Protect communities: The “guns everywhere” agenda hurts already highly impacted communities.
The hallmark of the gun lobby’s move toward extremism since the 1970s has been passing laws to allow the proliferation of guns in public spaces. Laws that destroy the concealed carry permit system force guns into sensitive places. Enacting Stand Your Ground laws have eroded the concept of public safety.
Some communities suffer the ill effects of the gun lobby’s dangerous “guns everywhere” agenda more than others. Black and Brown communities that also suffer from increased causal factors like poverty(16) experience violence at rates that would be unthinkable in other places.(17)
Most policy-based solutions for urban gun violence, thus far, have resulted in further incarceration and disenfranchising of populations of color. In recent years, however, the emergence of impacted community-led, non-legislative approaches have flourished and the preliminary data is encouraging. These programs, which use a public health approach, fall into several categories: focused deterrence, in which group violence members are offered incentives to change their behavior; violence interruption, which uses credible messengers to stop cycles of violence; and hospital-based violence interruption programs, which provide wrap-around services for new victims of violence. When these programs exist without supportive legislation, they have trouble thriving. To reduce urban gun violence, significant investment in community-based solutions is mandatory.
For example, in 2018, Maryland created a funding plan that provides state and federally funded grants to community-based programs. Maryland’s law is the model for other policy support.
Protecting highly impacted communities also means undoing the harm caused by decades of unintended consequences. Efforts to serve Black and Brown communities resulted in over-policing. We encourage policing models to move away from the Broken Window theory of policing, which postulates that prioritizing the prosecution of low-level offenses would reduce violent offenses. Instead, entire communities were devastated by over-policing and mass incarceration, which only fueled gun violence.
Felons, unable to engage in the formal economy upon re-entry, turned to the informal economy and protected themselves by self-armament. Investment in community policing models along with reforming harmful practices and departments is critical to rebuilding trust in impacted communities.
16. Williams, D. R., Mohammed, S. A., Leavell, J., & Collins, C. (2010). Race, socioeconomic status, and health: complexities, ongoing challenges, and research opportunities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1186, 69–101. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05339.