Los Angeles high school student Edna Chavez proved to be one of the March of Our Lives’ most inspiring speakers on Saturday — moving the crowd to chant her brother’s name, Ricardo, as she fought back tears.
But Chavez did not represent the kind of gun violence that’s been attached to the march. Her brother was not taken in a mass or school shooting. Instead, as the Los Angeles Times reported, her brother, who was in high school at the time, in 2007 “was killed in a shooting outside their home” — an act of everyday gun violence.
“This is normal — normal to the point that I’ve learned to duck from bullets before I learned how to read,” Chavez said, in front of thousands.
This routine gun violence makes up a huge portion of America’s gun problem. In 2016 (the latest year for which data is available), there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths. More than 14,000 of those were homicides, and almost 23,000 were suicides. In contrast, the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people were injured or killed (excluding the shooter), tracked 456 mass shooting deaths that same year — about 1.2 percent of all gun deaths.
We know, however, that many of the everyday gun deaths could be prevented with stricter access to guns. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in the scientific journal Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to firearms can save lives.
Meanwhile, a recent review of the best US-based studies by the RAND Corporation suggested that, while much of the research is lacking, there is evidence that some gun control measures — background checks, child access prevention laws, minimum age requirements, and prohibitions associated with mental illness — are linked to reductions in injuries and deaths.
The research is actually a bit weaker for mass shootings, in large part because such tragedies are, thankfully, somewhat rare, making them more difficult to study. But the basic point is that we know restricting access to guns could prevent gun deaths.
Still, discussions about gun control laws only seem to come in response to about 1.2 percent of all gun deaths — the mass shootings — even though we know that all types of gun deaths are preventable. It’s just that the other types of gun violence largely go ignored in public discourse.
Why does everyday gun violence go ignored?
It’s hard to say exactly why Americans seem so apathetic to more typical gun violence, but there are a few potential reasons.
There’s still a lot of stigma around suicide, for one. As Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously told me, these deaths are often impulsive, driven by mental health problems, and enabled by access to guns — all things that could be addressed by public policy.
More typical homicides, on the other hand, can be a lot less visible than mass shootings. Most shootings happen out of sight and out of mind for most wealthy, white Americans, since so many of them occur in poor, minority, urban communities. In 2016, for example, more than 52 percent of murder victims (73 percent of whom were killed by guns) were black, even though black people only make up about 13 percent of the general population.
Meanwhile, mass shootings, the most visible gun violence of all, feel different: There’s a sense that they can happen anywhere, so they seem like a more relatable threat.
So except for local news coverage and conservative political pontificating about black-on-black crime, everyday deaths seldom get much media coverage and the public at large rarely seems to care.
And it’s hard to ignore the racial element here: The majority of Americans are white, and it’s possible they might simply care less about black victims. We know, after all, that racial biases make white Americans more likely to perceive black people as less innocent and as criminals, which may, in some people’s minds, make these victims more deserving of the gun violence in their communities.
The result is apathy and inattention. Even as Americans express justified horror at mass shootings, we by and large ignore the gun violence in our backyards. And that lets the pattern continue.
