Opinion: Keep Massachusetts’ sensible gun restrictions

In 2024, the latest year for which we have final figures, some 44,447 Americans died by firearms. Of this total, there were 27,593 suicides and 15,364 homicides, while the rest were accidental, unknown or by law enforcement.

Sadly, in 2019, firearms became the leading cause of death in the U.S. pediatric population, edging out motor vehicle crashes, and remain so. Firearms rank no higher than the fifth leading cause of death in children in 11 peer countries studied by KFF. Guns killed 4,357 children ages 1-19 in the U.S. in 2020, 5.6 per 100,000 children. In our peer countries the rate was 0.3/100,000 children.

The additional trauma of firearm injuries include PTSD and other emotional harms. School shootings are rising: 1,453 counted between 1997 and 2022, and of these, 800 occurred between 2017 and 2022. Like other mass shootings, these garner major news coverages even though the number of deaths are small relative to suicides and one-on-one homicides. What does it do to the mental health of children who are taught how to respond to an active shooter? When parents sustain firearm injuries, children’s mental health visits and psychiatric visits rise.

The monetary cost of firearm injuries is also significant. The mean cost of an ED visit for firearm injury in 2021 was $1,743 and for a hospitalization, $38,879. The researchers estimated that the medical care of firearm victims totaled $1.6 billion in 2021.

Barring a dramatic turnaround at the Supreme Court, we are not going to get rid of guns, but that does not mean we are helpless to change this story.

Many of the laws and rules governing gun ownership and safety are still set at the state level, and this has given us “natural experiments,” as we can observe what happens in states with differing policies.

State laws vary across a variety of issues. The leading areas where states can be more or less strict include universal background checks, minimum age limits for gun purchase, waiting periods, child access rules, concealed carry and “stand your ground” laws.

Of these, three had dramatic effects on lowering gun homicides and suicides: requiring universal background checks, forbidding concealed carry and not having “stand your ground” as a legitimate excuse for firing a gun. States imposing these rules had 70-90% fewer firearm deaths than states which took the opposite position.

Children benefit from stricter gun laws. In 2010, the Supreme Court allowed states to set their own firearm rules. Researchers ranked all the U.S. states into most permissive (31 states), permissive (11) and strict (8) and compared what happened to pediatric gun death rates 10 years later. In the states with the most permissive laws, death rates of children by firearms went up by roughly 50% while in the states with the strictest laws, pediatric deaths fell by about 20%.

“Red flag” laws — also known as Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) — allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed to be a threat to themselves or others. These have been shown to clearly reduce the risk of death by suicide, though their effect on homicide is less proven.

If you value your life, and the lives of your children and grandchildren, vote to keep Massachusetts’ sensible gun restrictions.

Edward P Hoffer, MD, is an associate professor of medicine, part-time, at Harvard. He is a resident of Marion.