Philly's gun problem is nation's gun problem
We, as a nation, have failed our children. We’ve failed the families of dead children. And we’ve failed everyone else who values public safety, civil society and the rule of law.
Pennsylvania's conservative lawmakers have repeatedly failed to pass tighter gun laws, and the story is no different nationally.
Currently, the state has no limits on the number of guns a person can purchase at one time, does not require reporting of lost or stolen guns and retailers are not required to notify police of suspicious buyers, nor is there a concrete definition of what constitutes a "suspicious buyer." This is left to the discretion of the gun shop owners, who, themselves, need as much oversight as the buyers.
Meanwhile, according to Giffords.org, Pennsylvania ranked 15th in gun-related public safety in 2022, far behind neighboring states New Jersey and New York, which, despite historically having some of the most crime ridden cities in the nation, have stricter regulations and better outcomes as a result. Go figure.
Fifteenth is still better than most of the South, the heartland and Southwest, but, living in a city where I'm told that nurses, of all people, are restricted from visiting patients in downtown Philadelphia because it's too dangerous, but this just isn't good enough.
But Republican lawmakers here and everywhere else will keep peddling the myth that regulations aren't the answer, that we ought to stick with enforcement because that’s the argument that mollifies their friends in the NRA and their gun-obsessed constituents, despite the fact that gun sales, firearm-related arrests and gun-related deaths in the state remain disturbingly high.
According to William Fritze, head of the Gun Violence Task Force in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office:
We take thousands of guns off (the streets), and we know that people are buying guns by the thousands. You’d need a massive amount of investigation power in order to do something … to see how many guns are actually going on the street that are straw purchases and are causing violence.
The state simply doesn’t have the manpower.
More than 510 people were killed in Philadelphia in gun-related homicides last year, and nearly 560 more were slain in 2021. These are record-setting numbers in a city that was already not-so-lovingly known as Killadelphia. As a state, we've done next to nothing in response.
More than 44,000 gun-related deaths were reported nationwide last year, and there were more than 50,000 each year between 2016-2018, according to information from the Gun Violence Archive. Mass shootings have become so frequent and commonplace that they barely rouse our attention before we're off to the next distraction.
Children have died, en masse, year after year for a decade, and yet, as a nation, we've done next to nothing.
As NBC News reported last year, the country witnessed 54 school shootings involving active shooters since the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in 2013, resulting in 101 deaths and more than 150 injuries.
According to the article, the “never again” rallying cry in the days and weeks after Sandy Hook quickly turned into “again and again,” as our lawmakers considered doing something and then did nothing.
Four months after 20 children were shot at Sandy Hook, then-President Barack Obama and the Democrats attempted to drum up support for a new background check legislation. The bill failed.
It only took shocking levels of violence, scores of dead or injured children and many times more mass shootings for Congress to finally do something with passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provides funding for mental health services for children, increases school security and introduces new measures to prevent those with mental health problems from obtaining a firearm. The bill drew support from a scant 14 Republicans in the House and 15 in the Senate.
President Joe Biden, in a speech last month in Connecticut, vowed to do more:
We will ban assault weapons in this country. We will ban multi-round magazines. We will hold gun makers liable.
While I hope this comes to pass, all I can say at this point is, “good luck with that.”
The modest gains in gun regulations since Sandy Hook has to feel like cold comfort for family members of the victims, as Washington has dragged its heels and kicked the can time after time after time and has now passed only the most modest of proposals.
If members of the GOP had the resolve, and well, the courage and requisite spinal columns, to stand up to the gun lobby and do the right thing, damn the consequences, many deaths could have surely been averted.
One would think, since members of the Republican Party like to claim the supposedly Bible-based, moral high ground for themselves, that taking swift and decisive action to ensure that fewer children would die at the hands of deranged gunmen would have been a no-brainer. But alas. Their real gods seem to be money, power, greed and raging gun nuts in the hinterland.
We, as a nation, have failed our children. We’ve failed the families of dead children. And we’ve failed everyone else who values public safety, civil society and the rule of law.
But hey, at least we have our freedom.