Guns Now Kill More Than Auto Crashes

Hanging sculpture of guns from another angle. Photo by Craig Mastantuono.

Gun killings have become so common in America that it’s easy to become numb to the issue or how it might be changing. But a report last fall, by the national Violence Prevention Center and the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort, included a stunning statistic: More people in Wisconsin are now killed by firearms than by auto crashes.

That’s a huge change. Back in 2002, twice as many people in Wisconsin (16 per 100,000 people) died from motor vehicle crashes than from gun deaths (8 per 100,000 people). Two decades later, by 2022, motor vehicle deaths had dropped significantly (to about 11 per 100,000) while gun deaths increased by a whopping 75% (to about 14 per 100,000).

Much of that increase has come in recent years: Gun deaths in the state, including homicides and suicides, jumped from 598 in 2018 to 830 in 2022.  And it is happening in both urban and rural areas of Wisconsin, which have both seen an alarming increase in gun deaths over the last 20 years.

Both homicides and suicides with guns are up significantly in Wisconsin, but it’s worth noting that suicides cause most of the deaths — more than 60% — and are more prevalent in the state’s rural areas.

Research has shown that states with laxer gun laws have more gun deaths. “In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence,” a report by Everytown Research & Policy has found. It ranked Wisconsin behind 22 other states in the strength of its gun laws.

“More than twice as many suicides by firearm occur in states with the fewest gun laws, relative to states with the most laws,” another study found.

Wisconsin has a lot of guns: “In 2022, more than 8,000 firearms were recovered in Wisconsin and traced,” the Violence Prevention Center study noted. Of guns recovered in the Midwest, more than twice as many were traced back to Wisconsin than to Minnesota.

Wisconsin is a big hunting state but has long backed reasonable laws to reduced gun violence. An overwhelming percent of people — 79% — support universal background checks for gun buyers, and 81% support red flag laws allowing the police to take guns away from people who have been found by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others. That’s according to a 2022 survey of state residents by the Marquette Law School poll.  And Wisconsin had long had a law requiring a two-day waiting period for handgun purchases: the law was on the books from 1976 until 2015, for nearly four decades, when it was repealed under Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

In March, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers released his biennial budget, which included all three of these provisions: universal background checks, a red flag law and 48-hour waiting period for gun purchases. They were rejected by Republican legislators and among 600 provisions dropped from the budget.

So Democrat legislators held a press conference yesterday announcing they would re-introduce bills with the three provisions dropped by Republicans. A fourth bill would ban untraceable “ghost guns,” which are put together from parts sold online and have no serial number. Democrats were joined by gun safety advocates and Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul at the press conference, as WPR reported.

Many states have such laws: 21 states have red flag laws, 20 have universal background checks, 15 now regulate ghost guns and 13 have a mandatory waiting period for handgun purchases.

But Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos immediately dumped on the bills. “Passing more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners is typical overreach by the Democrats that doesn’t solve the problem,” he declared.

The bill has particular resonance for the state Legislature, as it lost one of its own, former state representative and later, Milwaukee alderman Jonathan Brostoff, who committed suicide last fall with a gun. State Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) who was a good friend of Brostoff, noted that  a waiting period would help stop suicides. “Every suicide is preventable, and adding a waiting period … puts a barrier between somebody making an irrational decision and an irreversible harm,” he said.

Brostoff himself wrote a powerful Op Ed for Urban Milwaukee in 2019 that foreshadowed his own crisis. “For people contemplating suicide,” he wrote, “access to a firearm is like having your own personal, and permanent, ‘delete’ button. And let me tell you: having the power to use that delete button at your absolute lowest moment — when thoughts don’t make sense and when calm, structured thinking is no longer part of the equation — is not something that anyone facing those types of struggles is equipped to handle.”

“Access to firearms can be a death sentence to those experiencing a mental health crisis,” he noted. “More than 50% of deaths by suicide are completed with a gun. And for suicide attempts involving guns, the completion rate is 85%. Compare that to the completion rate of 5% for attempts not involving a gun.”

Both a mandatory waiting period for handgun purchases, and a red flag law would help reduce gun suicides in Wisconsin. And these killings happen the most in rural areas represented by Republican legislators. They would be serving their constituents, and acceding to the will of the majority in Wisconsin that supports these gun restrictions in order to save lives. What could be more important for public servants to do?