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Gun Violence: When Will It End?
Image by Giovanna Trabasso, NYU Florence Student Walkout on March 15, 2018.
Nicholas. Aaron. Scott. Alyssa. Chris. Jaime. Luke. Alaina. Martin. Joaquin. Peter. Alex. Helena. Cara. Meadow. Carmen. Gina.
Maybe this is a list of names from a school roster, or of students who made honor roll, or of members in a particular class. Maybe they are all Facebook friends or neighbors. Maybe they’re the names of students who play sports or lead clubs or make art. Maybe they’re teachers and coaches, moms and dads, sisters and brothers.
In reality, they were all of these things, and now, one more: victims of gun violence. This is a list of names that will never fully represent the weight of each human life that was taken on February 14, 2018.
In remembrance of the seventeen students and faculty members who died at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, NYU Florence students organized a walkout on Thursday, March 16.
At 3 p.m., approximately seventy-five students gathered in front of Villa Ulivi, in the rain, standing in an arc, and listened as Tia Glista delivered a short speech naming the victims followed by some inspirational words. Ward Hejazi then recited a poem that was written by Alex Schachter, one of the victims, called “Life is Like a Roller Coaster.” After a sixty-second moment of silence, students stood under their umbrellas until 3:17 p.m., when they departed for class.
The walkout was inspired by the events of Wednesday, March 14, when thousands of U.S. students from coast to coast demonstrated in a walkout to honor the victims and demand gun control legislation.
The walkouts lasted seventeen minutes, one minute for each of the seventeen who were killed, but protesters continued to rally after the time was up, even into the following days. Students made statements in several ways, including reading the victims’ names out loud and setting out seventeen empty chairs at which they stared in silence.
At one school in Los Angeles, students gathered on the football field and arranged themselves to spell out the word “Enough” that could be read from above. On Tuesday, March 13, the day before the walkouts, 7,000 pairs of shoes were placed on the lawn of the United States Capitol to symbolize the 7,000 children killed by gun violence since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty children and six faculty members were killed.
The walkouts served as a jumping-off point for continuing activism. On March 24, The March for Our Lives will attract thousands of people to Washington, D.C., where they will march to demand a comprehensive and effective gun control bill to help end the ubiquitous mass shootings and gun violence in the U.S. Marches will take place in cities all over the country as well, and even here in Italy, where two fatal shootings have taken place this year.
Students at NYU Florence who are from America are well aware of the culture of fear created by the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S., and those who are not American but have studied in New York have also felt firsthand the effects of hearing about yet another mass shooting in the country, where there is almost one mass shooting for every day of the year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker.
With mass shootings occurring this regularly, it makes it hard to argue, as many gun rights advocates do, that the aftermath of a tragedy is the “wrong time” to talk about gun reform. If this were the case, there would never be a “right time.”
In Italy, there is a much different attitude towards guns. Whereas in the U.S. one can purchase a firearm at a sporting goods store or a gun show with a few uncomplicated preceding steps, Italian laws require an extensive acquisition process including a purchase authorization, a carry license, proof of ability to safely use a firearm, a clean criminal record, and no history of mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse or other mental health issues. Even living with someone who may be suspected of using the firearm unsafely, due to mental health issues or a criminal record, is grounds for a refusal of a gun permit. They also don’t allow ordinary citizens to carry military-grade weapons like semi-automatic rifles.
The restrictions surrounding gun ownership in Italy make for few instances of public and mass shootings, which made this year’s two fatal shootings in the country a particularly disturbing shock to citizens. The first involved an extreme-right gunman who fatally shot six African immigrants in a drive-by shooting in Macerata; the second occurred in Florence, where a 66-year-old Italian man fired six shots at an African street vendor, killing him.
A tragedy like the mass shooting at this Florida high school should never be considered commonplace, but in the U.S., mass casualties due to gun violence are a regular occurence.
Since the start of 2018, there have been eight school shootings that have resulted in injury or death, according to research reported by The Guardian. Everytown for Gun Safety, a commonly cited organization that tracks all the school shootings in the U.S. regardless of mass death or injury, counted eighteen in total, including suicides and accidental discharges on school grounds.
On March 14, the same day as the walkouts, Vox published an article with seventeen maps and charts comparing the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. to other countries in the “developed world". Their findings, based on statistical information, proved that gun violence is “a uniquely American problem”.
Since American citizens’ right to own guns is constitutionally protected, one of the few countries in which this is the case (although the Second Amendment can be interpreted in various other ways, this is the government’s conclusion), the number of firearms in circulation greatly exceeds the number in other countries.
An argument of pro-gun advocates is that only those who are mentally ill or otherwise prone to violence will misuse a gun, and other citizens will solely use them for self-defense or “recreational” purposes like hunting. They argue that if the right to bear arms were restricted, these violent people would find a gun in another way and leave ordinary citizens defenseless.
If this logic were entirely sound, the number of guns in the U.S. would not directly correlate with the amount of gun violence. The number of violent occurrences would be aligned with those in other countries, as it is known that there is no greater prevalence of mental illness or other such triggering factors in the U.S. than in its counterparts.
America is the most homicidal country of all developed nations. According to Vox, who compiled United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for The Guardian, America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly sixteen times as many as Germany. There are 29.7 homicides by firearm per 1 million people in the U.S., with the next highest number at 7.7 in Switzerland, and the fewest amount in Australia at 1.4.
Source: VOX/Josh Tewksbury
In Switzerland, male citizens serve as minutemen militia; because of this, each man must not only learn how to use a gun, but must keep a gun in their homes at all times. This accounts for the higher prevalence of gun use in this country.
Though there are competing theories about the cause of this issue, reviews of research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center suggest that the greatest difference between the U.S. and other developed countries in relation to gun violence is that the U.S. simply has many more guns. At 4.4 percent of the world population, America is home to 42 percent, nearly half, of all civilian-owned guns in the world, according to UNODC Small Arms Survey.
There have been 1,600 mass shootings in the U.S. since one of the country’s most shocking and brutal massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Gun Violence Archive data states that more than 1,800 people have been killed and more than 6,400 wounded due to gun violence as of February 2018. This database keeps track of mass shootings, which they define as shooting instances in which four or more people were shot. Though mass shootings are often at the spotlight of the gun violence debate, they make up only a small fraction of all gun-related deaths, which totaled nearly 39,000 in 2016.
Further data shows a breakdown of the amount of guns per state in the U.S., and the corresponding number of firearm deaths.
Using data from a study in Injury Prevention and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones constructed a scatter plot chart comparing citizen gun ownership with gun deaths per 100,000 residents that showed a clear positive trendline.
For example, New York State, where roughly 10 percent of adult citizens own guns, there are approximately four gun deaths per 100,000 residents. In Arkansas, where 60 percent of adult citizens own firearms, the number of deaths is roughly sixteen per 100,000 residents. A state in the middle of the spectrum, like Colorado, where around thirty-four percent of adults own guns, the death toll per 100,000 residents is roughly twelve.
These findings are not isolated. “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in his book Private Guns, Public Health.
But instead of focusing solely on how the U.S. stands out, it’s also important to look at how other developed nations differ from each other in terms of gun violence. Findings from Josh Tewksbury of Vox show that Switzerland, the developed country with the next highest prevalence of gun violence after the U.S., has about 3.8 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people, with roughly forty-five guns per 100 people. In the Netherlands, where there are around three guns per 100 people, there is an average of less than 0.5 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. This is yet another instance in which a greater number of guns results in more death by firearms.
Furthermore, the U.S. is not an outlier when it comes to violent crime in general. The difference between the U.S. and the other countries is the amount of violent crimes that are homicides, a category in which the U.S. stands out.
Data compiled from the International Crime Victims Survey by Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University shows that America falls right near the average of violent crime in fifteen "industrialized nations", at 5.5 percent of all crime being violent crime compared to a 6.3 percent total average. But more of these violent crimes result in homicide and, more specifically, gun violence, than in any of the other nations studied,.
“A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime fifty-four times as deadly in New York City as in London,” said UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in a 1999 study, the same year as the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.
Other findings, also represented in charts, were that states with tighter gun control laws do in fact have fewer gun-related deaths, states with easier access to guns results in more police getting shot on duty, and that the majority of gun-related deaths are suicides.
A common perception may be that police shootings or mass shootings lead to the greatest number of gun-related deaths in the U.S., but in reality, most gun deaths are due to suicide. More than several studies and extensive research shows that easier access to guns increases the risk of suicide; 96.5 percent of firearm suicide attempts result in death of the individual.
Research in Australia showed that after the country limited its citizens’ access to guns following a fatal mass shooting, there was a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. Similar findings occurred in Israel when the military stopped letting Israeli soldiers take guns home over the weekend; the result was a 40 percent decrease in suicides, with the most prominent drop-off during the weekend.
Even the police, who have legitimate reasons to own guns, are at the receiving end of violence. The American Journal of Public Health found that “every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.”
This might just seem like a long list of numbers, but when you consider the gravity of one single human life, really think about all the complexities and moments, love and sadness, fear and accomplishments--in just one single life--and then multiply it by thousands, it’s sobering.
Many of the victims in Florida were just 14 years old, in their first year of high school. They were experiencing the start of their teenage years, their first tastes of freedom, their first sense of maturity. Seniors were applying to college, ready to embark on their passions. Their eyes were set on the future, full of hope and wonder. They were making plans for the rest of their lives.