Leila Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law and director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute; and Madaline George, Harris Institute Fellow.
Two more public mass shootings. More thoughts and prayers. We are staring down the barrel of 25 years of legislative failure. The last major federal gun control measure was the Brady Act, enacted in 1993. Although the House passed two significant gun control measures earlier this year, the bills didn’t get a hearing in the Senate. Had they passed, President Donald Trump promised to veto them.
The result? More than 181,000 lives lost to gun violence in half a decade. Suicides, aided by the easy availability of guns, account for 60% of the dead. Gun homicide rates in the United States are 25 times higher than in other high-income countries, and Americans own nearly 46% of civilian-owned guns in the world, while making up only 4.3% of its population.
What will change this?
Read the full piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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