Steve Forrester

For years, automobile accidents were the major cause of children’s deaths in the U.S. That has changed. In the most recent year of reporting, the leading cause of children’s deaths was gunshots, as The New York Times reported.

That alarming trend helps explain the shift in the discussion of firearms in America. Public alarm and disgust — well beyond Texas’s borders — was apparent following the killing of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde.

Parents have become aware of how troubling active shooter drills are to young children. These exercises were not commonplace just a decade ago. Gun massacres in school buildings such as Sandy Hook and Uvalde have become so common over such a long period of time that there is a generation of students who are marked by them.

Gun woundings in persons of all ages in Oregon nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021. During that same period, Oregon gun deaths increased by 18%. For the first time, we know these numbers, because of a new partnership between Oregon Health & Science University and the Portland State University School of Public Health. This new research collaboration is the Gun Violence Prevention Research Center.

“The center aims to treat gun violence as a public health issue,” reported the Oregon Capital Insider. “Similar to how society would address the outbreak of infectious disease, researchers will use data-driven science to inform prevention strategies and reduce health impacts.”

Beginning in the 1990s, public health physicians gathered similar numbers of gun woundings, deaths and suicides. In its revulsion at seeing that information made public, the gun lobby prevailed upon President George W. Bush to halt that practice, and Congress agreed. It was a decision for the nation to be ignorant of a clear and present danger to our lives.

The weekly drumbeat of mass killings in schools and other public places such as grocery stores and shopping malls can either numb our society or cause it to seek more information. Knowing the numbers such as the Gun Violence Prevention Research Center is gathering is the kind of development that will shift public discussion of firearms, just as Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile” gave momentum to seat belt legislation, just as information about lung cancer changed laws about smoking.

In the National Rifle Association’s mantra — designed to alarm gun owners about government seizures of firearms — is like an army that’s fighting the last war. The kinds of reforms that increasingly are gaining public approval are background checks for gun buyers and bans on large magazines and bans on the sale of military-grade assault weapons.

The public opinion analyst Samuel Lubell noted in the 1950s that political change happens in America when the middle shifts. That is what’s now occurring with guns. A generation of parents and grandparents find themselves appalled at the jeopardy their children and grandchildren live with on a daily basis.