Looking for Hope in the Face of Tragedy

Last week, a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 in a series of shootings in Lewiston, Maine. The shooting is the latest in a country where such tragedies have become sadly routine. There have been over 580 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year. Nearly 36,200 people have been killed by guns, and over 31,200 have been injured by them in 2023. Mass shootings this year include a shooting in Goshen, California, which killed six people, a shooting in Monterey Park, CA, which killed 11 people, and a shooting in Half Moon Bay, California, which killed seven people.

Mass shootings touched the lives of those who had previously, like most of us, looked at the gun violence epidemic from the outside. And yet these mass shootings all are part of a long-term, familiar dynamic, a broken status quo we have not yet been able to fix. Over the past decade, we have heard an increasing drumbeat of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians, and a growing outcry on social media; yet we continue to have more gun violence deaths and injuries than ever before, punctuated by periodic mass shootings that penetrate the public consciousness. And so, again and again, we search for words that can find meaning, that can shift our thinking. But perhaps there is little new to say, because the arguments have been made, and what is left is for us to act. It is important to recognize that we have made progress on this issue, despite the violence we continue to see.

After the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 students and two teachers, President Biden signed bipartisan legislation to address gun violence. The reforms, while modest, represented a step in the right direction on this issue. In the public health space, recent years have seen significant energy dedicated to shaping a world without gun violence. Years of research and convenings, including a special issue of the American Journal of Public Health on gun violence, have advanced more and more scholarship that is commensurate with the scope of the crisis. About a year ago, I chaired a task force commissioned by the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health that produced a report that aims to help move public health schools and programs to the center of the gun violence conversation.

It has also been encouraging to see that the National Academy of Medicine is evolving a special interest group on guns, which I recently had the privilege of addressing. These steps all reflect seeing gun violence as the public health issue it is, one that requires action, yes, and perhaps the action that can be catalyzed by the scholarship, education, and practice that emerges from universities that see gun violence as a preventable problem that is calling for steps that can save tens of thousands of lives every year.

I have long admired the writing of Nicholas Kristof on guns, finding it reflects a pragmatic, data-informed approach to this problem. In a recent piece, he wrote: “Public health mostly is not about one big thing but about a million small things. To reduce auto deaths, seatbelts and airbags helped, and so did padded dashboards, crash testing, streetlights, highway dividers, crackdowns on drunken driving, and zillions of tiny steps such as those bumps in the highway to help keep dozing drivers from drifting off the road. Likewise, we need countless other steps to address gun violence.”

I agree. It has been a long process to shape an awareness that gun violence is a public health problem, one that is subject to public health solutions. Now that this awareness is more widely shared, it is on us to continue to apply a public health approach, focused on harm reduction, even as broader solutions, such as national gun bans, remain elusive.

This incremental approach, while at times frustratingly slow, can yield small wins that add up to meaningful change. As Kristof notes, we have successfully applied such an approach to creating safer roads, doing so not by banning cars, but through a gradual process of regulation which has raised safety standards for every aspect of driving. We can do the same with guns. Indeed, in some places we already are. In Massachusetts, for example, we have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. We achieved this through a process of commonsense reform, including banning military-style assault weapons, requiring universal safe storage laws for guns, and the thoughtful regulation of the gun industry. The Massachusetts model, if widely adopted, could help guide the nation in making similar reforms, building on the progress we have made toward a future without the threat of guns.

It may seem perhaps inappropriate to talk about this progress so soon after yet another mass shooting. Yet it is at precisely such times—when we are tempted to despair, to imagine that there is nothing we can do to solve this problem—that we must recognize the progress that generates hope, that shows we can make a difference. We must push back against the feeling that would have us give up just when years of patient effort have started to bear fruit. There is much we can do, much we are doing. We are not powerless in the face of gun violence. We need to stay the course, building on the progress we have made. While our steps may be modest, they are moving us in the right direction toward a world where we no longer see headlines like the ones that confronted us last week.

A version of this piece appeared on Substack and in BU Today.