Like the vast majority of Americans, I am sick and tired of hearing about another mass shooting involving an automatic weapon and the politicians who oppose banning the weapons that killed our kids saying in the aftermath, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim’s families.” These days, there’s a third act: Those same feckless politicians now like to insist that our gun death epidemic is actually a mental health crisis.
Wrong. As we approach the anniversary of the Uvalde school shooting, it is important we reflect on some basic statistics which frame the gun debate in a clear light. And those statistics clearly show that the scourge of gun violence in this country is simply not going to be solved by targeting the mental health problems of potential violent actors. That theory reflects the ignorance of those who oppose strict gun control—and their irrational and twisted thinking.
We are averaging more than one mass shooting in the United States a day since the beginning of this year. Most of those have been carried out with some form of automatic weapon intended for military use, where the gun has been optimized for rapid fire mass killing. There are approximately 200 victims of gun violence every day in the United States, resulting in 120 deaths per day, of which 11 are teens or children.
This has resulted in the leading cause of death of children in the United States now being gun violence.
As we cure any number of diseases that have caused children to die in the past, we as Americans have proven absolutely incapable of making any real progress in addressing child death by guns.
The data just does not lie. New York has much tougher gun laws than Texas, where the Uvalde shootings occurred, and it also has one third the number of gun deaths as a percentage of the population. Does that mean Texas has three times the number of mentally ill people than New York does? Of course not.
Or even more striking: In the UK, where handguns and automatic weapons have essentially been banned for over 20 years, that country had just 31 gun homicides in 2021—compared to 21,000 in the United States. Even controlling for the difference in population, that is an enormous gap. But it would be preposterous to think that the United States has that much higher a percentage of mentally disturbed people than the European country closest to us in traditions and demographics. Moreover, Britain’s statistics do not look very different than most of the other countries in the modern industrialized world.
We are the outlier.
As Fareed Zakaria of CNN points outIllinois has tough gun laws, but because the states that surround it do not, it has elevated gun deaths compared to other stricter gun control states. Conversely, New Hampshire, with its relatively lax gun regulation, has lower gun deaths than other similarly regulated states because of the tough laws of those states surrounding it.
The United States clearly has an abundance of guns—over 300 million, along with an estimated 20 million automatic weapons—and the sale of firearms have gotten laxer by the year. The Republican governor of purple Nevada recently vetoed a bill that would have required someone to be at least 21 years of age to be able buy a semi-automatic weapon. We have much tougher laws for an 18 year old to get a driver’s license.
Republicans like to argue that tightening security around our schools is the answer. But how is that going to solve a broader societal gun violence problem that affects malls, office work environments, places of worship, community parades, movie theaters, and just about any other place people convene? It is not even an answer for schools, as Uvalde proved, given that it had a school security force that proved incompetent and ineffective.
It’s true that mentally deranged people get ahold of firearms, but it is the easy access to firearms that lies at the heart of the issue. Identifying who may have a mental problem significant enough to engage in ruthless acts of violence will never be a sufficient form of deterrence that will reduce our gun death epidemic.
Both the UK and Australia solved their gun violence issues through a buyback program that required the government to confiscate guns. Our Second Amendment may prohibit the confiscation of all guns, but the automatic weapon killing machines that are primarily responsible for the heinous violence we are seeing in mass shootings could be solved by a program that requires taking such guns off the street.
Recreational hunting or home protection does not require a military weapon capable of killing dozens of schoolchildren in seconds. The Supreme Court may have ruled in a tortured reading of the Second Amendment that the Constitution allows Americans to personally own guns and that the right to carry such guns in public cannot generally be infringed, but it has not ruled that such protections extend to the ownership of killing machines intended for military use.
The real mental infirmity lies with the politicians who will passionately speak on the need to protect a six-week-old embryo from being terminated by abortion but cannot seem to propose anything meaningful when it comes to protecting a six-year-old child anywhere in the United States from gun violence. Yes, mentally ill people can commit some awful gun crimes—but it is that kind of thinking which is truly sick.
Tom Rogers is an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC and is the former CEO of TiVo. Currently, executive chair of Engine Gaming & Media, and a member of Keep Our Republic, an organization dedicated to preserving the nation’s democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
