WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Tuesday discussed how to treat gun violence as a public health crisis, hoping to build on last year’s federal gun safety legislation.
“Across the country, gun violence is a public health epidemic,” Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the committee chairman, said in opening remarks.
Senate Republicans opposed treating gun violence as a public health crisis and argued that such an approach would violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on mental health.
“The fact is that firearms in the hands of a law-abiding citizen do not pose a threat to public safety,” said the committee’s top Republican, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.
Durbin said hearing from Democratic witnesses – from doctors to public health experts – would aid lawmakers decide how to expand the most comprehensive federal gun safety legislation passed by Congress over the course of nearly 30 years, known as the bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Any additional gun safety legislation will be an uphill battle because Republicans control the House and although Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate, they would still need to clear the 60-vote threshold.
The bipartisan safety bill was passed after 19 children and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 Black people were killed in a white supremacist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. There have been several high-profile mass shootings this year, including the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee where three children and three teachers died, and another Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people died and another 13 were injured.
A year of mass shootings
Durbin said Congress needs to get involved because the United States is unique in gun violence.
There have been 619 mass shootings this year alone according to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks gun violence in the US. Currently, firearm-related injuries include: main cause of death according to the New England Journal of Medicine for children and adolescents in the United States.
One of the witnesses questioned by Democrats, Megan L. Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, said she has a front row seat on the issue of gun violence.
“We are becoming a nation of trauma survivors,” she said.
For the United States to treat gun violence as a public health epidemic, the first step is to collect data on gun violence, Ranney said. With the data, she said, researchers will be able to find threats and predictions, and then learn what kinds of programs, such as violence prevention programs, can change those patterns.
She said the next step would be to scale up the designs that work and implement those practices in communities with high rates of gun violence.
Cornyn argued that gun violence and mass shootings are linked to mental health and asked Ranney how often this happens.
Ranney said research has shown that people with mental health issues are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, adding that “mental illness is deeply linked to gun suicide, which is the most common type of gun death in this country.”
“I think it’s worth noting that when we actually look at mass shooters, the extensive majority of them were in an identifiable crisis prior to this mass shooting, but only slightly more than the average population of Americans (that) were identified as having a grave mental illness ” Ranney said.
Another witness questioned by Democrats, Franklin Cosey-Gay, director of the anti-violence program at UChicago Medicine, said hospital-based violence intervention programs are critical to solving the gun violence epidemic.
“Violence recovery specialists conduct intensive case management, working with community-based violence interventions to ensure comprehensive recovery and reduce re-injury after discharge from hospital,” he said.
Cosey-Gay said this type of intervention can involve a multidisciplinary approach involving spiritual care, social work, child life specialists, mental health and hospital clinical staff.
New Mexico Executive Order
Several Republicans, such as Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina were sharply criticized executive order in September from New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, who declared gun violence a public health emergency.
A New Mexico source said the Sept. 8 order encouraged local mayors and sheriff’s offices to request “a declaration of a state of emergency and the implementation of temporary additional restrictions” under the state’s Riot Control Act.
The governor later changed the order that applied to parks and playgrounds, but that sparked a political firestorm from Republicans and a flurry of lawsuits.
Tillis, who was among a group of bipartisan senators who worked to pass federal gun safety legislation, said Lujan Grisham’s decision to declare a public health emergency takes us “further from developing sound policy.”
Cornyn said it was the latest attack on the Second Amendment.
“A group of our colleagues … and I have written to the Department of Justice asking them to intervene and protect the constitutional rights of New Mexicans to carry firearms outside the home,” he said. “What constitutional law is is something…some of our colleagues consistently overlook.”
