Firearm safety begins at home
Guest Commentary |
Can you do anything about America’s problems? Not really
He is the author of 13 books including Uncommon Sense, the Spiritual Chocolate series, Grandpa's Store, Minister's Guidebook insights from a fellow minister. His column is published weekly in over 600 publications in all 50 states. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of any other group or organization. We welcome comments and views from our readers. Submit your letters to the editor or commentary on a current event 24/7 to editor@oursentinel.com.
Advocacy groups are pushing state Illinois lawmakers to pass domestic violence firearms bill
Illinois News Connection
Illinois enacted a "red flag" gun law in 2018 that gives courts authority to use emergency orders to remove guns from people who are a danger to themselves and others. However, Illinois has rarely used such emergency orders.
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How social media fuels today's gun violence - ‘All We Want Is Revenge’
Kaiser Health News
Juan Campos has been working to save at-risk teens from gun violence for 16 years.
As a street outreach worker in Oakland, California, he has seen the pull and power of gangs. And he offers teens support when they’ve emerged from the juvenile justice system, advocates for them in school, and, if needed, helps them find housing, mental health services, and treatment for substance abuse.
But, he said, he’s never confronted a force as formidable as social media, where small boasts and disputes online can escalate into deadly violence in schoolyards and on street corners.
Teens post photos or videos of themselves with guns and stacks of cash, sometimes calling out rivals, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. When messages go viral, fueled by “likes” and comments, the danger is hard to contain, Campos said.
“It’s hundreds of people on social media, versus just one or two people trying to guide youth in a positive way,” he said. Sometimes his warnings are stark, telling kids, “I want to keep you alive.” But, he said, “it doesn’t work all the time.”
Shamari Martin Jr. was an outgoing 14-year-old and respectful to his teachers in Oakland. Mixed in with videos of smiling friends on his Instagram feed were images of Shamari casually waving a gun or with cash fanned across his face. In March 2022, he was shot when the car he was in took a hail of bullets. His body was left on the street, and emergency medical workers pronounced him dead at the scene.
In Shamari’s neighborhood, kids join gangs when they’re as young as 9 or 10, sometimes carrying guns to elementary school, said Tonyia “Nina” Carter, a violence interrupter who knew Shamari and works with Youth Alive, which tries to prevent violence. Shamari “was somewhat affiliated with that culture” of gangs and guns, Carter said.
Shamari’s friends poured out their grief on Instagram with broken-heart emojis and comments such as “love you brother I’m heart hurt.”
One post was more ominous: “it’s blood inna water all we want is revenge.” Rivals posted videos of themselves kicking over flowers and candles at Shamari’s memorial.
Such online outpourings of grief often presage additional violence, said Desmond Patton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies social media and firearm violence.
More than a year later, Shamari’s death remains unsolved. But it’s still a volatile subject in Oakland, said Bernice Grisby, a counselor at the East Bay Asian Youth Center, who works with gang-involved youth.
“There’s still a lot of gang violence going on around his name,” she said. “It could be as simple as someone saying, ‘Forget him or F him’ — that can be a death sentence. Just being affiliated with his name in any sort can get you killed.”
The U.S. surgeon general last month issued a call to action about social media’s corrosive effects on child and adolescent mental health, warning of the “profound risk of harm” to young people, who can spend hours a day on their phones. The 25-page report highlighted the risks of cyberbullying and sexual exploitation. It failed to mention social media’s role in escalating gun violence.
Acutely aware of that role are researchers, community leaders, and police across the country — including in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. They describe social media as a relentless driver of gun violence.
Michel Moore, the Los Angeles police chief, called its impact “dramatic.”
“What used to be communicated on the street or in graffiti or tagging or rumors from one person to another, it’s now being distributed and amplified on social media,” he said. “It’s meant to embarrass and humiliate others.”
Many disputes stem from perceived disrespect among insecure young adults who may lack impulse control and conflict-management skills, said LJ Punch, a trauma surgeon and director of the Bullet-Related Injury Clinic in St. Louis.
“Social media is an extremely powerful tool for metastasizing disrespect,” Punch said. And of all the causes of gun violence, social media-fueled grudges are “the most impenetrable.”
Calls for Regulation
Social media companies are protected by a 1996 law that shields them from liability for content posted on their platforms. Yet the deaths of young people have led to calls to change that.
“When you allow a video that leads to a shooting, you bear responsibility for what you put out there,” said Fred Fogg, national director of violence prevention for Youth Advocate Programs, a group that provides alternatives to youth incarceration. “Social media is addictive, and intentionally so.”
People note that social media can have a particularly pernicious effect in communities with high rates of gun violence.
“Social media companies need to be better regulated in order to make sure they aren’t encouraging violence in Black communities,” said Jabari Evans, an assistant professor of race and media at the University of South Carolina. But he said social media companies also should help “dismantle the structural racism” that places many Black youth “in circumstances that resign them to want to join gangs, carry guns to school, or take on violent personas for attention.”
L.A.’s Moore described social media companies as serving “in a reactionary role. They are profit-driven. They don’t want to have any type of control or restrictions that would suppress advertising.”
Social media companies say they remove content that violates their policies against threatening others or encouraging violence as quickly as possible. In a statement, YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon said the company “prohibits content reveling in or mocking the death or serious injury of an identifiable individual.”
Social media companies said they act to protect the safety of their users, especially children.
Rachel Hamrick, a spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said the company has spent about $16 billion in the past seven years to protect the safety of people who post on its apps, employing 40,000 people at Facebook who work on safety and security.
“We remove content, disable accounts and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety,” Hamrick said. “As a company, we have every commercial and moral incentive to try to give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible on Facebook. That’s why we take steps to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line.”
Meta platforms generated revenue of over $116 billion in 2022, most of which came from advertising.
A spokesperson for Snapchat, Pete Boogaard, said the company deletes violent content within minutes of being notified of it. But, Fogg noted, by the time a video is removed, hundreds of people may have seen it.
Even critics acknowledge that the sheer volume of content on social media is difficult to control. Facebook has nearly 3 billion monthly users worldwide; YouTube has nearly 2.7 billion users; Instagram has 2 billion. If a company shuts down one account, a person can simply open a new one, said Tara Dabney, a director at the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago.
“Things could be going great in a community,” Fogg said, “and then the next thing you know, something happens on social media and folks are shooting at each other.”
Playing With Fire
At a time when virtually every teen has a cellphone, many have access to guns, and many are coping with mental and emotional health crises, some say it’s not surprising that violence features so heavily in children’s social media feeds.
High school “fight pages” are now common on social media, and teens are quick to record and share fights as soon as they break out.
“Social media puts everything on steroids,” said the Rev. Cornell Jones, the group violence intervention coordinator for Pittsburgh.
Like adults, many young people feel validated when their posts are liked and shared, Jones said.
“We are dealing with young people who don’t have great self-esteem, and this ‘love’ they are getting on social media can fill some of that void,” Jones said. “But it can end with them getting shot or going to the penitentiary.”
While many of today’s teens are technologically sophisticated — skilled at filming and editing professional-looking videos — they remain naive about the consequences of posting violent content, said Evans, of the University of South Carolina.
Police in Los Angeles now monitor social media for early signs of trouble, Moore said. Police also search social media after the fact to gather evidence against those involved in violence.
“People want to gain notoriety,” Moore said, “but they’re clearly implicating themselves and giving us an easy path to bring them to justice.”
In February, New Jersey police used a video of a 14-year-old girl’s vicious school beating to file criminal charges against four teens. The victim of the assault, Adriana Kuch, died by suicide two days after the video went viral.
Preventing the Next Tragedy
Glen Upshaw, who manages outreach workers at Youth Alive in Oakland, said he encourages teens to express their anger with him rather than on social media. He absorbs it, he said, to help prevent kids from doing something foolish.
“I’ve always offered youth the chance to call me and curse me out,” Upshaw said. “They can come and scream and I won’t fuss at them.”
Workers at Youth Advocate Programs monitor influential social media accounts in their communities to de-escalate conflicts. “The idea is to get on it as soon as possible,” Fogg said. “We don’t want people to die over a social media post.”
It’s sometimes impossible, Campos said. “You can’t tell them to delete their social media accounts,” he said. “Even a judge won’t tell them that. But I can tell them, ‘If I were you, since you’re on probation, I wouldn’t be posting those kinds of things.’”
When he first worked with teens at high risk of violence, “I said if I can save 10 lives out of 100, I’d be happy,” Campos said. “Now, if I can save one life out of 100, I’m happy.”
Editorial | Knock, Knock - Pew, Pew
As gun violence is rises to epidemic levels, many traumatized Americans now live in fear
KFF Health News
The national survey of 1,271 adults conducted by KFF revealed the severe physical and psychological harm exacted by firearm violence, especially in minority communities.
Nearly 1 in 5 respondents, including 34% of Black adults, 18% of Hispanic adults, and 17% of white adults, said a family member had been killed by a gun.
The survey “confirms that firearm-related injuries are ubiquitous,” said Dr. Selwyn Rogers, a surgeon and founding director of the UChicago Medicine trauma center. “For every person killed, there are two or three people harmed. These are people who have had fractures, who may have been paralyzed or disabled.”
Beyond causing physical injuries, gun violence has left many Americans living with trauma and fear, Rogers said.
Just over half of adults say gun-related crimes, injuries, and deaths are a “constant threat” or “major concern” in their communities. Black and Hispanic adults were more likely than white adults to describe gun violence as a constant threat or major concern. About 3 in 10 Black or Hispanic adults say they feel “not too safe” or “not safe at all” from gun violence in their neighborhoods. (Hispanics can be of any race or combination of races.)
Women also reported high rates of concern about firearm violence, with 58% saying gun-related crimes are a constant threat or major concern, compared with 43% of men. More than half of intimate partner homicides are committed with guns.
Parents are worried about their children as well.
About 1 in 4 parents of children under 18 say they worry daily or almost daily about gun violence, the KFF survey found, and 84% of adults report having taken at least one precaution to reduce their family’s risk from gun violence. More than one-third of adults say they have avoided large crowds, such as at music festivals or crowded bars, for example.
Gun violence surged during the pandemic. There were a record 48,830 firearm-related deaths in 2021, an increase of 23% from 2019, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. The increase among children was even sharper. Firearm deaths among Americans under 18 — which include those due to homicide, suicide, and gun-related accidents — increased 50%, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.
Guns have become the leading cause of death among children and adolescents ages 1 to 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The pandemic also coincided with a huge increase in gun purchases, which grew an estimated 64% from 2019 to 2020.
According to the KFF survey, 29% of adults have purchased a gun at some point to protect themselves or their families, with 44% of parents of children under 18 keeping a gun in the home. Yet 78% of parents in gun-owning households fail to follow safety recommendations, such as locking guns and ammunition, storing guns unloaded, and storing guns and ammunition separately, practices that have been shown to reduce the risk of thefts, accidents, and suicides.
Dr. Abdullah Pratt, an emergency physician at the UChicago Medicine trauma center, has lost a dozen close friends to gun violence, including his brother. His father never recovered from that loss and died about seven years later, at age 64.
“As soon as my brother got killed, he stopped taking his medications and started chain-smoking out of nowhere,” Pratt said.
Gun violence also wears away communities, Pratt said.
In neighborhoods with high crime rates, the daily drumbeat of loss can lead residents to conclude there’s no point in voting, going to school, or trying to improve their lives. “They think, ‘What am I voting for if I can’t have basic access to safety on a day-to-day basis?’” Pratt said.
And while mass shootings and homicides grab headlines, Rogers, the surgeon, noted that suicides account for more than half of firearm-related deaths in the U.S. and cause ripples of grief throughout a community. Researchers estimate that every suicide leaves at least six people in mourning.
Pratt said he feels guilty he wasn’t able to help a close friend who died by suicide with a gun several years ago. The man had recently lost a job and had his car repossessed and came to Pratt to talk about his troubles. Instead, Pratt spent the visit asking for parenting advice, without realizing how much his friend was hurting.
“There were no red flags,” Pratt said. “A couple days later, he died.”
Gun violence has also shaped the trajectory of Bernice Grisby’s life.
Grisby, now 35, was shot for the first time when she was 8, while playing on the swings at her school in Oakland, California. She was shot a second time at age 15, when she was talking to friends after school. One of her friends died that day, while another lost an eye; Grisby was shot in the hip and experiences chronic pain from the wound.
Two of her brothers were fatally shot in their 20s. Her 15-year-old daughter was recently robbed at gunpoint.
Rather than leaving Oakland, Grisby is trying to save it. She works as a street counselor to young people at high risk of gun violence through Oakland’s East Bay Asian Youth Center, which aims to help young people living in poverty, trauma, and neglect.
“My life is a gift from God,” Grisby said. “I am happy to be here to support the youth and know that I am making a difference.”
After school shooting last week, survey finds teens can obtain a loaded gun in under 15 minutes
Kaiser Health News
“That’s a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said Virginia McCarthy, a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.
The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another school shooting. On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was fatally shot in February while sitting in his car outside the school.
The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.
“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.
The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent’s permission?”
American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.
Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.
The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.
The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the leading cause of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.
Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.
Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.
“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”
While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.
“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said Dr. Shayla Sullivant, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”
Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study found that 70% of parents who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.
“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said Catherine Barber, a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”
If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.
The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.
“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.
Editorial | A step in the right direction
Gun control…does…not…work. pic.twitter.com/FUKE122djV
— SafeSuburbsUSAPAC (@SafeSuburbsUSA) January 6, 2023
Of course, there are some who believe gun control doesn't work and that criminals will commit violent crimes regardless of whatever laws are in place. They are correct, in my opinion. Logically speaking, there is no argument against that line of thought. However, one could reasonably argue with significantly fewer weapons available to the population over time, the probability of hardened criminals obtaining them to do dirty with them would be significantly lower. If the bill doesn't work, if we can't reduce the number of firearms available to the population, we can lean on the wisdom of former GOP governor challenger Darren Bailey and "move on."
Guest Commentary: Give women a fighting chance
Dr. Glenn Mollette is a syndicated American columnist and author of American Issues, Every American Has An Opinion and ten other books. He is read in all 50 states. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of any other group or organization.
This article is the sole opinions of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Sentinel. We welcome comments and views from our readers. Submit your letters to the editor or commentary on a current event 24/7 to editor@oursentinel.com.
Guest commentary: A country in crisis, we need a plan from our government
Dr. Glenn Mollette is a syndicated American columnist and author of American Issues, Every American Has An Opinion and ten other books. He is read in all 50 states. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of any other group or organization.
This article is the sole opinions of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Sentinel. We welcome comments and views from our readers. Submit your letters to the editor or commentary on a current event 24/7 to editor@oursentinel.com.
ViewPoint | There are a few things our culture needs to admit
Some big government types want new legislation severely restricting gun purchases. But it won't work.
Recently, a convicted felon walked into the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago and open fired with a rifle; another convicted felon with an extensive criminal history of weapons opened fire on Philadelphia police officers, wounding six; and a shooter, also a felon, killed a California Highway Patrol Officer.
Current gun laws did not stop these criminals who are already legally barred from possessing a firearm from using guns to attack others.
We should stop the feckless politicking and political correctness and admit that we have a cultural problem. We should look at the rise in secularization, family breakdown, drug abuse, mental illness, identity-politics and demand personal responsibility and accountability.
BTW - with the legalization of weed, the numbers of intoxicated drivers and deaths will certainly increase in the coming years, as will violence-related marijuana-induced psychosis.
Forgetting God and His ways have consequences.
Illinois Family Institute
Tinley Park, IL
Guns, knives, trucks and airplanes can all kill
Viewpoints
Terrorists proved on September 11, 2001 that guns are not necessary to kill 2,753 people.
Timothy McVeigh proved that a truck load of explosives can kill 168 people and injure 680 more as well as destroy one-third of building and damaging many others in Oklahoma City.
A man with a knife killed four people and wounded two others in Los Angeles last week.
A weapon of mass destruction can be a plane, an automobile, a knife, a gun or whatever an evil person chooses to utilize at a certain moment.
By and large the weapon of choice has been an automatic weapon capable of holding a high-capacity magazine.
Whether it was Las Vegas, Columbine, Charleston, El Paso, Dayton or sadly too many other locations to name, the weapon of choice has been an automatic rifle with high-capacity bullet magazines.
A truck can kill people but normally you can hear and see a truck coming. A knife can kill people but not as many as a rifle with a magazine clip holding 70 or more bullets.
An evil person can walk into a church, theatre, Walmart or school and immediately have a couple of hundred people huddled together as a target. He doesn’t have to aim. He just points the weapon and pulls the trigger. The gun acts like a sprayer of bullets hitting people so fast that running or dodging is almost impossible.
The shooter looks for scenarios where people are trapped with limited escape door opportunities. Thus a shooter with a bullet clip of 50, 70 or more has a potential of killing many people in just a minute or less.
This is why Congress must enact background checks, strict licensing for high-powered rifles and limit the number of bullets a clip can hold at one time.
However, here is the problem: What is the magic number? My ordinary pistols hold six shells and my automatic ones hold more, so what is the magic number of bullets that Americans will be limited to in one clip?
Will it be 10 or 15 or 20? Honestly, there is no right number because a skilled marksman will still be able to kill.
The hope is that maybe the ending of one clip or emptying of one pistol would give someone a chance to tackle the monster if anyone is still alive. Hopefully, someone in the room will have a gun and be able to stop the shooter.
I’m for limiting magazine capacity but it won’t eliminate terrorism and mass shootings. It’s a Hail Mary and our Congress has to do something but we have to do more.
Hollywood and network television has to change.
Universal Studios/NBC television is the biggest hypocrite of all. They constantly bark gun control and are negative toward the National Rifle Association yet coming out with a movie titled "The Hunt", which is supposedly about liberals hunting deplorables and killing them. This kind of junk is a huge part of the problem.
Hollywood, the music industry and video games makers must dramatically change their tone. Barney Fife in the Andy Griffith show carried a gun but he never made any of us want to kill anyone or hate people.
Guns, knives, trucks and airplanes can all kill. There are many other weapons that will kill massive numbers of people. We can’t eliminate them all. Our greatest need is a culture change.