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

As a Florida State University alum, the shooting on our campus on Holy Thursday was particularly jarring. Though we were not so fortunate as to hear the call for “thoughts and prayers” we were lucky that the campus happened to have the excellent Tallahassee Memorial Hospital nearby to save several of the victims. Until we get to the point where there could be more common-sense gun reform, having more trauma centers may be the only chance we have to save lives.

“All six of the patients at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital (TMH) are expected to make a ‘full recovery,’ medical professionals said Friday during a press conference on the aftermath of a fatal shooting at Florida State University,” WCTV reported. “Dr. Brett Howard said that TMH is currently treating six people who were injured Thursday after an FSU student allegedly opened fire on pedestrians near the FSU Student Union. Doctors are hoping to release two of those patients on Friday.”

Having a good hospital near a mass casualty event may well be the best hope we have to save lives, since there’s a reluctance to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

Research in The American Surgeon journal confirms this. In their article “Discrepancies in Mass Shootings and Access to Trauma Care Across the United States, 2014-2018,” researchers Kaylin J. Beiter, Stacey M. Knowles, Alexandra Tedesco, Claudia Leonardi, Peter L. Scharf, Brett M. Chapman, Tommy A. Brown, Jonathan E. Schoen, Lance E. Stuke, Patrict P. Greiffenstein, Alan B. Marr, John P. Hunt and Alison A. Smith looked into “geographic disparities in mass shootings and access to trauma centers.”

In this 2024 article, the writers acknowledge that “The United States has one of the highest rates of gun violence and mass shootings.” They look at information from where mass shootings take place, as well as data for all trauma centers. Over four years (2014-2018), they found “A total of 564 trauma centers and 1672 mass shootings were included. Ratios of the number of mass shootings vs trauma centers per state ranged from 0 to 11.0 mass shootings per trauma center. States with the greatest disparity (highest ratio) included Louisiana and New Mexico.”

The results of this study should be particularly worrisome for the Southeast USA, because the region has a lot of mass casualty events from guns, and not as many trauma centers. According to Niloofar Dehghan, Lisa K. Cannada, Ashraf N. El Naga, Anna Miller, Dan Schlatterer’s article “Trauma Center Proliferation in the United States: Concerns and Potential Solutions,” in the Orthopaedic Trauma Association International, there is some good and bad news.

“There has been an increase in the number of Level I and II trauma centers across the United States in the past few decades. However, data suggest that access to trauma care remains poor in rural areas of the country,” Dehghan et.al. write in this 2025 article.

And my research on red flag laws shows that those red states that don’t have such laws have much higher firearm deaths. “When it comes to gun death rates per 100,000 residents, Red Flag Law states average 12.0381 gun deaths per capita. Non-Red Flag Law states have a mean of 18.6414. The difference is statistically significant as well.”

We have two choices: (1) adopt stronger red flag laws to keep firearms out the of the hands of dangerous individuals, or (2) build more trauma centers in red states to save the lives from this increased number of killings. As Beiter et.al. report “States in the southern regions of the US experience the greatest disparity due to a high burden of mass shootings with less access to trauma centers.”

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.