By: Former MA State Rep. Lenny Mirra
“Don’t do it,” my House colleagues said. “There’s no way gun owners will sit down with gun control groups to discuss gun violence.”
But I didn’t listen, so, when anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action demanded to speak with me, I asked if they’d be willing to discuss their concerns with gun owners. They were totally on board!
So, I formed a Gun Violence Working Group that met at different locations in my district, just to get a conversation going. This led to numerous meetings with MDA and from Gun Owners Action League along with fellow legislators, police chiefs, and anyone else interested in the issue.
It was helpful just to get the parties in the same room at the same time, if for nothing else than to see that the other side is not a bunch of monsters out to destroy the republic. But the group wasn’t formed so that we could sit around and talk, we eventually started to work on actual solutions, so I did a little research and found two experts right in our backyard.
The first was Michael Siegel, Professor in Community Health Sciences at BU, who took a public health approach to finding ways to curb gun violence.
Siegel was able to boil it down to a simple premise: we need to focus on the who, not the what. Controlling who has access to guns has much more impact on reducing gun-related homicides than controlling what guns people have.
His latest study shows that laws designed to regulate who has firearms are more effective in reducing shootings than laws designed to control what types of guns are permitted. He looked at state gun regulations in comparison with FBI data about gun homicides, gathered from police departments around the country.
It revealed that universal background checks, permit requirements, “may issue” laws, and laws banning people convicted of violent misdemeanors from possessing firearms are significantly able to reduce gun-related deaths.
The firearm homicide rate in states without background checks is 58% higher than in states with background-check laws in place. Conversely, laws regulating the sale of assault weapons are unlikely to have a large impact on homicide rates, because these weapons are used in only a very small proportion of homicides.
We also heard from Thomas Abt, Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy and Law School, who explained how we could reduce gun violence by 50% in the 40 most violent US cities.
He found that in most cities, about 4% of city blocks account for approximately 50% of crime. In Oakland, 60% of murders happen within a social network of approximately one to two thousand high-risk individuals – about 0.3% of the city’s population. In New Orleans, a network of 600 to 700 people, less than 1% of the city’s population, account for more than 50% of its lethal encounters.
This is the kind of research needed by lawmakers when drafting bills to address gun violence, or any kind of violence for that matter. And yet it was glaringly missing from the recent omnibus gun safety bill H.4885 put forth by Michael Day (D-Stoneham).
Like too much of what gets passed on Beacon Hill, this bill was pretty much drawn up in total secrecy, behind closed doors, and at over a hundred pages you can bet that few, if anyone voting for it, read it.
This is shameful, and, sadly, it’s par for the course in a one-party legislature that’s completely bought and paid for by its leadership who created dozens of phony titles that come with huge raises, which are used to buy their unquestioning loyalty. ◊