U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, led a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023. (Screenshot from U.S. Senate webcast)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Tuesday discussed how to treat gun violence as a public health crisis, in hopes of building upon last year’s federal gun safety legislation.

“Across the country, gun violence is a public health epidemic,” Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, the chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks.

Senate Republicans pushed back against framing gun violence as a public health crisis and argued that approach would violate the Second Amendment and that the focus should be on mental health.

“The fact is a firearm in the hands of a law-abiding citizen is not a threat to public safety,” the top Republican on the committee, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said.

Durbin said the Democratic witnesses tapped — who ranged from doctors to public health experts — would help lawmakers decide how to expand the most comprehensive federal gun safety legislation that Congress passed in nearly 30 years, known as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Any additional gun safety legislation will be an uphill battle, as Republicans control the House and although Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate, they would still need to pass a 60-vote threshold.

The bipartisan safety act came after 19 children and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 Black people were killed in a white supremacist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. There have been several high profile mass shootings this year, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee where three children and three teachers were killed and another in Lewiston, Maine where 18 people were killed and another 13 were injured. In Louisville, five victims were killed in a shooting in April at a downtown bank.

A year of mass shootings

Durbin said that Congress needs to get involved because the U.S. is unique in its gun violence.

This year alone, there have been 619 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks gun violence in the U.S. Firearm-related injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the witnesses tapped by Democrats, Megan L. Ranney, who is the dean of the Yale School of Public Health, said that she has a front row seat to gun violence.

“We are turning into a nation of traumatized survivors,” she said.

Ranney said that for the U.S. to treat gun violence as a public health epidemic, the first step is to first collect data on gun violence. She said through data, researchers will be able to find risks and predictions and then figure out what kind of programs can change those patterns, such as violence prevention programs.

She said then the next step would be to scale up those projects that work and implement those practices in communities with high rates of gun violence.

Cornyn argued that gun violence and mass shootings were tied to mental health, and he asked Ranney how often that was the case.

Ranney said that studies have shown that people with mental health problems are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators, adding that “mental illness is deeply connected to firearm suicide, which is the leading type of firearm death in this country.”

“I think it is worth noting that when you actually look at mass shooters, the vast majority of them were in an identifiable crisis prior to that mass shooting, but only slightly more than the average American population (that) has been identified as having serious mental illness,” Ranney said.

Another witness tapped by Democrats, Franklin Cosey-Gay, the director of the Violence Recovery Program at UChicago Medicine, said that hospital-based violence intervention programs are critical to solving a gun violence epidemic.

“Violence recovery specialists use intensive case management partnering with community violence intervention to ensure comprehensive recovery and reduce re-injury after discharge,” he said.

Cosey-Gay said that kind of intervention can include a multidisciplinary approach involving spiritual care, social work, child life specialists, mental health and hospital clinical staff.

New Mexico executive order

Several Republicans such as Sens. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina slammed an executive order in September from New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that declared gun violence a public health emergency.

Source New Mexico reported that the Sept. 8 order encouraged local mayors and sheriff’s offices to ask for “an emergency proclamation and implementation of temporary additional restrictions” under the state Riot Control Act.

The governor later revised the order to apply to parks and playground, but it set off a political firestorm from Republicans and a flurry of lawsuits.

Tillis, who was part of the group of bipartisan senators who worked to pass the federal gun safety legislation, said the decision by Lujan Grisham to declare a public health emergency pushes “us further back from coming up with reasonable policy.”

Cornyn said it was the latest attack on the Second Amendment.

“A group of our colleagues …, and I wrote to the Department of Justice to intervene and protect the constitutional rights of New Mexicans to carry a firearm outside of their home,” he said. “What is a constitutional right, that’s something … some of our colleagues consistently overlook.”