Caitlin Clarkson Pereira & Devin Hughes
caitlin@gvpedia.org & devin@gvpedia.org
Misinformation is deadly. In the span of a week, 18 people have lost their lives in two high profile mass shootings because Americans have been deceived into believing that guns make us safer.
While the motives, locations, and targets of the Atlanta and Boulder shootings differ and are still being investigated, both share a hauntingly familiar thread: easy access to lethal weaponry. The Atlanta shooter bought his handgun mere hours before he fatally shot eight people. The Boulder shooter bought an AR-556, an assault style weapon, days before taking 10 lives. And why can these killers so easily access weapons? Because 6 in 10 American’s believe that a firearm in the home makes them safer and 56% feel that more firearms in public would make society safer, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The widespread myth that guns make us safer is killing us.
In 2020, GVPedia published a report that found that weak gun laws lead to 50% more gun deaths from mass shootings (defined as 4 or more people shot). Using 2013–2019 data provided by the Gun Violence Archive, we noted with alarm that the number of annual mass shootings had dramatically risen from 254 in 2013 to 418 in 2019, a 65% increase. Since then, the crisis has only worsened, with 611 mass shootings recorded in 2020, representing a harrowing 140% increase since 2013. The shooting in Boulder was already the 102nd mass shooting in 2021, a new record for this time of year.
It is only after mass shootings that the debate over firearm laws heats up. As Senator Ted Cruz angrily opined in the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s hearing the day after the Boulder shooting: “Every time there’s a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders.”
Senator Cruz does have a point about ridiculous theater, but is wrong about its origin and direction. US policy on gun violence has been held hostage for the past several decades by a cavalcade of falsehoods and myths, many of which were present at the aforementioned committee hearing.
Most prominent among these is the myth that firearms are used millions of times each year in self-defense. This statistic is then used to bolster the idea that to prevent tragedies, such as those in Atlanta and Boulder, the US needs more good guys with guns to stop bad guys with guns. However, the widespread defensive gun use myth is based on decades-old surveys that suffer from catastrophic methodological flaws and have been repeatedly debunked. Instead, the evidence from the Gun Violence Archive finds that there are only approximately 2,000 verified defensive gun uses annually, far fewer than the more than 40,000 gun deaths and tens of thousands more injuries and abusive uses annually.
Legislators buying into these myths have contributed to the gridlock in Washington. Today, as we face the consequences of inaction, the academic research conclusively demonstrates that popular laws including universal background checks, closing the Charleston loophole, and an assault weapons ban are only a first step on the path to substantially reducing gun violence. The Denver Accord, named to remember the Columbine shooting, is a comprehensive package of evidence-based policies and programs that is desperately needed. Similar comprehensive reforms were promised during the Presidential campaign but have yet to be fully proposed in legislation.
Strong federal action on Firearms Licensing, Extreme Risk Protection Orders, requiring safe storage of firearms, fully funding community led programs, and much more are also going to be needed to stem the tide of violence. Ending the PLCAA and Tiahrt Amendments that provided unprecedented protections for bad actors in the firearms industry along with fixing the panoply of deliberate loopholes that have crippled effective enforcement of gun laws will also be crucial to helping our country recover. It is worth noting that none of these measures require banning all guns.
Rejecting myths and proposing evidence-based, comprehensive solutions to end gun violence is not asking the impossible; it is the bare minimum we can do to honor the tens of thousands of lives needlessly lost every year. We have a duty to overcome the gridlock created by decades of believing the false narrative that guns make society safer. We owe it to the lives lost, and the survivors living in fear and grief, to enact policies and programs proven to save lives. Continued carnage is the price of inaction.
