The murders of at least 19 children and two teachers in a Texas elementary school have led to more calls for a coherent approach to gun and mental health reforms in the United States.
Shortly after his 18th birthday this month, the school shooter bought two rifles and 375 rounds of ammunition, according to Texas state senator. One of the rifles was found with the gunman on Tuesday after he was killed in a classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, a town of 16,000 people 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Jack McDevitt, professor of the practice of criminology and criminal justice, and director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University
It was the 212th mass shooting in the US this year, with four or more victims, injured or dead, and the 27th US school shooting. It came 10 days after racist mass murder 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
“When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” President Joe Biden said Tuesday night, hours after the Texas shooting. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why are we letting this happen?'
Jack McDevittA Northeastern professor who helped pass a new package of gun laws in Massachusetts says a starting point for overhauling US gun laws should include mandatory gun licenses, just as driver's licenses are required of anyone who operates a motor vehicle. vehicle.
“This kid in Texas could just walk into a store and buy an assault weapon and he didn't have to get a license,” says McDevitt, a professor of criminology and criminal justice and director of Institute on Race and Justice in the Northeast. “We in Massachusetts have proven — as have New York, Hawaii and other states — that requiring a gun license does a lot of things, including a background check, so you know the person is someone who should be able to get a gun .”
James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University
In response to the 2012 murders of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, McDevitt was tapped by Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo to lead the effort to strengthen the state's gun laws. DeLeowho is now a University Scholar in Public Life at Northeastern, passed 43 of the 44 proposals recommended by the McDevitt committee were signed into law in 2014.
“As a result, Massachusetts has become the safest state in the country in terms of gun suicides as well as gun homicides,” says McDevitt. But those efforts have failed to spread across the U.S., he acknowledges.
The need for a comprehensive approach to gun ownership is critical, he says James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern. in 2020, more than 45,000 people in the US died by gunshots, representing a 25% increase from 2015.
“This is why we need to enact stricter gun control,” says Fox. He adds, however, that mass shooters are difficult to detect and stop in advance. “These individuals are generally going to be able to get a gun no matter what [obstacles] we got in their way.”
Fox notes that legal guns were used in Uvalde and Parkland, Florida, where a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
“Should we expand background checks? Yes,” says Fox, principal leader of the Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Killing Database. “Would they have prevented these two shootings? No.”
The complexity of America's contentious relationship with guns is underscored by school shootings, says Fox, who argues that responsive security measures — which include arming teachers and surprise intruder alert drills — can be traumatic for the children.
“Since 2013, a total of 73 students in K-12 schools have been killed in a mass shooting with at least four total casualties resulting from injury or death,” says Fox. “I do not want to minimize in any way the pain of the families and communities who endure these tragedies. But given that there are over 50 million students in America, the odds are slim.”
Robert DeLeo, University Fellow for Public Life at Northeastern. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
“The irony is that these kinds of cases create the biggest push for gun legislation,” Fox says of school shootings. “But they are the least likely to be affected by this legislation.”
DeLeo says he developed an understanding of the resistance to gun laws after Sandy Hook, when he spent more than a year strengthening Massachusetts' regulations.
“I learned very quickly that it wasn't going to be as easy as I thought it was going to be,” DeLeo recalls. “I couldn't understand where people were coming from. I had visions of those poor second graders hanging out in the corner with their teacher and getting slaughtered. I learned later that some of the students were unrecognizable, that they could only be identified by the clothes they were wearing.”
Although a majority of Massachusetts residents were in favor of gun laws, DeLeo says they were in danger of being drowned out by a vocal minority with political support of the National Rifle Association.
“I decided to take it more to people,” DeLeo says. “I worked with churches, synagogues, schools – wherever people had me, I would go out there to try to stir them up. It was a silent majority with a very good bill, and to get it passed, a lot of people who were kind of quiet became noisy. They were active in reaching out to their legislators and making them feel like they were representing their constituents if they voted for the legislation.”
Instead of waiting for federal legislation that may never come, McDevitt says he'd like to see a grassroots movement across the U.S. to help people who may be vulnerable.
“If you think someone in your family is having a hard time, we should care about that person enough to take that person's guns away for a short period of time until everyone is satisfied that they are not going to be a danger to themselves. them or others,” says McDevitt. “We need an education campaign and additional mental health services to help people through that potentially dangerous time.”
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