“The decline of motor vehicle deaths in America over the past two decades is part of a broader trend that began in the 1960s. Ralph Nader’s seminal 1965 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed, catalyzed an auto safety movement that culminated in the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which set up the infrastructure for automobile safety.
From the 1970s onward, the NHTSA would maintained a database on motor vehicle-related deaths, make research investments, and provide safety certifications for cars on the market, incentivizing auto companies to adopt safety procedures. The work of the NHTSA and civil society groups like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety helped usher in a new era where safety features like seat belts and airbags became standardized. All of this, along with measures like universal state licensing of drivers and registration of cars, led to the decline in youth and overall American motor vehicle mortality. The CDC would eventually tout this decline as one of the country’s biggest public health achievements of the 20th century.
And as Lee recounts in the NEJM article, that progress continued into the 21st century. In 1998, frontal airbags became mandatory in all cars and trucks sold in the US. Other improvements like automatic emergency braking, blind-spot detection, side airbags, and rear-facing cameras also contributed to an improved auto safety landscape. “What we’ve seen is more than a half-century of efforts to make the automobile safer,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning and director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University.
If cars went one way with safety, guns went the other. Guns are one of the only consumer goods whose safety is not regulated by any government agency. Gun manufacturers are also very insulated from lawsuits, and perhaps consequently, have little incentive to design safer guns, such as “smart guns” that would only be operable by the users they are registered to. As Moss said, “We really have a Wild West approach to the manufacture of weapons in this country.””
“The problem is that there’s very little evidence that surveillance technology effectively stops these kinds of tragedies. Experts even warn that these systems can create a culture of surveillance at schools that harms students. At many schools, networks of cameras running AI-based software would join other forms of surveillance that schools already have, like metal detectors and on-campus police officers.
“In an attempt to stop, let’s say, a shooter like what happened at Uvalde, those schools have actually extended a cost to the students that attend them,” Odis Johnson Jr, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, told Recode. “There are other things we now have to consider when we seek to fortify our schools, which makes them feel like prisons and the students themselves feel like suspects.”
Still, schools and other venues often turn to surveillance technology in the wake of gun violence.”
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“Even more advanced forms of surveillance tech have a tendency to miss warning signs. So-called weapon detection technology has accuracy issues and can flag all sorts of items that aren’t weapons, like walkie-talkies, laptops, umbrellas, and eyeglass cases. If it’s designed to work with security cameras, this tech also wouldn’t necessarily pick up any weapons that are hidden or covered. As critical studies by researchers like Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deborah Raji have demonstrated, racism and sexism can be built inadvertently into facial recognition software. One firm, SN Technologies, offered a facial recognition algorithm to one New York school district that was 16 times more likely to misidentify Black women than white men, according to an analysis conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. There’s evidence, too, that recognition technology may identify children’s faces less accurately than those of adults.”
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“Research conducted by Johnson, the Johns Hopkins professor, and Jason Jabbari, a research professor at Washington University in St. Louis, found that a wide range of surveillance tools, including measures like security cameras and dress codes, hurt students’ academic performance at schools that used them. That’s partly because the deployment of surveillance measures — which, again, rarely stops mass shooters — tends to increase the likelihood that school officials or law enforcement at schools will punish or suspend students.
“Given the rarity of school shooting events, digital surveillance is more likely to be used to address minor disciplinary issues,” Barabas, the MIT researcher, explained. “Expanded use of school surveillance is likely to amplify these trends in ways that have a disproportionate impact on students of color, who are frequently disciplined for infractions that are both less serious and more discretionary than white students.”
This is all a reminder that schools often don’t use this technology in the way that it’s marketed. When one school deployed Avigilon’s software, school administrators used it to track when one girl went to the bathroom to eat lunch, supposedly because they wanted to stop bullying. An executive at one facial recognition company told Recode in 2019 that its technology was sometimes used to track the faces of parents who had been barred from contacting their children by a legal ruling or court order. Some schools have even used monitoring software to track and surveil protesters.”
“Even once you identify some details that many of the attackers have in common, such a large swath of the population shares these traits that the “profile” is fairly useless for prevention. Red flag laws circumvent that problem by focusing less on a type of person and more on a type of emotional and situational crisis — where the people involved aren’t necessarily “bad guys” but troubled individuals in need of help. Gill thinks of it as a public health approach, analogous to the way we treat physical health problems that are hard to profile.
“We know that raised cholesterol leads to heart problems. We don’t have the ability to predict who in the general population who already has raised cholesterol will go on to have a heart attack. So we put in place prevention policies to try to decrease cholesterol in the whole ‘at risk’ community,” he said.
For the researchers who study mass violence, what’s appealing about red flag laws is that these rules have the potential to shift the emphasis from a cut-and-dried checklist of dangerous traits to a more nuanced system that accounts for a person’s big-picture emotional state.”
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“these researchers supported red flag laws because they could create a clear plan of action for friends and family concerned about a loved one’s combination of emotional crisis and violent threats. It creates a place to take concerns, a system to evaluate those concerns and a means of mitigating them. That’s particularly true, researchers said, if national red flag laws are set up so that the system isn’t punitive. Ideally, the process would focus on helping a person get through to the other side of an emotional crisis rather than putting them in jail. It’s also important, the researchers said, to make sure the laws are focused on professional evaluations of overall behavior, not checklists.”
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“there’s some evidence this could work. An analysis of records from California, where one of the first red flag laws was enacted in 2016, found at least 21 cases where the laws had been used specifically because people around a person were worried about their potential to commit a mass shooting. As of 2019, none of those people had followed through on that potential. It’s impossible to know, however, how those risks would have played out if the red flag hadn’t been there.
But if those parts work together the way they should, then red flag laws really could be a useful tool for combating the segment of mass shootings that function like very public, violent suicides. “There’s an important piece when we interviewed school shooters and active threat cases,” Randazzo said. “They feel very strongly about two things: They have to carry out the violence, they have no options left, but they also don’t want to do it and hope someone will stop them.””
“In 2019, New York enacted an extreme risk prevention law, otherwise known as a “red flag law,” that can bar individuals who are believed to pose a danger to themselves or others from possessing firearms. New York state police decided not to invoke that law against the Buffalo shooter, who didn’t have a previous criminal record, but had made serious threats of violence. On Wednesday, Hochul issued an executive order requiring police to do so going forward.”
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“She also called on the state legislature to pass bills that would require police to report guns associated with crimes within 24 hours and mandate that semiautomatic pistols sold in New York be microstamped so that law enforcement can link cartridges found at crime scenes to the gun that fired them. And she announced the creation of a dedicated domestic terrorism unit within the state police, along with efforts to investigate social media companies that have provided platforms for hate speech.
The goal is to ensure that people like the Buffalo shooter don’t fall through the cracks again. When the shooter was 17, he said that he wanted to commit murder-suicide at his high school. He was required to undergo a psychological evaluation and referred to police, who decided not to take further action for reasons still unknown. So when he turned 18, there was nothing preventing him from legally purchasing a weapon. And he did. The weapon he used in the shooting was purchased from a store in Endicott, New York: a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that he illegally modified to increase its capacity.
Under New York’s red flag law, that never should have happened.”
“There is no evidence supporting arguments from pro-gun rights lawmakers that training and equipping teachers with guns will make students safer. A 2019 study by researchers at the University of Toledo and Ball State University reviewed 18 years of US school security measures — including placing more armed teachers in school — and found no evidence of reduced gun violence.
Denise Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, called the policy of arming school personnel “ill-advised.” Beyond substantial research linking gun accessibility and increased gun violence, firearms brought into school by educators “might be fired accidentally, the teachers who carry them might deliberately use them for unintended purposes, and, even more likely, the guns might end up in the hands of students,” Gottfredson told Reuters.”
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“The US is not the only country in the world where mass shootings have happened, but it is unique in how frequently these mass shootings occur within its borders.
In his widely-cited 2016 study, Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, analyzed data on global mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 and found that 31 percent of perpetrators in mass shootings worldwide during that time were American.
Adjusting for variables, Lankford also found that a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds of it having mass shootings. When it comes to gun ownership, the US is practically in a league of its own: the US population only makes up less than 5 percent of the global population yet Americans account for about 45 percent of the world’s gun ownership. It is estimated that US civilians own a total of 393 million firearms — meaning there are more guns in civilian hands than people.”
“Under the legislation, $750 million would be allotted over the next five years to help states implement red flag laws, which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed a threat to themselves or others. (Similar laws already exist in 19 states and the District of Columbia.) The legislation allows for the implementation of these programs through mental health, drug and veterans’ courts.
Republicans involved in the negotiations pushed to make sure no one is flagged without “the right to an in-person hearing, an unbiased adjudicator, the right to know opposing evidence, the right to present evidence, and the right to confront adverse witnesses,” as well as a right to bring counsel to the hearing.
“Under this bill, every state will be able to use significant new federal dollars to be able to expand their programs to try to stop dangerous people, people contemplating mass murder or suicide, from being able to have access to the weapons that allow them to perpetrate that crime,” Murphy said in a floor speech.”
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“While spouses, co-parents or cohabitating partners convicted of domestic violence are already banned from purchasing firearms, abusers in relationships between people who are not married and live separately are still able to purchase guns, creating the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” (According to Everytown, a gun safety advocacy group, about 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month.)
Under the new legislation, anyone convicted of domestic violence against a former or current dating partner would be banned from purchasing a weapon.”
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“The legislation calls for an expansion of background checks into buyers under 21 years of age, providing three business days for the check into their criminal and mental health history to be completed. If that background check finds something questionable in a potential buyer’s record, the legislation would provide for an additional seven business days to look into the buyer.”
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“The bill provides funding for expanding access to mental health services, including making it easier for Americans on Medicaid to use telehealth services and work with “community-based mental health and substance use disorder treatment providers and organizations.” And it would provide additional funding for the national suicide prevention hotline (since guns accounted for a majority of suicide deaths in 2020) while schools would receive funding to increase the number of staff members providing mental health services.”
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“The bill also provides $300 million for the STOP School Violence Act for increased security at schools, although some Democrats had expressed concern about this aspect of the bill.”
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“The legislation would also require more sellers to register as “Federally Licensed Firearm Dealers,” including anyone who sells guns to “predominantly earn a profit.” These sellers would in turn be required to run background checks on potential buyers and keep records of the sales.
The bill would also impose penalties on “straw” purchasers who buy guns for people who can’t pass a background check.”
“Cornyn hoped to get as many as 20 Republican votes for his legislation, which would enact new enhanced background checks on people younger than 21, grant states money for red flag laws and crisis intervention and close a loophole on domestic abusers’ firearm access. On Monday the vast majority of the conference voted against advancing the legislation, with 14 Republicans voting to advance the legislation and supportive Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) absent.”
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“Faced with a chorus of boos and a rebuke from the Texas GOP over the weekend, Cornyn got a taste of what the reaction could be on the right for Republicans who vote for the Senate’s bill designed to curb mass shootings in America. What’s more, on Monday evening the NRA announced opposition to the package crafted by a quartet of senators that includes Cornyn, whose A+ rating from the gun group is probably about to take a downgrade.”