How gun policy is scrambling to keep up with gun culture?

When was the last time you saw a cigarette commercial?

Chances are, it’s been a while — tobacco ads on television, radio, billboards, transit, and event sponsorship have been banned by federal law for decades. It’s an approach some gun control groups and lawmakers are now trying to deploy in response to the country’s massive shooting crisis.

“The arms industry at one point recognized that there was money to be made by calling on the anti-government and increasingly extremist fringe,” New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski to USA Today, advocating legislation he introduced that would force the FTC to restrict gun ads.

California banned gun ads targeting minors in July, a move challenging youth shooting sports organizations under the First Amendment. A ruling is expected this week. One columnist argues that the law is merely political grandeur that lacks more important factors, such as the “unparalleled cultural influence” of video games, movies and television “to fuel violence in our culture.”

The bill was part of a series of California gun laws enacted this summer. Another priority for Governor Gavin Newsom was to curb the proliferation of “ghost weapons,” including signing a controversial bill — modeled after a Texas abortion law — that would allow private individuals to sue distributors for $10,000 or $10,000 in damages. more per weapon.

The term “ghost gun” generally refers to a firearm that is assembled from a kit of parts after purchase. By selling unassembled parts, sellers and buyers could have circumvented a number of gun regulations, namely the 1968 law that required all new guns to carry a serial number. The term is also used to describe 3D printed weapons.

As of Wednesday, those kits are now regulated by the same federal laws as fully assembled weapons. The Trace reports that retailers ran crazy promotions to try and move as much inventory as possible before the new regulations came into effect.

According to data from the Department of Justice and the FBI, homemade weapons without serial numbers make up less than 1% of the weapons found at homicide scenes. They are increasingly being identified by the police, but that may be partly because the police spend more time looking for them.

ProPublica takes a look at how the ghost gun battle is unfolding in Nevada, and how a prolific kit manufacturer sees the effort to regulate its industry. “I don’t care if this bill gets passed or not,” Loran Kelley, owner of Polymer80, told lawmakers. “I’m just informing you that we, as Americans, just won’t abide by it.”

Public opinion is not as defiant as Kelley. In recent polls, the proportion of Americans reporting firearms is rising, but so is support for gun control laws — 71% of those surveyed said gun laws should be stricter.

The increased approval for gun control is largely due to public attention to mass shootings, which account for about 1% of U.S. gun fatalities. The remaining 99% of shootings (most of which are suicides) leave an unfathomable trail of trauma.

A Washington Post analysis found that more than 2,400 children lost a parent to gun violence in Chicago between 2016 and 2020. Almost all of them were black or Hispanic. A 13-year-old who witnessed her father’s murder in 2016 — when she was just seven — describes the sickening fear that shapes her choices and haunts her dreams.

For children like her, who are present at the death of parents, it is trauma that “can cause more psychological damage to children than if they were shot themselves,” researchers say.

Of course, the trauma of child victims surviving shootings is also immense. Oronde McClain was shot in the head in Philadelphia at the age of 10 while running an errand for his mother. “Over the years, I saw no future for myself,” McClain writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I wish I hadn’t survived the shooting and tried to kill myself more than a dozen times.” He incorporated those feelings of anger and resentment into a documentary about survivors of gun violence, who often receive much less attention than the murdered.

A recent study into this imbalance found that people injured in shootings suffer a lot from pain diagnoses, mental illness and substance use disorders.

The public often associates shooting perpetrators with mental illness, rather than seeing the psychological toll of gun violence on victims. Psychologists point out that about half of all Americans will have mental health problems at some point in their lives, and that “there’s a big gap between a clinical diagnosis and the kind of emotional disorder that precedes many mass murders.”