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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian today. Coming up on today's show, the brand new FDNY commissioner, Robert Tucker, will join us to talk about his new gig. We'll focus on fires caused by lithium-ion batteries, which have really become a scourge here in the city. If you've been hearing about the FBI raids on some of Mayor Adams's top appointees, WNYC and Gothamist reporter Elizabeth Kim will update us with the latest on that in about an hour.

Plus, have you noticed the brick-and-mortar shopping experience has changed but not necessarily disappeared? A lot of people thought shopping online would totally kill off retail stores, but turns out they're still around. They're just different. We'll talk about what's going on with in-person shopping with Lora Kelley, who wrote about this for The Atlantic.

It's September in New York, and both of our local baseball teams are in the playoff hunt. If the Yankees and Mets both make it to the postseason, and that's still an if, it'll be only the 6th time in history that has happened. It's all very exciting for us New York baseball fans who are hoping for another Subway Series, but first, we turn to the issue of gun violence and how it's been thrust again into the national spotlight and the presidential race after a deadly shooting in Georgia this week.

On Thursday, a 14-year-old allegedly opened fire with a military-style rifle. The teen is accused of killing two students and two teachers in what was the deadliest shooting in Georgia history. The teen's father was also charged with second-degree murder for allowing his son to possess the weapon. Gun deaths among children under 18 years old rose from 2022 to 2023 to an average of seven kids killed each day.

The shooting came as the two presidential candidates have been campaigning mostly on other issues like the economy, abortion rights, and immigration. Joining us now to break down the latest and how it's playing out in the presidential race is Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun violence. Chip, welcome back to WNYC.

Chip Brownlee: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Katz: Thanks for being here. Listeners, we can take a few of your questions, comments, reactions to how gun violence is being addressed by each of the presidential candidates. Call us or text us now. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. All right, Chip, to start with the latest, two students, two teachers were killed with an AR-15 style rifle. This was Wednesday. I think I misstated it in my opening. It was Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Georgia. The suspect in custody is a 14-year-old who went to the school. We're deciding like NPR to withhold his name.

He's expected to be tried as an adult, and his father is also now charged with second-degree murder. Can you talk about what the latest information is about what happened there as you understand it?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. Both of them, the shooter, the alleged shooter, and the shooter's father, had their first court appearances this morning, and so we're just beginning to learn more about what happened here. Like you said, four people were killed, and then there were also nine others who were injured. Really, to be honest, this just looks like another school shooting in the United States.

t appears that this was a young person who had some kind of mental health struggles, maybe not a mental illness, but was in some kind of crisis, had some kind of troubled home life. His parents were going through what appears to be a very messy divorce. I've seen some reporting that they were evicted from their home, and there was easy access to a firearm, and it resulted in the shooting.

Matt Katz: The easy access to the firearm, obviously, a common ingredient with these shootings. Georgia has some of the most lax gun control laws in the country. When we talk about lax gun control laws and specifically in Georgia, what does that look like? Do we know if that might have had a role here?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. It means a lot of things. There are a lot of different organizations and groups that rank states by their gun laws, but pretty much all of them agree that Georgia is a state that has some of the weakest gun laws. What that actually looks like on the ground is Georgia does not have universal background checks. There are loopholes available for people to buy guns without having to go through a process to check to see if they have a criminal record, to see if they have been committed to a psychiatric institution for a mental health disorder, a whole range of other things that go into a background check.

It also means that Georgia does not have a red flag law, which are the laws that we've frequently heard about since the Parkland shooting in 2018. These laws allow people, typically family members or roommates, close friends, teachers, sometimes mental health providers, to petition to a court to have a judge order the removal of firearms from somebody who is posing a threat to themselves or to other people. Georgia doesn't have that law.

It also includes things like age of purchase laws. Under federal law, you have to be 18 to buy a rifle from a licensed gun dealer, but under Georgia state law, there's no age limit to possessing a rifle like an AR-15. There's also no limit for a person under 18 to be able to go and buy a gun like that from a private seller without a background check. It's all of these different things. I think probably the most relevant gun law in this situation would be a safe storage law. Georgia doesn't have one of those.

That would require that a gun owner keep their firearms safely stored, whether that be locked up in a safe or with the cable lock or in some other fashion to prevent access by a young person or any other person who shouldn't have access to the gun. Georgia doesn't have one of those laws. There's a whole range of laws that Georgia doesn't have that makes it be one of the states that has some of the loosest gun laws in the country.

Matt Katz: You said the safe storage law is maybe most relevant here. Does that mean that we think that he might have taken the gun from his father's possession, or if he's legally able to own this gun even as a child, then that's also relevant? No?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, it is. Well, typically in a state that would have a safe storage law, they would also have some kind of age limits on being able to possess a gun. I think those two things go hand in hand, but in this situation, it's been reported that the father bought the son an AR-15 rifle as a Christmas present in 2023, so just a few months ago. That appears to be the gun that was used in the shooting.

I think another relevant thing here is that all of that happened after the FBI was alerted that there were threats that had been made online to possibly "shoot up a school" and they had interviewed the family about this, believing that it was the shooter in this situation now, who had made those threats. They were eventually unable to link those threats to him, but this shooter in this situation had been previously on the FBI's radar.

The father knew that he had been interviewed about these threats before and other concerns about his son's well-being, and despite that, bought him an AR-15 rifle as a Christmas present and apparently let him have at least some access to that gun to be able to take it to school. Now, in a situation where a place has a safe storage law or a child access prevention law, the father would have been required to have that gun locked up.

Even if they were legally able to go to a gun range or to go hunting together with the gun, all of that would be fine under a law like this. The child in that situation would not be able to have individual unsupervised access to the gun. I think that's what's important here. Another thing is that we know, from all of the other school shootings that we've experienced, that most of them, if the shooter is a young person, the shooter is getting their gun from their parents or from another family member.

This is not the first time that this has happened. You only have to go back just a couple of years ago to the Oxford High School shooting to see that parents are sometimes making these reckless decisions and buying guns for their kids that then end up in these school shootings.

Matt Katz: If lax laws regarding the parent's role here had a role in this, then why was the father charged if he didn't necessarily violate Georgia law when it comes to allowing, enabling access to the weapon for his kid?

Chip Brownlee: No, I think that's a good question. Just fair disclosure, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really speak on all of that. I think the thing that's interesting about this is this is definitely unprecedented in Georgia, as far as I know, that no other parent has been charged in a school shooting like this. Really, the only other kind of precedent we have is the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan in 2021, where both of the parents there were charged with manslaughter.

This is the first time that a parent has been charged with murder, in this case, second-degree murder, which my understanding is that that indicates that there was some kind of intent or knowingness. I think we saw investigators say that the father intentionally gave the child access to the gun. I think the thing that comes into play here is that he knew about some of the previously reported concerns in the interview about the threats that had happened in the past.

I think this is still an unprecedented charge that has been levied against the father. I can't make a call about whether it's likely to succeed, but I think we're seeing this trend starting where prosecutors are trying to be innovative in how they respond to these shootings in lieu of the gun laws that we probably should have to prevent them. That's why I think if you have other laws in place, making charges like this would be a lot easier.

I think the prosecutors are still going to have a challenge before them of proving a case like this, especially the intent that is required for a murder charge. I think that's a really good question, and I don't know the full answer to it, but all of these things play into it.

Matt Katz: Like you said, prosecutors are being tough after the fact in lieu of legislators who could be passing these laws being weak beforehand. Chip, let's go right to the phone lines. Sharon from Queens. Hi, Sharon. Thanks for calling in.

Sharon: Good morning.

Matt Katz: Good morning.

Sharon: I am a retired teacher, and my daughter is a principal in the school, and my granddaughter is seven years old. For the last couple of days, this is the beginning of the school year this week for many, many kids, and trying to make sense of what happened was very hard. I had to keep the TV off so my seven-year-old did not see what happened. I'm very disturbed on, how are we allowing these guns, AKs and ARs, to be in the possession of anybody? They are drastically destructive to the body. Surgeons even said there's no way to repair a body after the bullets enter the body.

If our elected officials don't address this gun lobby where people are saying, "Well, it's a hunting rifle," it is not. It is hard for a grandmother to explain the senseless carnage and get my granddaughter to go to school. How are the kids going to go to school being traumatized that they're not safe? School is supposed to be safe as a second home. If we don't make it that, there's no sense in sending our children to school. Have a good day.

Matt Katz: Thank you so much, Sharon. Really appreciate it. Thanks for your service as a teacher, and call us again. Chip, it is so common, this school shooting thing that-- My kids are 9 and 12. They're very well aware that this happens on a regular basis. Can you give some context here? How often is there a school shooting in America? How many of these have we experienced? How many alerts have we gotten on our phones at noon saying there's another school shooting? How many times have we watched video of parents literally running to the entrance of schools in tears looking for their kids?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. First of all, I'm really sorry. I want to say I'm sorry to the caller that nobody should be having to have these conversations, especially with kids who should be feeling safe and especially at school, but everywhere. That's the first thing. I think the type of school shooting that we have here, which is one that's there are several deaths, it appears to be like an intentional targeting of other students in the school during school hours. Those shootings, despite the level of coverage that they get when they happen, are pretty rare.

I know that's not a comfort to anybody because they shouldn't happen at all, but we have about, I would say, on average, one of those every year. The last really big one was the Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022, but there was also another one last year in 2023, the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. These things do happen frequently enough to where they're happening almost every year, but the other side of that, I think, is all of the school shootings that don't get the media coverage that this type of school shooting gets.

I hate to pit them against each other because that's not at all what I'm trying to do here, but so far this year, there have been at least 40 school shootings, and none of them get the same level of coverage that this one did. That's because sometimes they happen outside of school hours but on school grounds or a situation like that, or it's just maybe no one was killed, and so they don't get the same level of coverage.

Then in addition to-- I would say there's these concentric circles of school shootings outside of the school shootings that happen at a school during school hours. There's also shootings that happen within a few blocks of a school that happen literally every day in the country. We did a story earlier this year using data to analyze how frequently there's a shooting within a 500-yard radius of a school, and there have been thousands of those since 2014. This is not an infrequent thing that happens. It happens literally every day in the country. They just don't get the same level of coverage.

People often say that those shootings that happen near a school, they're obviously not the same as someone getting killed or injured inside a school, but those shootings still have effects on students. Schools still go on lockdowns. Sometimes blood spatter on the street outside of a school. Just because it doesn't happen inside the school, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact on the students. This is a frequent thing.

Matt Katz: All those shootings, those thousands that you referenced, they're not necessarily fatal, right? It just means that--

Chip Brownlee: Right.

Matt Katz: Okay.

Chip Brownlee: This could be any type of situation where someone was shot. It doesn't necessarily mean-- When I was talking about the shootings near a school, there have been over 100,000 of those between 2014, but that's within a 500-yard radius of the school. Not all of those shootings involve someone dying. It could just be an injury or even a minor injury, but those things still cause lockdowns and other effects on students.

Matt Katz: This tragedy put the issue of gun violence back into the political spotlight. We hadn't really heard guns come up much so far in this presidential campaign. On Wednesday, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was in Pennsylvania at a rally. Let's take a listen to her reaction to this.

Kamala Harris: This is just a senseless tragedy on top of so many senseless tragedies, and it's just outrageous that every day in our country in the United States of America that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It's senseless. It is-- We've got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.

Matt Katz: Chip, you've covered gun violence with The Trace for a long time. Do you want to weigh in on this reaction, just from a rhetorical standpoint? Is this messaging different from President Joe Biden? Is it much of the same? What did you hear in there?

Chip Brownlee: I heard a lot of passion, and I think that that comes from Vice President Harris having worked herself on this issue for a long time. President Biden put her in charge of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. She has been heavily involved in all of the executive action that President Biden has tried to take on gun violence. I think this is clearly something that matters a lot to her.

I don't know that it is dramatically different or really different at all from what President Biden has done. They've both been very consistent on this issue since taking office. I think where the contrast comes is with former President Trump and his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, who have taken a different tone when it comes to these kind of shootings and have really proposed no policies that would prevent them. I think that's where the distinction comes.

Matt Katz: We're going to get to Trump and Vance in a moment, but let's stick with Harris for a moment. Her campaign tweeted out today, "Together, we passed the first bipartisan law addressing gun violence prevention in nearly 30 years, but we have more work to do. We must pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and red flag laws." Are those the three pillars at the moment in terms of gun control measures that Congress is considering or might be considering if the politics were such? Can you talk a little bit about those three?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. I think those are the three pillars because those are the policy proposals that have the most popular support. Let's just talk about background checks for a second. Most of the polls that have been conducted on that issue show around or upwards of 90% support for universal background checks. That has been an issue that even Republican gun owners support. It's just it has become such a politically divisive issue in Congress and in state legislatures that there has been little action on that proposal.

I think that's why you see her and President Biden, having done this before, pick out those proposals as the ones to highlight because there is research that shows that background checks, universal background checks, do help reduce gun violence. Those proposals are also popular. I think that they're trying to walk that line of picking something that has broad support but also something that could be effective.

I don't think that any of those proposals can prevent every shooting on their own, but they could certainly help. They would prevent some shootings, if not many shootings, if they were fully implemented. We've seen a lot of qualitative studies looking at extreme risk protection orders, more commonly known as red flag laws, and those studies have shown that those laws are effective at reducing suicides. There's some evidence to suggest that they might be preventing mass shootings.

They've looked at particular instances where red flag laws have prevented shootings. All of those things could make a difference. I think that combined with the popularity of them and the support for them is why they're being touted or pushed to the forefront.

Matt Katz: This is The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. If you're just joining us, we're talking about gun violence as an issue in the 2024 presidential race now, unfortunately, back in the spotlight following this deadly shooting in Georgia on Wednesday. My guest is Chip Brownlee, reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun violence.

Chip, let's talk about the Republican candidates. Trump's initial comment on the shooting did not mention gun violence. On Wednesday evening, he told Fox News' Sean Hannity, "It's a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons, and we're going to make it better. We're going to heal our world." Notably, no mention of guns. What do we know about President Trump's policy proposals to address gun violence?

Chip Brownlee: The former president, when he was in office, really did not take much action on gun violence at all. He took one executive action after the giant mass shooting in Las Vegas, which was to ban bump stocks that were used in that shooting. Bump stocks are these kind of accessories that you attach to a gun to make it fire more like a machine gun. That regulation, his one action to regulate guns, was overturned by the Supreme Court earlier this year, so he did not do much on the issue while he was president.

I think since he has now been a candidate again, we've also seen no significant policy proposal about this. He has spoken at the NRA convention. He has sought out the gun rights movement's support, and so I think there's no indication that he would take any kind of significant action to try to put in place any gun regulations to prevent gun violence. I think that's just where we stand with him.

Another thing that's important to remember is that it's not always about the presidential candidates. Really, the bottleneck here is Congress. No matter who the president is, it's going to be difficult to get any more significant gun violence prevention legislation through Congress. That's really where the bottleneck is.

Matt Katz: Let's go back to the phones. Greg on Staten Island. Hi, Greg. Thanks for calling in. You're on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Greg: Good morning. What I wanted to say was that it's possible to have two parallel conversations. One on the abstract existential notions of legislating successful gun control policies, and the other is just the practical nuts and bolts measures that can be taken to lessen the likelihood of mass shootings occurring on school grounds. We already have a model of prevention, and that's throughout New York and New York City at federal and state municipal buildings.

In Federal Plaza, for example, you pull up or walk up, and there are marked police cars out front. There's a federal protective service. There's uniformed, armed law enforcement agents on foot around the perimeter of the building, and in the lobby, there are armed and uniformed officers. I think that at this stage in American civilization and society, it's foreseeable that there are unbalanced, mentally ill people who will choose schools as targets.

We can staff schools with uniformed armed officers to make those places hard targets and let a shooter change his mind, or keep going and go another direction, rather than go inside a school and target the innocent children and teachers.

Matt Katz: Thank you. Greg, our producer said you were a police officer. Is that right? If so, did you work in schools at all?

Greg: Yes. Well, what NYPD does is do training to respond to school shooters. It was always interesting to me that, just for example, during the religious holidays, that NYPD stations uniformed offices in front of various houses of worship throughout the city because it's foreseeable, unfortunately, that people will try to commit mayhem and terrorize the adherents of different religious groups within the city.

At this stage, we know that schools are a target and that we can discuss the merits of gun control, and at the same time, while we're having that discussion, take practical steps to protect children and students and teachers.

Matt Katz: Thank you very much. Thanks for calling in, Greg. Chip, what do we know about armed guards, armed officers at schools, and how they may or may not prevent these sorts of massacres?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, that's a great point. It's such a good point that there were already officers at this school. There were two school resource officers at Apalachee.

Matt Katz: At this school in Georgia there were two officers?

Chip Brownlee: Yes.

Matt Katz: Wow. And they were armed?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, and four people still died and nine others were injured. It doesn't really appear that just having armed officers on a campus is enough to stop school shootings. I will also just add that there was armed staff at Uvalde, there was armed staff at Parkland, Oxford High School, Santa Fe High School, and a ton of other high school shootings. The police are already present at these schools, and you can make the argument that there should be more.

I take the point about having police officers stationed outside, that kind of thing. I think there's an argument for that. There's also an argument that we shouldn't be living in a situation where students have to go to school under the gun, basically, whether that gun is another student who's trying to shoot them or a police officer who's there to protect them. I don't think anybody wants a situation where students are having to go to school through metal detectors, carrying clear backpacks.

All of these things, and I don't know that there's a ton of evidence that they work, but even if they did work, there's also other impacts on the other side of it, forcing students to be in a situation like that. We also know that lockdown drills are very detrimental to students' mental health. There's all these things. Maybe we should try to address the underlying issues and not just try to harden the schools, which we should do in the interim.

That's already being done, and it's not always working. I don't think it is a reasonable, practical solution to have. Schools are already having one way in and one way out.

Matt Katz: Sure.

Chip Brownlee: Even when I was in high school, that was a thing, having to check in like that. Some of that stuff is already being done. Schools across the country are implementing clear backpack policies. There's no evidence that that works, but it's already being done. A lot of these things are already happening. They don't work.

Matt Katz: Chip, we need to take a short break, but when we're back, we're going to take more calls. Stay with us.

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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. If you're just joining us, my guest is Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun violence. Chip, we played a clip earlier from Vice President Harris. Let's hear from the other side of the aisle. Republicans have addressed this shooting, some of them, and Republican VP JD Vance said this at a rally in Phoenix on Thursday.

JD Vance: I don't like to admit this. I don't like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets, and we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door-- [applause] We've got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they're not able to.

And again, as a parent, do I want my kids' school to have additional security? No, of course I don't. I don't want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you've got to have additional security, but that is increasingly the reality that we live in.

Matt Katz: Chip, you've already addressed the fact that schools are already hardened and already have armed security. This school, where four people died on Wednesday, had two armed security guards. What else do we know about Vance's position on guns and his political history here?

Chip Brownlee: Not much. He hasn't been a politician that long, so not much. What he said kind of aligns with what President Trump has said. After a shooting in Iowa a couple of years ago, President Trump said we should just get over it. I think neither one of them have a strong record of trying to pass any kind of significant legislation on this.

One other point about what he said about psychos at schools and the mental health point that he was making, yes, I think it is fair to say that most shooters, like these school shooters, are going through some kind of mental crisis, but the reality is that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of gun violence than they are to perpetrate it. That's a very complicated issue to talk about, and it's not really clear, but I just wanted to say that.

Another thing about that is that we know that the situation is related to unfettered access to guns because every other developed country in the world also has mental health struggles. They have the same mental illnesses that we do. They listen to the same kind of music. America is like the cultural Mecca, so our music goes all over the world. They play the same video games. It's none of those issues that are frequently brought up from the right on this. The problem is the guns.

I think we just have to admit that that's what the research says. The research is very clear that when there are more guns in a place, there are more gun deaths. That's just the reality, and I think we should recognize that.

Matt Katz: Tina in Manhattan. Hi, Tina. Thanks for calling in. [silence] Tina, if you're there, going once, going--

Tina: Hello?

Matt Katz: Hi, Tina. Hi there. Thank you for calling.

Tina: Hi. Can you hear me?

Matt Katz: We can. Yes, you're on with Chip Brownlee from The Trace.

Tina: I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you very much. I just wanted to mention that it was just a day or two before the shooting that I happened to see-- In New York City, we don't see a lot of Trump-sponsored ads, but this ad set was one of those graphics like, "Wham." The screen comes with these big graphics, Harris and Walz, with a voiceover, "Harris and Walz want to take away our guns." It was a really short ad, and that was the entirety of the message.

I'm sure they have put a pause on airing that right now after the shooting, but it just speaks to how inaccurately uninformed public-- That's not what the Harris-Walz plan is. It's about these background checks. It's about things that you and Chip were discussing about proper laws, having the guns locked up from children. That kid wasn't a psycho. He was a student. He was a 14-year-old student, first, second day at high school. Otherizing the shooters is unavoidable I know, but the fact is that the only way to keep it from happening isn't hardening the schools. We need more money for education, not for security.

We need to make sure that people obey the law and put laws in place that don't allow this to happen. The end is not that complicated. It's just not getting-- If someone runs, even though Harris is trying to run with reasonable laws in place for guns, they're trying to say, they're trying to make her sound like they're taking away your guns so she wouldn't get elected, and neither would the congresspeople who support gun laws that help protect the rest of us because these guys are pretending that it's a whole different subject than it really is. They can't get voted into office.

Matt Katz: Thank you very much, Tina. Thanks. Chip, does this work, saying that Kamala Harris is going to take away your guns? It seems so implausible as a policy position or even in a practical matter how that could possibly happen in the United States of America. Is it politically useful? Is that a successful political attack?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, it's a tactic that they've tried for as far back as I can remember, and I don't know that it is all that successful. I think most voters are smart enough to recognize that nobody is going to take away all of their guns, but for a certain segment of the Republican base, that is activating for them. For people on the right who vote for guns as a single issue, which there are a significant number of them, it activates them.

Just from a political standpoint, I think that if former President Trump is going to win, he needs those type of people to turn out. I don't think that that convinces middle-of-the-road voters or independent voters who are maybe still trying to decide who they're voting for, even though there's not that many of them. I don't think it really convinces them. What those messages try to do is target the people who already believe that kind of thing and get them to turn out.

Like the caller noted, that's not anybody's proposal. I don't think there is a politician elected, and certainly in the federal government that is saying, "I want to take away everybody's guns." There are proposals all over the spectrum, but the mainline Democratic Party proposals for background checks and assault weapons ban and red flag laws is not taking away everyone's guns. It might take away assault weapons, and that's certainly true, but those guns are not owned by most gun owners.

The most common type of weapon that's owned in the country is a semi-automatic pistol, and there's no proposal to ban those. There's no proposal to ban common hunting rifles or shotguns. Those things are just not on the table, and I don't think they're going to be on the table any time in the near future. Those kind of attacks do turn out the base, I think, is why they are put out there.

Matt Katz: Chip, one last question before I let you go, and maybe a little bit more on the positive side, since this has been a dark and heavy segment, you reported that Americans have been safer from violence so far this year than any other year since before the pandemic, and you looked at the impact of gun laws on that. Can you give us a minute on what you found?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. I think everybody knows, and a lot of people experienced the terrible surge of gun violence that we had when COVID struck and then in the months and years after that, but we're finally, this year and the part of last year, seeing the numbers of shootings go down across the country. There have just been a ton of cities in the country that have seen record decreases in gun violence. Places like Buffalo, New York had shootings at a rate that was lower than 2019. There are other cities that are seeing similar decreases like that that are just kind of records.

I don't think that that is getting us down to a level of gun violence that anyone is going to be comfortable with, but we're certainly down from the highs that we experienced during COVID. I did report about what impacts laws are having on that, and there are a ton of laws that there has been research that shows that they could make a difference. One of them, actually, that has the strongest research support, is safe storage laws. There's evidence that, that not only helps prevent homicides and accidental shootings but also suicides, which often get left out of the conversation.

That's the majority of gun deaths that happen in the country. There's new evidence about the red flag laws and extreme risk protection orders that we were talking about. I think the research is getting stronger on the different particular gun laws, but the research is already very strong that, generally speaking, stronger gun laws reduce gun deaths.

Even though we have seen this massive deregulation around guns across the country in the last decade or two, there have been states like New York, like Illinois, California, even places like Colorado, smaller states, that are taking action to pass gun regulations. Those could be having an impact, the research suggests. That's where we were coming with that.

Matt Katz: Chip Brownlee is a reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site covering gun violence. Chip, thanks so much for your reporting on all of this, for illuminating us on this issue, and thanks for coming on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Chip Brownlee: Thank you for having me.

 

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