A Mass Shooting Comes to My Neighborhood - Rob Horowitz

A Mass Shooting Comes to My Neighborhood - Rob Horowitz

The names of the schools are etched in our memories: Sandy Hook Elementary School, Columbine High School, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Robb Elementary School, Utah Valley University, Virginia Tech, and, unfortunately, many others.  Now, we add Brown University to an American map that is dotted by schools and other locations, forever marked by the senseless taking of young lives.

 

 A gunman walked into a Brown engineering and physics building on Saturday afternoon and indiscriminately opened fire on students there for a finals’ study session, killing two and seriously wounding eight others.  Due to the heroic efforts of our first responders and the skill and dedication of our medical professionals, the eight students who entered the hospital in critical condition appear out of danger and on their way to what will likely be difficult recoveries.

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My daughter and son-in-law live in the College Hill neighborhood adjacent to Brown and were subject to the shelter-in-place order.  I live about a mile away.  This brought a unique brand of what can truly be called American carnage--one whose all too regular occurrence has made it an almost numbly accepted feature of American life--home.

 

While mass shootings do occur throughout the world, including the horrific, antisemitic killing of 16 people in Australia at a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, a highly disproportionate number take place in the United States.  More than 3-in-4 (76%) of the mass shootings that occurred in developed, high-income nations--36 nations in total--between 2000 and 2022, happened in the United States, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

 

Similarly, the U.S. gun homicide rate is 26 times the rate of other high-income countries, according to Everytown Research & Policy.  Gun homicides are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers; more than 2,800 die from gun violence every year.   In 2024, 44,000 Americans died from gun violence, including more than 17,000 who were victims of gun homicides, according to provisional CDC data.

 

It is the case that the prevalence of mass killings and gun violence in the United States is multi-causal.  The isolation of our young men who marinate in often violence-encouraging corners of the internet, as well as growing struggles with mental illness and a failure to recognize and treat it before it’s too late, for instance, are certainly contributors. What most distinguishes us from the rest of the developed world, however, is that we are awash in guns and do the least to ensure gun safety.

 

Nearly 1-in-2 civilian-owned guns in the world belong to residents of the United States, despite the fact that we comprise only 5% of the world’s population.  There are approximately 1.5 guns for every American.  Yet, we still haven’t put in place a sufficiently robust background check system to keep these weapons out of the hands of people who will use them to do harm.  We also continue to fail to ban large capacity magazines and assault weapons that enable the rapid, continuous spraying of bullets that increase death tolls and injuries at some mass shootings. 

 

We have allowed a weakened, but still politically formidable, National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun manufacturers that back it to stand in the way of sensible gun safety measures that are supported by more than 6-in-10 Americans, according to a series of national polls.  It is time to break this logjam.  

 

A good first step would be the adoption of the Background Check Completion Act, which would close the loophole that allows gun sales to proceed if a background check is not completed within a certain time period. "This loophole is a massive gateway to dangerous evasion of the background check rules," said Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), one of the legislation’s sponsors. “If you haven’t passed a background check, you shouldn’t be able to purchase a weapon. No check, no gun. It’s really that simple.”

 

Here in Providence, we are rooting for robust recoveries for the wounded, mourn for the senseless loss of 2 young lives, and our hearts are with all the impacted families and with the greater Brown community.  But that is not enough. 

 

We all owe our communities, nation, and especially our youth much more.  Let’s finally get serious about taking on the scourge of gun violence.