Sign of changing times: Mass. gun deaths up

Kenneth J. Cooper

For more than a year, a large billboard alongside Fenway Park advised passing motorists on the Mass Pike, “Welcome to Massachusetts. You’re more likely to live here.” The public service message, though, had nothing to do with traffic—at least not vehicle traffic.

Smaller type on what its sponsor describes as the largest billboard in the country declared that the state has “The most effective gun laws and lowest gun fatality rate in the country. Gun laws work.”

This month, that billboard came down. One reason: The rate of shooting deaths in the state has gone up, and Massachusetts no longer has the fewest people being killed with firearms.

The latest computations by the federal Centers for Disease Control for 2002 ranks the state second behind Hawaii. The order of these two states was reversed in 2001, the year of the initial billboard.

The rate of gun deaths in Massachusetts rose slightly to more than 3 per 100,000 people, while Hawaii’s rate also went down to just below that level. The national rate remained at more than 10 deaths per 100,000 people.

More than half the individuals killed in Massachusetts’ murders in 2002 were African Americans, 53 out of 94. All but three of the black victims were men.

The rise in shooting deaths of all kinds, including murders, accidents and suicides, coincided with an upturn in violence in Boston as young offenders who had been imprisoned during the “Boston Miracle” in the late 1990s finished their sentences and returned to the streets and their old ways.

In 1995, John Rosenthal co-founded Stop Handgun Violence, a statewide group based in Newton that since then has posted different gun control messages in the same spot along the Mass Pike. Rosenthal said law enforcement officials on the Pacific islands of Hawaii have a much easier time stopping an inflow of firearms than their counterparts in Massachusetts.

His group’s new billboard replaced the previous one on March 1, and spotlights interstate trafficking as a major cause of gun violence in Massachusetts.

“You need to have uniform national laws,” Rosenthal said. “We’re surrounded by states with irresponsible gun laws, like New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.”

Those states do not require criminal background checks before someone buys a weapon at unregulated gun shows or from another person in what are called “private sales.” The three neighboring states, along with Georgia, are leading suppliers of guns that wind up being used to commit crimes in Massachusetts, according to Rosenthal.

“Sixty percent of crime guns in Massachusetts are traced out of state to the original gun purchase,” he added.

The new billboard measures a staggering 252 feet long — the same length as the previous one — and urges motorists to help “Stop Traffic” in guns from out of state because “Background Checks Stop Crime.” Four images of highway signs bearing the names, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and Georgia, are also shown, with an image of a handgun on each where the numbers identifying a highway would usually be.

What about the previous billboard’s other claim, that Massachusetts has nation’s “most effective gun laws?”

Rosenthal said the state’s laws have been widely regarded as “the most comprehensive” since passage of the Gun Control Act of 1998. That law increased criminal penalties for illegally posing or using a gun, required new applicants for a license to carry firearms to complete a safety course, mandated that guns have a child safety lock or be stored in a locked container, and banned certain assault weapons.

A national lobbying group based in Washington, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, does rank Massachusetts as one of the states with the toughest gun control laws.

The Brady Campaign’s annual rankings, released earlier this month, lists it as one of the six states to receive the top grade given to any for 2004, an A-minus. The state’s cumulative grade since 1997, when the rankings began, places it in a tie for second with Connecticut, behind Maryland, the only state ever to receive a solid A from the group.

“I question why we got an A-minus, instead of an A,” Rosenthal said.

This year Massachusetts received an A in four of seven categories of gun laws, an A-minus for safety rules and restrictions on private sales, and a B-plus for giving local police the discretion to allow residents with a license to carry a concealed weapon.

The National Rifle Association has called the 1998 law in Massachusetts “one of the most restrictive” in the nation, citing in particular a proviso that imposed a one-year sentence in jail for illegal possession of a gun.

But the NRA discounts the Brady Campaign’s rankings, and also the general idea that gun controls actually control crime. The gun owners lobby declared that “there is no correlation between its grades, and the state’s gun-related crime and accident rates and trends.” For instance, the NRA pointed out, Maryland has a murder rate higher than the national average. (In shooting deaths, Maryland falls about in the middle of the states, ranking 31st in 2002, according to the CDC.)

Gun control advocates like Rosenthal cite other factors behind violence, such as the lack of federal laws regulating gun shows and the need for more job opportunities and better rehabilitation programs for ex-offenders.

Taking neither side in the debate, the Centers for Disease Control found in a 2003 report that there was “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness” of gun control laws and said more research was needed to evaluate whether they do prevent violence.

With violence still on its way up in some Boston neighborhoods, lawmakers are not waiting for further study and are moving ahead to enact more restrictions on firearms. In 2005, there were 341 shootings in the city, the most since 1995, and the number of murders also rose to the highest in a decade, 75.

The Massachusetts Legislature this month imposed stiff sentences for lending of a firearm to commit a crime, a provision aimed at a relatively new practice of gang members sharing “community guns.” The new penalty is a mandatory sentence of two years in prison and a $500 fine.

In Boston, City Councilor Robert Consalvo has proposed a registry of residents who have committed a major crime with a gun, making available to the public a listing similar to the state’s registry of sex offenders. Consalvo denounced the gun violence afflicting the city as “urban terrorism.”