After yet another school shooting in Tennessee and another workplace massacre in Kentucky, politicians may finally be ready to join the vast majority of Americans, even gun owners, at restricting firearm ownership. Limiting the super-easy access to guns will likely reduce another American scourge: Fentanyl overdoses and deaths.
In a neighborhood near to where my parents live, in a city where my sister’s kids went to school, our country has witnessed yet another calamity where teachers and students perished, despite evidence from a 911 call that there were armed staff members at The Covenant School. Then news came of another mass shooting, this time at a Louisville bank, the type of place Texas Senator Ted Cruz said was better protected.
A Florida County Sheriff used a press conference about a teen gang spree killing to attack gun laws, saying they don’t work. But we haven’t seen more gun restrictions. If anything, we’ve seen an explosion of (a) laws that make it sinfully easy to purchase a firearm in this country, (b) laws that make it hellishly hard to stop someone carrying a gun anywhere, and (c) Supreme Court rulings that make impossible for a state, city or even a school to make any sort of gun restriction possible. And now some governments are refusing to cooperate with national gun laws enforced by the ATF because they personally believe the ATF is unconstitutional.
Nearly 8,000 kids and teens die from guns each year. We’ve had 250 school shootings in 2021. In fact, though the USA is not technically a war zone, we ranked second in 2019 for gun-related deaths (Syria or Yemen beat us). And the deadliest state for gun deaths isn’t California or New York, but Mississippi, with nearly 30 firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. New York City doesn’t even make the top 100 cities for violent crime rates, by the way, but four Tennessee cities are in the top 60.
More than 90% of Americans support universal background checks. My research last year shows that red flag laws could save thousands of lives. And Congress passed bipartisan legislation incentivizing such red flag laws. Now Tennessee GOP Governor Bill Lee is supporting such measures in his state.
But here’s a new reason for restrictions on unsafe gun purchases: it will reduce the Fentanyl Crisis. Firearms, legally sold in America and then trafficked to Mexico (200,000 of them), are wielded by the same gangs Republicans want to stop. The recent killing of American tourists was traced to one of these guns.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham accused leading Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois of ignoring the Fentanyl Crisis to try and solve the gun crisis. With such legislation, Americans can protect schoolchildren, workers and business executives, and solve this drug scourge that also claims thousands of lives.
Just cut off the cartel’s gun supply by stopping such straw purchases, and they’ll have to be like gun-deprived gangs in England where low supply and high demand make firearms rare.
Given 74% of NRA members agree with such universal background checks, it’s a common gun law to shoot for this year in Congress.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia.