The NPR Politics Podcast - Kids' Leading Cause Of Death? Guns.

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

This episode discusses gun violence and contains mentions of suicide and the sound of gun shots. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.Nearly one-in-five Americans have seen someone injured in a shooting. Four percent of adults have been injured themselves. A recent KFF poll documents the sizable reach of a uniquely American gun violence epidemic.This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, and science correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin joins us today. Hey, Selena. Hi. You've heard this before. Gun violence is one of the most intractable issues in American politics, but recent data shows that it's even more widespread than you might think. A recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, now known as KFF, showed that a majority of U.S. adults have been personally impacted by a gun-related incident. Selina, you reported on the survey. What are

the major findings? Well, they broke it down by different kinds of impacts, personal impact that people have experienced with guns. So one in five have had a family member killed by a gun. One in five have been threatened by a gun themselves. And nearly one in five have personally witnessed a shooting. So those are really direct impacts. And I talked to Ashley Kersinger from KFF who worked on this survey. They called more than 1,200 people. You put it all together, and it's like more than half. So a majority of adults in this country have either personally experienced or had a family member experience one of these incidences of gun violence.

And she points out that creates a lot of stress, not just among the people who have had those experiences, but when you live in a place where gun violence is so prevalent, it can kind of put you on edge. And they asked people about how often they worry about gun violence. And they found, especially in certain groups, that a third of both Black and Hispanic adults say they worry either every day or almost every day about themselves or someone they love being the victim of gun violence. Ryan, one of the things that's interesting to me about this, because a lot of times when we have gun conversations on the podcast, it's following a mass shooting because these are

these horrific events that sort of captivate the nation. But we also know that mass shootings are actually not the main driver of gun deaths in this country. Right. They aren't. They aren't. But it is something, as you said, that captures the country's attention. It's on the news for days at a time. But as you said, it is not something that is driving all of the gun death and gun violence that we see in this country. Did the survey at all get into kind of specifics as to what is the main driver of a lot of this violence? Yeah. I mean, Kersinger told me more than half of gun deaths happen in the home. So we're talking about domestic violence, suicides, accidents. And that domestic violence, we should note, is almost exclusively men towards

women. Right. And another thing that they talked about is gun deaths amongst certain parts of the population. And, you know, you talk about the nation being captivated, certainly when there's a shooting at a school. You know, we're all parents of young kids. A lot of people spend time thinking, where should I send my kid to school? And gun violence plays a role in how they think about that. They found one in five parents have either moved their kids to a different school or thought about moving their kids because of fears about gun violence. And, you know, recently the CDC found that gun deaths overtook vehicle crashes as the leading killer of kids and teenagers of people under 20 in this country. That is a horrific statistic for this country, that guns are killing children more than things

like cancer or even car accidents. But can you, what did the survey tell you about that? I mean, kids are dying more from guns, but what is the cause of the gun violence? Is it suicide? Is it homicide? Like what is it? Accidents. Accidents, right. Yeah. So CDC has started to kind of dig into these numbers. I looked at the most recent figure we have is from 2021. And there were 2,590 deaths among Americans under age 20. And in terms of type, 60% of those deaths were homicides, 32% were suicides, and 5% were accidents, which is surprising. I found it surprising. I would have thought that accidents accounted for many more of these deaths. And another thing that was interesting is that boys accounted for 83 percent of gun deaths among children and teens in 2021.

And black children were about five times as likely as white kids to die from gunfire. So that's really I mean, the chart is it's outrageous, especially because black children make up about 14% of the population. So it doesn't affect the country evenly. But I think that it's important not to say that it's just this group's problem or that group's problem. You know, it's important to say, like, this is definitely an American, a uniquely American problem. You talk about the fact that boys under 20 are predominantly impacted. I mean, you see that disparity between men and women in gun violence throughout age ranges. It isn't just a kid's thing. It is predominantly males who are using guns and males who are being killed by guns.

And it's usually men who are perpetrators in mass shootings. That's true as well. The thing that I think is fascinating about this, Lena, is that sometimes more data raises more questions, right? That's true as well. Yeah. to do this? Why is this happening? And I imagine that's got to be part of the conversation from the public health perspective of this. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you need to understand the problem to be able to figure out what policies are going to have the most impact. And we just don't have a great understanding of the problem right now. I mean, this was KFF's first effort to pull the country and to get a sense for how people out in the world are being personally impacted and how that's affecting what they do. I mean, we talked about how much of gun violence

happens in the home, but people are deciding not to go to festivals, not to go to religious services, you know, because of the fear of gun violence. So KFF was trying to get a picture of that. And so there's a lot of different kinds of research efforts that are putting a little bit more complexity and nuance on this question. But it's just kind of starting because for a long time, Congress really didn't give any funding for CDC to be able to examine this problem. And you need to understand it. This is a big heavy lift politically. I mean, you know more than I. And so without the backing of science to say this is what would make the most impact, whether it's, you know, limiting sales of this type of gun or requiring this kind

of check or et cetera, et cetera, it's kind of easy to say this problem's too big, like we can't take it on. Let's take a quick break and this problem's too big, like we can't take it on. Let's take a quick break and we'll talk about at least one possible solution when we get back. And we're back. And Ryan, you just took a trip out to Colorado to profile a company that has maybe found a unique solution or at least a workable solution, to address some of the concerns over gun safety. Yeah, so I went out to see this company called BioFire, which has just offered for sale the first smart gun that uses biometrics and facial recognition. And the smart gun is a gun that will only fire for a registered user, not for anybody else. Biometrics like a fingerprint.

Fingerprint and facial recognition. The CEO and founder of this company is a guy named Kai Klepfer. He's 26 years old. He started working on this as a science fair project when he was 15 years old because he grew up outside of Denver. There was that horrific shooting during a screening of Batman, midnight screening of Batman. In a row, yeah. Twelve people killed, 70 something like that, wounded. And so he was 15 at the time and he said, maybe there's a technological solution to this.

And so he started working on a smart gun for a science fair project. 11 years later, this company now has 40 employees. They have $30 million in venture capital funding, and they now have this product that they are offering for sale, which looks like a handgun, but it looks like a futuristic handgun. So I went out there and I saw a demonstration of it. I just need to put a pin in this for a second because we're talking about how gun violence has sort of shaped American identity and a generation of kids. And it is a fascinating point to me that this is a kid. He was a child who was inspired to do this technology because of mass violence. But it's not a new idea. It's not even new technology. It sounds

like he's just done it better than everyone else. Nobody else has actually ever really done it before. There have been several attempts to try to build a smart gun before. There's also been politics around this. Smith and Wesson reached an agreement with the Clinton administration way back when to start developing smart guns. There was a mass boycott, essentially, of Smith & Wesson. The company almost went bankrupt because of it. And then they eventually backed off and said, look, we're shuttering our smart gun program. We're not going to do that anymore. There's a company that came out with a smart gun in 2014 that used a radio frequency watch.

But there were technological problems with it. It took like 12 seconds to unlock. Somebody demonstrated that you could actually hack into the gun. So there was a lot of pushback from the gun community to the idea of a smart gun, in large part because nobody had really developed a good one. So did you get to try it? So I did. I went out and did this demonstration at the company, went into their in-house firing range out back. Kai Klepfer, the founder, brought it out. I saw this gun in action. I saw him fire it down the range. We have a bit of tape here, but just as a warning, you are going to hear the sound of gunshots.

So I'll load the firearm here. So the firearm is now loaded. You'll see, even as I was starting to handle that, it had already unlocked. And so I get up on target. So you just fired it. I just fired it, yep. You're the only registered user. I am not registered to it. I'm not an authorized user, but I'm going to walk over to it and see if this works.

So I'm walking over to it, pick it up. It recognizes that someone's touching it, but the white light is on. It's not green. I point it down range. I pull the trigger and nothing. Okay. Set it back down. And then I can pick this right back up if you want to see that. Yeah. And then

again, it'll go green, obviously. And it's fired. And so this gun, I picked it up, I pulled the trigger, and as you can hear there, it doesn't fire. The way he sells this gun, what element of it is about gun safety? All of it. All of it is about gun safety. His idea is, look, this is a gun for the home. It's a gun for home defense.

That's how they view this. That's how they have developed it. The idea being that you want a gun for your home because you're concerned about somebody breaking in, but you also want something that's safe for your kids. There are a lot of kids who end up getting shot over the course of any given year by accident. They find their parents' gun, they pick it up, they shoot themselves, they shoot a friend, they shoot their parents. This, if the kid is not authorized, then this gun will not fire. And so this would help address that sort of issue. And then you also have the idea of, you know, there are roughly 400,000 guns a year that are stolen in this country. A lot of them end up being used in crimes. If you have guns that cannot be fired except by the authorized user, those guns essentially become bricks. So there are certain aspects that they see this as a gun safety enhancement. I spoke to people from

every town, the gun control advocacy group, they view this as a very positive development, but they also say, look, this isn't going to solve the issue of gun violence in this country. It can eat at the margins, but we're still going to have mass shootings. We're still going to have crime, but any sort of positive impact right now when politically, this is a very difficult issue to try to tackle, having industry take steps that could address at least some aspect of this problem, they view as a positive step. I should just mention, you were talking about accidents in the home with kids picking up guns. So the KFF poll actually asked parents, parents who owned guns, about their gun storage. And they found that six in 10 store it in the same place as ammunition,

a third store it loaded, and a third store it unlocked. So, I mean, as you say, I don't think there's a lot of different ways in which this isn't going to impact the problem of gun violence. But it seems like in this kind of situation, in terms of just safe storage, that it could have an impact. Right. It's like maybe the bigger intractable political debate is, you know, over here. But there are sort of these niche ideas that people are trying to come up with, which I actually kind of find fascinating. Like this might not move the needle on gun violence in this country, but like the around the margin stuff might actually be where the only action is in this country right now. Well, one thing that's interesting, too, is that, you know, they asked people in this poll if their pediatricians had mentioned guns. So one issue here is increasing

the number of pediatricians who have that conversation. It can be uncomfortable, but, you know, it's one way in which you have a person with a young child that you can say, do you have a gun in your home? And then hopefully also the second question, which is how is it stored? Maybe are you aware of how many kids are injured or killed through accidents? I mean, this is one kind of public health type of approach, getting clinicians involved. You know, there are several hundred children a year who are killed by a gun in the home, by accident, unintentional shootings. So while there are 48,000 people who die in gun violence every year in this country, if you can save 300 kids or 200 or even 10 for those families, let alone those kids, that's a major, major plus.

All right. I think that's it for us today. Selina, as always, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.