gun violence

As his term nears its end, President Biden signed new executive orders last week on ghost guns, school drills and other efforts to reduce gun violence throughout the country.

When the Gun Violence Memorial Project was launched in 2019, there were an average of 700 gun-related deaths every week in the United States. In 2024, the weekly average has been 840. The need for a space of collective mourning, remembrance and awareness is greater than ever.

As an emergency physician at Boston Medical Center in the early 2000s, Dr. Thea James saw Black and brown patients come into the emergency department forgotten by the system.

The opening scene in “Senseless Smoke – Live,” a theatrical production based on a film of the same name, brings to life the fears and uncertainties of living in a culture of gangs and guns. As well as efforts to overcome the pathologies of that life.

In their first meeting of 2023, Boston City Council members offered up what amounts to at least a partial agenda for the new year.

Gun violence is as American as apple pie. Urban citizens are apprehensive about safety in large cities. As expected, racist Republicans are quick to insist that the shootings are a consequence of large Black populations in major cities. By generating white fear, they hope to diminish the impact of the Black vote, which is usually predominantly Democratic.

In the wake of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, hundreds gathered at Christopher Columbus Park in Boston’s North End to demand new gun safety policies Saturday.

A bi-partisan group of 20 U.S. Senators Sunday announced an outline for gun safety reform, signaling a step forward in the effort to address recent back-to-back mass shootings while also balancing second amendment rights.

Racist propaganda asserts that Blacks are responsible for the violence in America, but the evidence refutes that. Indeed, some whites are undoubtedly fearful of violent retribution from Blacks because of slavery, segregation and racial discrimination. However, there has been no united vengeance attack by Blacks against whites.

Robert Aaron Long, the alleged mass shooter in Atlanta, is taken into custody without incident. His non-violent capture is not a fluke, aberration, or an anomaly. We have seen this time and again, a white mass killer guns down multitudes in shopping centers, schools, and in public places, and in almost all cases, they meekly surrender and are arrested.

What I’ve come to learn as a physician is that the ER is where the failures of public policy present themselves in their most crude, violent, and visceral form. Yes, we must have strong gun control laws on the books, but we must also address the conditions that allow violence to foster and create a situation where a young woman can be shot in the head during daylight hours.