Earlier this month, Gov. Kemp signed a bill that allows residents to carry a concealed firearm without obtaining a permit.
Kemp said the move was another step to reduce crime levels and that it is what Georgians wanted. “SB 319 makes sure that law-abiding Georgians, including our daughters, and your family too, can protect themselves without having to have permission from your state government,” said Kemp at the April 12 signing.
But according to poll data, including one conducted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, constitutional carry isn’t what most people want.
Seventy percent of Georgia voters oppose allowing people to carry concealed guns without a permit. And 80% of adults in the U.S. feel the same way, according to data from Pew Research Center. That opinion holds regardless of political affiliation.
“Shame on our lawmakers, especially Gov. Kemp, for advancing this reckless and unpopular legislation,” said Sharmaine Brown, an Atlanta-based activist for Moms Demand Action, when we spoke this week. “Our state is facing a devastating rise in gun violence. With this policy, I think this is only going to make matters worse.”
In 2020, there were almost 1,900 gun deaths in Georgia.
Brown lost her son, Jared, 23, in July 2015 when he was killed by a stray bullet while attending a cookout in Southwest Atlanta. The shooter, a convicted felon, never should have had a gun, Brown said. Gun violence had only been on the periphery of her life, something she saw on television news, but when it touched her family directly, Brown turned to a community of activists that support evidence-based solutions to gun violence.
She recently shared her story on the newest season of the “Last Day,” a podcast hosted by Stephanie Wittels Wachs that tackles the topic of gun violence and offers some insightful views on how we should be approaching the conversation about guns in our country.
Wachs and her team visited two states where guns are prevalent — Montana and Georgia — hoping to explore differences in gun death 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.
While talking to families who have lost children to gun deaths, Wachs learned that although the struggles in these communities may seem different on the surface, the underlying causes of gun deaths are shockingly similar.
“We had assumed we would find different things, but once we got there we started to realize they have so much in common,” Wachs said. “We went to Montana where there is a cowboy mentality and the challenge of changing people’s behavior when mental health is stigmatized, or you are dealing with a community that doesn’t want to talk about their feelings … that same cowboy mentality is in Atlanta.”
In each community, urban or rural, residents were often isolated from resources – living in food deserts or having limited access to health services. Sidelined by these long-standing systemic problems, residents and entire communities that feel unsupported hold tightly to a kill or be killed mentality, Wachs said. But conversations framed around issues of gun ownership solely as self-protection, which Kemp noted when signing the permit-less carry bill, are misleading.
“When you have a gun in the house, which so many people have for self-defense ... you are putting yourself at three times greater risk of someone in your home dying by an accidental shooting,” Wachs said. As she reveals in her podcast, for the young men in Montana and metro Atlanta who died by suicide or homicide, access to guns in times of crisis resulted in quick actions with irreversible impacts.
Guns are part of American culture and most of the families featured in the podcast did not blame guns for the deaths of their children.
“If you are approaching (conversations on gun violence) from an abstinence only or absolutism or just say no, you are not going to get through to people,” Wachs said. She hopes the stories being shared will continue to shift the national conversation about gun violence toward harm reduction and healthy communities.
After losing her son, Brown established the nonprofit, Jared’s Heart of Success that mentors youth on conflict resolution, giving them tools other than guns to reach for when they find themselves in crisis. There are many grassroots organizations with similar missions that try to uncover and address the root causes of gun violence, she said.
To support those efforts, we have to stop the political power plays and focus on policies 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 in common than we think.
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