Here’s what we’ve always known: Guns are the problem

Published 5:00 am Monday, November 4, 2024

Let me get this part out of the way as succinctly as I can: I am a proponent of nationwide and state laws that reduce gun violence.

Am I anti-hunter? No.

Am I opposed to this nation’s appalling rate of suicide by gun, and mass shootings in schools? Yes.

Over the years that I’ve been working in journalism, the big argument about gun violence, including suicide, is that if we did a better job of treating behavioral health, we wouldn’t have so many gun deaths. To which I say: Absolutely. I agree 100%, full stop.

Oregon has traditionally been at the very bottom of the states, as far as services for mental and behavioral health. (Our friends at Willamette Week noted that, “Oregon moved up three spots in Mental Health America’s latest annual report ranking the prevalence and access to care among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Oregon is now 47th. The reason: improving access to care.”)

That’s still abysmal.

A few weeks back, I got a chance to talk to a metro-area psychiatrist and an associate professor of psychiatry. The topic was anxiety but we got talking about guns and mental health.

I was interviewing Dr. Gen Tanaka, associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University’s School of Medicine, and Dr. Surya Karlapati. And both of them agreed on three facts: The United States has way too many gun deaths. The United States has way too many guns, compared to other countries. And Americans are not less mentally stable than people in other countries.

It’s a simple mathematical formula: X plus Y equals Z.

If X is the same for most countries (the prevalence of mental illness), but Y has a radical outlier (U.S. gun ownership per capita compared to other countries), then Z (gun violence) should spike broadly in the United States.

And it does.

Now a new research paper, led by another OHSU professor, put some real numbers on the theory that Drs. Tanaka and Karlapati shared with me.

This study, by far the largest in terms of countries examined — 41 of them — concluded that the United States had 20 times more deaths by firearms than the other countries even when rates of mental illness are the same.

“We have the same degree of mental health issues as other countries, but our firearm death rate is far greater and continuing to increase,” said Dr. Archie Bleyer, a clinical research professor at OHSU and lead author of the study (See story, page A1). “In most of the countries, firearms deaths are decreasing.”

The study found that firearm deaths in the United States have risen 23% since 2000 while dropping 27% in other countries.

According to the story by Ben Botkin of the Oregon Capital Chronicle, suicides account for most firearm deaths in Oregon, and young people often are the victims. In 2022, 488 people died from suicide by firearm in Oregon, according to Oregon Health Authority statistics. Of those, 127 of them were people younger than 35. Another 161 people died in firearm-related homicides.

Overall, 674 people died of firearms in Oregon in 2022, including accidents and interactions with police, according to Botkin’s well-sourced story.

There’s ample evidence that policies focused on reducing gun violence work. Such policies have proven effective in countries such as Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Israel. We know they work.

And it’s not impossible to pass common sense legislation in this country, despite how very polarized people are over the Second Amendment. (Which reads, in full, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The lack of a hyphen and the weird capitalization of nouns raises my hackles as a copy editor, but there it is.)

America was shocked following the shooting in a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 people, including 19 students, dead. After that, Congress passed a law to expand background checks for gun buyers.

Oregon has managed to pass several laws to reduce gun violence. Not every effort by the government to rein in gun violence runs into a brick wall.

The OHSU study found that the United States has 4% of the world’s population, but almost one-quarter of the world’s firearms, and half of all non-military assault weapons are in this country.

This is a fixable problem. It’s fixable without dismantling the Second Amendment, written by the founders of our nation who had no concept of an assault rifle, or Kevlar-piercing rounds, or 30-bullet magazines. (But who did have a need for a well-regulated militia.)

We need more beds, services and service provers for the state’s behavioral health crisis, and we need real parity, nationwide, between physical health and mental health services.

And we need common sense laws to reduce gun violence.

This isn’t an either/or. We need both.

Now.