GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Since a shooting this year in Buffalo, New York on May 14th at a supermarket that left ten shoppers dead, the U.S. has seen nearly 50 mass shootings since.
This weekend alone in Michigan, three separate shootings in Wayne, Saginaw and Kent counties left nine hurt and four dead.
“I think there’s some forms of gun violence where people are still outraged, these really high-profile, public mass shootings, but I don’t think that most people really understand that that’s not the majority of gun deaths,” said Lisa Geller a State Affairs Advisor with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. “I don’t see the same outcry for those everyday shootings; for domestic violence homicides, for community violence.”
Geller says every day in the U.S. an estimated 100 people die of gun violence.
This week in New York and Delaware, the legislature considered so-called red flag laws that would allow law enforcement to take away firearms from people who may pose harm to themselves and others. It’s something that’s been considered, but not passed, in Michigan.
19 states and Washington, D.C. have implemented some form of red flag laws and Geller says they decrease instances of gun violence.
“In general, states with more gun violence prevention policies have lower rates of gun violence,” she said.
One issue, Geller says, on studying the impact of gun violence is data collection. Because some states don’t accurately track their gun violence data, there’s a lag in getting accurate numbers.
“A lot of states don’t collect data, a lot of states don’t collect detailed data. And so if we don’t have data, we can’t really assess what’s going on,” Geller said. “We’re not really able to look at this problem in real-time because we have such a significant lag in data.”
Right now, Johns Hopkins is using CDC data from 2020 – the most reliable they have at their disposal.
For more info on the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, click here.
