to neglect any effort to pass laws that address gun violence. Additionally, guns are pervasive in America. Recent estimates place the number of civilian-owned firearms in the United States around 400 to 500 million. Politicians funded by pro-gun organizations in a country flooded with guns make political action or anti-gun movements almost obsolete. 

In a gun-loving country, we need a public health approach for treating firearm fatalities, and car crashes can act as a model. Since the 1970s, car crash fatalities have decreased greatly. Researchers cite a public health approach as justification for the reduction — an approach grounded in research-backed regulations on cars, drivers and roads, educating the public and founding organizations that enforced laws. As a result, drunk driving fatalities decreased, people wore seatbelts more and infrastructure and cars alike became safer.

Considering that gun technology is ingrained in American culture, experts can compel pro-gun parties to support gun control in the name of public health. Guns won’t disappear, so efforts should shift to making them safer, educating the public and introducing rational gun regulations. Logically, it’s impossible to take all guns away. Awareness of gun violence prevention must shift to implementing triumphant strategies that create nonpartisan cultural shifts regarding safety.

Woefully, fears and arguments about Americans’ rights to guns sidetrack the discussion around gun control. Petty conversation about the 27 words in the Second Amendment shifts focus away from the havoc that guns wreak on our society. In dialogues surrounding guns, people often try the appeal to emotions and stories. While this approach typically changes minds more than facts, the grief rising from gun violence still falls short of motivating American politicians. Rather than restlessly watching while American legislators twiddle their thumbs with gun policy, shifting the responsibility to public health arms of power can promote necessary change apolitically. 

Awareness of funding research-backed solutions to gun injuries can boost hope for the cause. The University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention runs substantial studies and interventions based on its firearm injury analysis. The institute prides itself on research, developing programs in communities to change behaviors about gun safety and tracking which policies reduce firearm fatalities. The institute’s arms of outreach include free programs for communities to interrupt cycles of gun violence. 

The institute’s extensive research also supports gun control laws that don’t necessarily ban guns, but inform how they may be safely present in our society. For example, red flag laws protect against those who are a threat to themselves or others from owning guns. Further evidence also finds that child access prevention laws could reduce adolescent suicides and accidental fatalities by one-third if half of families began safely locking guns away. In order to continue making research-based progress in communities and adolescents’ lives, institutes like the U-M IFIP must gain more funding and public awareness. 

Despite the feeling of hopelessness about the issue of gun violence, people generally agree across party lines about some gun control policies. A majority of Republicans and Democrats favor policies that restrict those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns and increasing the minimum gun purchasing age to 21, and oppose policies that allow people to carry guns without a license. For the sake of our young Americans growing up in a world of gun violence, using partisan agreements on gun control to inform a public health approach can make progress. 

Alienating people on whether they should have the right to own a gun distracts from creating regulations and interventions that will decrease firearm fatalities. No one wants kids to die from guns, whether on purpose or by accident. To best support adolescents during their tumultuous development period immersed in American gun culture, the approach to gun control must look through the lens of global health rather than politics. 

Meredith Knight is an Opinion Columnist who writes about education policy in her column “School is in Session.” You can reach her at [email protected].

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