America’s Gun Violence Is A Public Health Emergency, But Politics And The Courts Prevent A Proper Response

Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. Mass shootings are the most salient form of gun violence in the minds of people. But the problem runs much deeper. In 2021, more than 48,000 Americans died from guns.

These deaths are preventable. However, repeated attempts to introduce gun control measures have run into formidable opposition in the U.S. Congress as well as the judiciary.

Guns cut lives short

During the past decade, there’s been an alarming decline in life expectancy in the U.S. There are multiple causes, the most recent of which is Covid-19. But even prior to the pandemic, the U.S. exhibited stagnant or even a downward trend in life expectancy.

If we focus on conditions which disproportionately affect younger populations – and therefore have outsized impact on life expectancy – diseases of despair feature prominently in the past 15 to 20 years. These include drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease, and suicide.

Then there are gun deaths. There’s some overlap with diseases of despair, as about half of gun fatalities are suicide-related. Gun violence encompasses attempted suicide, suicide, homicide, violent crime, and unintentional death and injury.*

Gun violence is a public health emergency

Seen through the lens of public health, epidemiologists increasingly view gun violence as a disease. Public health is the science of reducing and preventing injury, disease, and death, while promoting the health and well-being of the population through use of evidence-based policies and practices. In light of this, a comprehensive and multifaceted public health approach is needed to prevent gun violence, one which addresses both access to firearms and the underlying factors – societal, mental – that contribute to gun violence.

There is precedent for successfully tackling public health crises in America, to eradicate diseases like polio, for example, and reduce smoking. Over the years, public health programs have saved millions of lives.

Politics and the courts

Perhaps we can learn from public health successes and apply these lessons to preventing gun violence. But then again, maybe we can’t. At present, the U.S. is bogged down by inertia regarding what to do about gun violence. In the current political climate, it’s nearly impossible at the federal level to pass even comparatively benign interventions into law, such as universal background checks, age limits, firearm licensing, and a ban on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines.

Two intertwining currents impede the adoption of measures to rein in gun violence. First, there’s growing distrust in public health, which lately has been much maligned in the U.S. The most obvious recent examples relate to the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps best illustrated by the backlash to the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and subsequently the opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

Second, in many jurisdictions the judiciary often adheres to the view that courts should no longer consider whether a law serves public interests, like enhancing public safety. In this context, a number of conservative judges have declared as “unconstitutional” virtually any federal regulation designed to curb gun violence, going so far as to assert that it is unconstitutional to keep firearms out of the hands of domestic abusers and defendants under felony indictment.

Taking an originalist position on the Constitution, a federal judge in Virginia wrote that the government failed to present “any evidence of age-based restrictions on the purchase or sale of firearms from the colonial era, Founding or Early Republic.” According to the judge, the lack of similar regulations from those time periods indicates that the “Founders considered age-based regulations on the purchase of firearms to circumscribe the right to keep and bear arms confirmed by the Second Amendment.”

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms. Nonetheless, it’s implausible that the Founders meant anyone has a right to any gun at any time.

After all, no right is absolute. Consider the First Amendment, for instance, which concerns free speech. It is restricted. Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection include physical threats, obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, and the list goes on.

Inevitably, rights come with restrictions and limitations. Why should the Second Amendment be any different? Well, it appears that for some the Second Amendment is somehow qualitatively different. The right to bear arms is idolized by Second Amendment absolutists: “Worshiped rather than understood, frozen rather than interpreted and contextualized.”

What other nations do

As other countries respond to tragedies with common sense regulations, America mostly sits on its hands. There’s hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and of course the obligatory utterance of “thoughts and prayers,” but little or no action. The contrast with what happens outside the U.S. couldn’t be starker.

Subsequent to two recent mass shootings in Serbia, President Vucic pledged “disarmament” and a moratorium on gun sales. Gun owners across Serbia have already turned in thousands of weapons as part of an amnesty program aimed at reducing the number of firearms in the hands of civilians.

This week, there have been several mass protests against violence, with tens of thousands of people taking part. A minister was forced to resign, and demonstrators have demanded the resignation of other ministers.

What’s conspicuous about the situation in Serbia is that this nation has firearm ownership and a corresponding gun culture that is fairly similar to the U.S. Yet unlike America, in Serbia the government acts swiftly.

From Australia to Norway, there are numerous instances in which just one tragic event involving guns precipitated government action.

Take the Dunblane, Scotland, massacre in 1996, in which 16 students were killed and a teacher. In the aftermath of the mass shooting, parents of school children in Dunblane were able to mobilize with the kind of effectiveness that has invariably eluded American gun control activists. In turn, this led to further tightening of gun control in the U.K. There have been no school shootings in the U.K since then.

In the past several years, the U.K. has had around 30 gun deaths a year. By comparison, in 2021 alone, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S.

In the end, however, this international data doesn’t seem to matter to some Americans. There’s even a perverse pride some people take in America’s unique status as a nation of guns. Americans make up 4% of the world’s population but own approximately 46% of the estimated 857 million weapons in civilian hands. One would think that being awash in firearms is not a positive example of American exceptionalism. But to staunch defenders of the Second Amendment it is precisely that: A reflection of a liberty that may not be infringed in any way, shape or form.

Consequently, America’s gun violence public health emergency is largely ignored. Politics and the courts are invariably preventing a proper response from materializing.