Op-Ed Accuses AZ Legislature of ‘Ignoring Teen Gun Deaths’

I’m realistic enough to know that not everyone will agree with me on everything and some people won’t agree with me on anything. That includes the solutions to various societal problems, such as violent crime. I get that some people see the world differently, which is why I try to avoid just assuming they’re ignoring the problem because they don’t like my preferred policy change intended to be a solution to the issue.

Anti-gunners are completely different.

They all seem to think that everyone secretly agrees with their policies and that refusal to enact them is, at best, ignoring the issue. I’m referring to people like this author, who seems to think Arizona lawmakers are ignoring teen gun fatalities.

Late last year, before the Legislature’s current session, a report came out listing the leading cause of preventable death among Arizona teenagers, an unnecessary tragedy lawmakers could have made a priority.

But, because Republicans control the Legislature, and because Donald Trump is president, they ignore the problem.

And kids die.

The annual Arizona Child Fatality Review report found that firearms were the leading cause of deaths among young people between 15 and 17, and the second-most preventable deaths among all children, behind car crashes.

Sixty-eight Arizona kids died by firearms in 2023, adding to what has been a 170% increase over the past 10 years.

Now, it’s interesting how this is all framed, though the author kind of screwed up by listing the total number of fatalities.

See, I looked at that and recognized that those are high school-aged kids. Arizona had just under kids enrolled in public high school in 2022. If you add in the number involved homeschooling and private schools, you’re looking at well over a million teenagers in high school. Now, granted, some of those are 18 or 19, but not enough to make these 68 statistically significant.

Each is tragic, mind you, but we need to understand that statistically, what they author is losing his mind over, is something that accounts for a tiny, tiny fraction of one percent of the total population of the state at that age.

Plus, when you look at the report he linked, we see that 40 percent of those are termed as “self-harm,” meaning generally suicides.

Additionally, 12 percent were due to some kind of criminal activity and another 12 were due to “argument” of some description. Another eight percent are cases of just being a bystander.

Again, each of these are tragic, but that same report also shows a great deal of additional factors that likely played a role in every single one of these shootings, including substance abuse and a history of the family having run-ins with child protective services.

I get that the author is trying to hit at Republicans because he feels like they didn’t do anything, but what were they supposed to do exactly? The author suggests mandatory storage, but considering the fact that drug use played a role in nearly 60 percent of these cases and CPS was involved in even more of them that we’re dealing with the most law-abiding, responsible people on the planet.

They’re not going to start locking their guns up because they don’t actually care all that much. They’re not thinking long-term about anything. Especially as 10 percent of them involved a relative, such as a parent. Pretty sure a parent would have access to the gun.

Mandatory storage laws aren’t going to make the problem go away because the people who are the problem aren’t going to follow them.

Plus, again, we’re talking about fewer than 70 people out of a demographic of around a million people, if not more. While the rate of increase may be startling, it’s also pretty easy to get to that point when your numbers are so low to start with. That’s a baseline of 40 people between those ages killed a decade ago. Just one additional death works out to something like a 3 percent increase all on its own, so let’s be realistic about the issue.

And with a big chunk of these being “self-harm” of some sort, mandatory storage isn’t really the answer anyway. Better mental health efforts would do a lot more.