By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

The killing at Winder Georgia’s Apalachee High School struck a nerve throughout the state. Everyone I’ve talked to has some connection to this shooting, or has witnessed one. We can’t bring back the dead students and teachers, or heal the physical or psychological wounds of the survivors. But maybe we could do something about eliminating, or at least reducing, the numbers of these tragic cases of gun violence.

We’ll never eliminate guns in America, nor should we. The Second Amendment is there for a reason. But it also calls for a “well-regulated militia” something the most ardent gun rights groups don’t always share. Our Founding Fathers knew there should be some rules. But which ones would be a good idea? The current legal theory of some on the Supreme Court only applying pre-Civil War gun regulations to a modern context is as absurd as much as it is a failure.

The RAND Corporation is one of the most respected voices on gun legislation. They offered up support for Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws as a solution. But my oldest kid Asher and I did some research on CAP laws in the wake of the school shooting in Barrow County, even before the dad was arrested. We found that states with a “negligent storage law,” the toughest CAP law, had school shooting casualty rates that were little different from states that did nothing. The ones that fared the worst in our study were the “reckless provision” law, a watered-down CAP that only punished parents if they recklessly provided a weapon to a child. Georgia has that law.

Everytown Research and Policy, a gun research group, did find that CAP laws did have some effectiveness. “Secure gun storage reduces youth gun violence dramatically, with households that lock firearms and ammunition seeing up to 85% fewer unintentional injuries. State storage laws also incentivize better practices, with researchers finding they reduce injuries and deaths among young people.” So while they may not reduce school shootings, these are a positive development for other types of shootings.

RAND doesn’t think that an assault weapons ban or red flag laws are the solution. But I’ve found strong support for the effectiveness of both.

When it comes to assault weapons bans, my students and I found in Penn Live and other publications “that when comparing the years before the assault weapons ban and during the ban, there’s little difference between the number of mass shootings in both time frames. From 1982-94, there were an average of 1.4615 mass shootings per year, and 1.6 mass shootings per year during the AWB years, 1995-2004, when the ban expired. But it was a different story when we covered the years after the ban. From 2005 to 2021, there were an average of 5.1176 mass shootings per year, far more than the 1.6 from the AWB years.” Those who claim assault weapons bans don’t work rarely employ data after 2004, when letting the ban lapse really failed.

Furthermore, I’ve found that red flag laws have fewer gun deaths. In The Conversation, I learned “The seven states with the lowest firearm death rates for 2020 all had red flag laws. And 14 of the 15 states with the highest firearm death rates that year did not have a red flag law. The exception was New Mexico, where a red flag law took effect halfway through the year.”

Moreover, these “red flag laws,” which enable law enforcement to keep guns away from those designated as dangerous individuals, save lives, as I also found in that research for The Conversation. I found that if every state had a red flag law, it would have saved more than an estimated 10,000 lives.

Every time there’s a mass shooting, the humor newspaper The Onion runs the headline “‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” But many of these shootings can be prevented. Now that we know what works, it’s time to implement some modern-day common sense gun reform, instead of some pre-1860 legal standards.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.