It seems like gun violence in the United States never stops. As recently as Memorial Day weekend, shots rang out at Revere Beach, leaving two people injured. So far, in 2023, there have been more than 18,000 gun violence deaths and over 275 mass shootings in the United States. Grocery stores, churches, temples, mosques and schools have all been targeted. Massachusetts is not immune to these problems. To help us understand how big a problem gun violence is in the U.S., GBH's All Things Considered host Arun Rath spoke with Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor at Boston University's School of Public Health who studies gun violence. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So, give us a reality check and context. We get the sense that this is almost a nonstop problem in the United States. How bad is the gun violence?
Jonathan Jay: Gun violence is a public health crisis in the U.S. and gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents. A majority of those deaths for young people are homicides. Mass shootings are a really important problem, but they're just the tip of the iceberg of gun violence in the U.S. They make up a very small proportion of deaths and a much larger proportion of those deaths come from everyday gun violence that happens in communities.
Rath: There's a perception that gun violence has been getting worse in recent years, both in terms of mass shootings and and lower scale violence.
Jay: Gun violence has been getting worse. There was an unprecedented spike during the pandemic and that trend has not yet receded. It seems to have plateaued, but we are at rates of gun violence that have not been seen since the early to mid 1990's.
Rath: Do we have a sense as to the why we have had so many shootings over the past few years?
Jay: In the past few years, there have been lots of changes that could have contributed to an increase in gun violence. The pandemic brought economic stress. It brought traumatic experiences of losing loved ones to COVID. We've seen high profile incidents of police violence. I think there's really a lot of changes that could have contributed to that spike.
Rath: In terms of the research that we have, we understand that there's not much federal funding going into gun violence prevention because of certain laws, what do we have in terms of the research to tell us about about what can be done?
Jay: Well, the barriers that you're describing have been changing. There has been a growth in federal funding for gun violence research, and there's been a growth in federal funding for gun violence prevention programs. An important type of program is called community violence intervention. That's where people who have credibility in the communities where they're working, reach out to the people who are at the highest risk of being impacted by gun violence. They make sure that they get the services they need and sometimes they can mediate disputes. That's one important avenue. There's other things that we can do to change the societal conditions that contribute to gun violence.
Rath: Talk a bit more about that, the societal conditions.
Jay: Well, we know that gun violence tends to follow racial and economic segregation. It is associated with adverse built environments and social environments. So, even changes like getting rid of an abandoned building or increasing greenspace in a neighborhood seems to make them safer. So there are things that we can do in community environments that can make them safer from gun violence.
Rath: Jonathan, we know that there have historically been disparities with gun violence when it comes to ethnicity and race. How much is that the case and have recent trends, the pandemic or others, had any effect on that?
Jay: Yes, gun violence shows some of the most extreme racial and ethnic disparities that we see for any health outcome. So, for example, in a recent study looking at four major U.S. cities, we saw that before the pandemic, Black children were 26 times more likely than white children to be shot in gun assaults. During the pandemic, Black children were 100 times more likely to be shot. So, this is a health outcome that shows really severe disparities pre-pandemic and those disparities have gotten even worse.
Rath: Wow. That's that's staggering. Do we have a sense of why? We know that the health disparities were one thing that in general became worse with the pandemic, but that's shocking to hear that kind of a jump.
Jay: The research on this question is still coming together, but as you said, the pandemic really did not affect all communities equally. It had the most severe effects in the communities most burdened by racial segregation and economic segregation. It makes some sense that the impacts on gun violence might also have exacerbated disparities.
Rath: There's a huge aspect of this, which I guess you could say is an environmental aspect, which is the number of guns that are out there. It does seem that we are stuck in terms of regulating guns in this country, at least from a political and legal standpoint. Can you talk about from a public health standpoint, how much does it hamper our ability to tackle this problem if that whole area is left out in terms of a solution?
Jay: Yeah, from a public health standpoint, there is always likely to be a problem as long as there are so many guns in circulation. But there are still things we can do to prevent gun injuries and gun deaths, such as safer storage practices, making sure that guns are properly stored when they are in the household, to the other kinds of programs that we can do at the community level to make sure that people have access to the services that they need in order to stay safe.
Rath: Jonathan, thank you so much. This has been very interesting and we'll probably have to be talking about this more in the future.
Jay: Thanks for having me.
