DiscoverApril 12: Governor Kemp signs legislation allowing the concealed carry of handguns without a licensesubtitle
Gov. Brian Kemp hugs Rep. Mandi Ballinger before signing legislation allowing carry without permission on April 12. Approval from your state government,” Kemp said. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Photo credit: Bob Andres
Photo credit: Bob Andres
subtitle
Gov. Brian Kemp hugs Rep. Mandi Ballinger before signing legislation allowing carry without permission on April 12. Approval from your state government,” Kemp said. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Photo credit: Bob Andres
Photo credit: Bob Andres
In 2020 there were nearly 1,900 gun deaths in Georgia.
Brown lost her son Jared, 23, in July 2015 when he was killed by a stray bullet at a cookout in southwest Atlanta. The shooter, a convicted felon, should never have had a gun, Brown said. Gun violence had only been on the sidelines of her life, something she’d seen on the TV news, but when it affected her family directly, Brown reached out to a community of activists supporting evidence-based solutions to gun violence.
She recently shared her story on the latest season of Last Day, a podcast hosted by Stephanie Wittels Wachs that explores the issue of gun violence and offers some insightful perspectives on how we should be approaching the gun conversation in our country.
Wachs and her team visited two states where guns are widespread – Montana and Georgia – hoping to examine differences in gun deaths by category. According to data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in 2019, 82% of gun deaths in Montana were suicides, while 11% in that state were homicides. In Georgia, 41% of gun deaths were homicides, while 56% were suicides.
In speaking with families who have lost children to gun deaths, Wachs learned that while the fighting in these communities may appear different on the surface, the underlying causes of gun deaths are startlingly similar.
“We assumed we would find different things, but once we got there, we started to realize that they have so much in common,” said Wachs. “We went to Montana, where there’s a cowboy mentality and the challenge of changing people’s behavior when there’s a stigma attached to mental health, or you’re dealing with a community that doesn’t want to talk about their feelings… the same.” Cowboy mentality is in Atlanta. ”
In any community, whether urban or rural, residents were often isolated from resources – living in food deserts or having limited access to health services. Faced with these long-standing systemic problems, residents and entire communities who feel unsupported cling to a kill-or-killed mentality, Wachs said. But conversations centered around gun ownership issues solely for self-defense, which Kemp noted when signing the permit-less-carry bill, are misleading.
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“When you have a gun in the house that so many people have for self-defense, you put yourself at three times the risk of someone in your house dying from an accidental shot,” Wachs said. As she reveals on her podcast, access to guns in times of crisis for young men in Montana and the greater Atlanta area who died by suicide or homicide prompted swift action with irreversible consequences.
Guns are part of American culture and most of the families featured on the podcast did not blame guns for their children’s deaths.
“If you (talks about gun violence) just assume abstinence or absolutism or just say no, you’re not going to reach people,” said Wachs. She hopes the shared stories will continue to shift the national conversation about gun violence toward harm reduction and healthy communities.
After losing her son, Brown founded the non-profit organization Jared’s Heart of Success, which coaches youth in conflict resolution and gives them non-weapons tools to use when they find themselves in a crisis. There are many grassroots organizations with similar missions trying to uncover and address the root causes of gun violence, she said.
To support these efforts, we must stop the political power games and focus on action to address systemic issues that impact gun deaths, because whether we live in Montana or Atlanta, when it comes to gun violence, we have more together than we think.
