Remember when restaurants had smoking and non-smoking sections? A table just a few feet away could be filled with people smoking like chimneys while you’re “safely” seated in the non-smoking section coughing your lungs out. It was a joke.
We all knew at the time that deadly smoke didn’t magically stop at some imaginary line, and we all still breathed the same air. It drifted across the room, into the vents, and right into the lungs of people who wanted nothing to do with it.
That’s exactly how weak state gun laws work today. When one state makes it easy for dangerous people to buy guns, those guns don’t stay there. In fact, gun traffickers flock to them. Those guns then cross borders and end up in places with elected leaders who are trying to keep their communities safe.
This is not conjecture — it’s common sense. And it cost four New Yorkers their lives only weeks ago on Park Ave.
States that provide easy access to guns are exporting crime to other states and innocent people are dying because of it. Last month, a man with a history of serious mental health issues easily obtained multiple guns, drove across the country, and carried out a deadly mass shooting with a high powered weapon in the center of Manhattan. How? Nevada’s laws are weaker than New York’s.
While that tragedy led national headlines, it was far from an anomaly. More than 90% of guns used in crimes in New York City come from out-of-state, usually from southern states. That’s not an unusual trend nationwide — virtually every day, guns that have been trafficked from states with laws that make criminals’ lives easy, like Indiana or Ohio, are used in shootings in Chicago.
Cities like Baltimore, New York, and D.C. have adopted proven gun laws, yet they’re flooded with firearms trafficked in from states whose lawmakers refuse to pass the gun laws we know work. Why? They want to keep raking in campaign donations, so they put gun industry profits over protecting innocent lives.
Of course, none of this means state and local leaders should give up. While not foolproof, effective state laws make a real difference and are proven to save lives. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously referred to states as “laboratories of democracy” where lawmakers can experiment with new policy ideas and see what works. Forward-thinking states have found that even modest improvements in gun laws can both protect gun owners’ Second Amendment rights and save countless lives.
Look no further than the Giffords Law Center’s Annual Gun Law Scorecard — Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York all earned A grades and all have a gun death rate of less than 5 deaths per 100,000 people, roughly 65% beneath the national average.
Conversely, the poor gun laws that earned Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, and Mississippi F grades resulted in per capita gun death rates of between 23 and 29.4 per 100,000, nearly double the gun death rate in the country as a whole. The disparity should be eye-opening, especially for lawmakers in the more than 20 states with F grades. But the sad truth remains that too many elected Republicans, in states and in Congress, prioritize their political careers over the lives of their constituents.
The gun lobby claims that gun laws don’t work because the “bad guys” will always get their hands on a gun. They say this because they know that when criminals are able to obtain a gun, it often originated in a state with the gun lobby’s favored laws. They themselves support the patchwork of gun laws that allow criminals to opt out of laws designed to keep guns away from dangerous people.
The gun lobby manufactured their own talking point — all to sell more guns.
Gun crime is a national problem, and while state-level solutions do make a measurable difference in violent crime levels, a coordinated national approach would save countless additional lives. The way to truly reduce violent crime in places like D.C., Chicago, or Los Angeles is not to send in the National Guard like President Trump is doing, it’s to stop other states that facilitate gun trafficking into those cities. This is why Congress has to act.
We need national gun safety laws — like background checks on every sale, risk protection orders, and safe storage. Guns are the leading cause of death for kids and teens in America. They take the lives of 46,000 lives each year in this country. That’s more than 125 preventable deaths every single day.
Harris is vice president of communications for Giffords, the national gun violence prevention organization founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
