Co-authors: It's not mental illness; It's the firearms that make altercations more lethal

Co-authors Fred Guttenberg and Thomas Gabor have railed against intransigence on firearm safety laws, but they will emphasize solutions to the country's gun violence epidemic when they speak at Florida Atlantic University on March 6 and 7.

Guttenberg and Gabor last year co-wrote "American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence." They say Americans need to "accept" the fact that there are 400 million guns on the streets, in cars and in homes and then galvanize political support for gun-safety measures.

"We've been on a slippery slope," said Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime, 14 at the time, was one of the 17 people murdered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting six years ago. "It's led us to where we are today, and it is time to start fixing this. We now need to talk about how we're going to fix this. It's that simple."

Gabor added public opinion polls show that while Americans may be bitterly divided by partisan political views, they come together in support of sensible gun safety legislation.

"This myth of the country hopelessly divided, nothing could be further from the truth," Gabor said. "Public opinion is on the side of change."

'Fixes' start with better background checks, licensing requirements

Those changes, and "fixes" as Guttenberg noted, are already available. They include, for example, strengthening background checks.

Guttenberg related visiting an FBI office where agents scrutinize young buyers of pistols and assault weapons to spot signs of trouble. He was told agents had intervened about 500 times to stop purchases, often citing signs of emotional distress in the young buyers.

"That's a big deal," he said.

Gabor added that even current background checks can be made more stringent by providing local law-enforcement officers a role in them to question family members, work colleagues and others to detect signs of emotional imbalances before the weapon is purchased.

It may sound burdensome, but he points out that people wanting to drive must pass tests, and that barbers and cosmeticians must show aptitude, as well as do those in myriad other professions that require licensing and oversight. States like Connecticut, which have implemented better regulations, have seen a drop in gun-related suicides and homicides, while those that have weakened them, like Missouri, have seen an increase in gun violence.

"We're starting, we're very early in the game, but starting to actually strengthen background checks," he said.

Raising age to buy firearms, so-called red flag laws and requiring safe storage also work

Protective orders, dubbed red flag laws, have been said to have stopped 58 potential mass shootings. In Indiana, it is estimated that for every time a red flag order was carried out, a suicide was prevented. Florida has used its red flag program 12,000 times since it was enacted after the Parkland school shooting.

"The sheriffs using them the most are the red county sheriffs, not the blue county sheriffs," said Guttenberg.

Safe storage laws that require weapons to be kept away from those who should not have them in a home are also vital, Gabor added, citing statistics showing 76% of guns used by young people came from a home in which the firearm was unsecured. Right now, he said, 5 million homes have a dangerous combination of "at least one unlocked, loaded and accessible gun" and minors in the household.

"These things save lives," said Guttenberg. "This is not an affront to Second Amendment rights. Tom and I don't have an issue with gun owners. We don't have an issue with the Second Amendment. We have an issue with gun violence."

Guttenberg and Gabor said they wrote "American Carnage" to counter the narratives circulating in the U.S. body politic.

"There is a complete level of disinformation, I would call it lies, that exist in the effort to combat gun violence in America," said Guttenberg.

Mental health is not the problem. It's that guns increase the odds of lethal outcomes in disputes.

One of those is that gun violence — the United States is recording more than 600 mass shootings a year — is predominantly a mental health issue.

Not so, the co-authors say. Gabor said the mental illness argument "is such an evasion" and cites statistics showing that the U.S. is not an "outlier globally in terms of mental illness."

"What we do have is an issue where we have over 20 million individuals with severe anger management issues that also own guns," he said. "That combination is far more volatile."

He adds that the majority of the violence involving weapons are not premediated incidents, but rather spontaneous reactions. More often than not, Gabor said, they result from "some form of argument among people or groups" that is then resolved with gunshots.

Six years after Parkland: The complicated legacy of a shocking, saddening school shooting

That, he said, is why America leads the world in gun violence, because of the availability of weapons.

"The presence or absence of guns, and in particular these assault-style rifles, makes an enormous difference in terms of whether people get injured or you have lethality," he said. "What guns do is they increase the lethality of altercations. They make it more likely you have a mass casualty incident."

Gabor said that is where the United States is an outlier among "affluent" countries.

"It's not in its level of violence, but in its level of lethal violence, and that's where guns come in," he said.

Fred Guttenberg: U.S. weapons arsenal doubled without regard to public safety

And weapons have become much more available in the past few decades.

In 2003, Guttenberg noted, U.S. gun owners had 200 million weapons. That number is more than double today. Plus, in 2003, AR-15s accounted for fewer than 2% of all firearms sold. Today, they are over 25% of sales, as the number of assault rifles in U.S. communities has skyrocketed from 400,000 in the mid-1990s to 20 million today

"We went from a period 20 years ago when we had far more people than guns, to 20 years later, we now have far more guns than people," he said. "And we doubled our arsenal without any regard for public safety."

The rise in gun sales coincides with messaging from the gun lobby and manufacturers that Americans need a firearm in order to be safe in their neighborhoods and elsewhere.

"As we point out, nothing can be further from the truth," Gabor said. "The goal of this book is to take on some of the key talking points, the key claims made by the gun lobby and extremists, because many of them are patently wrong and debunked when you look at the evidence."

One of those key claims, Guttenberg said, emerged after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. Namely, the myth that a good guy with a gun is what will stop a bad guy with a gun, the refrain Guttenberg said the gun lobby and industry used to turn the devastating attack into a marketing campaign.

"They turned Sandy Hook into a gun-sales bonanza," said Guttenberg. "This isn't who we've always been as a country but we've allowed ourselves now to be into this horrific point in our history."

The two say what's needed is a call to action — specifically voter engagement and activism.

"To solve this, it is now a purely political issue," Guttenberg said. "We've seen what voting for people who actually care about gun violence can do. We've seen what voting can do to start turning the ship on this. We've only begun. You better show up and vote in 2024."

If you go …

WHAT: Fred Guttenberg and Thomas Gabor, co-authors of American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence, will speak at the FAU Boca Raton and Jupiter campuses.

WHEN: Wednesday, March 6 at 7 p.m. in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Auditorium at the FAU Jupiter campus and on Thursday, March 7 at 7 p.m. at the Friedberg Auditorium at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the FAU Boca Raton campus.

TICKETS: Tickets are $60 for OLLI members and $70 for non-members. Same-day tickets, if available, are $70 at the door. Tickets for the Boca event can be purchased by going to olliboca.fau.edu/wordpress/ or calling 561-297-3185 while tickets for the Jupiter appearance can be purchased by going to www.fau.edu/osherjupiter/ or calling 561-799-8547.

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Fred Guttenberg, American Carnage co-author Thomas Gabor speak at FAU