Missouri’s Public-Health Enemy No. 1: A Gun in Every Pocket
The day after the Yik Yak threat, a black undergraduate stopped by my husband’s office to say that she was interrupting her education and going home. Her parents thought she’d be safer there. She had spent the night, she said, hiding in her bathtub.
This year, I find my well of optimism has run dry.One of my public-health students, who came to Missouri from Mongolia, where a third to a half of the population is nomadic and gun ownership is far from the norm, had ended up in the emergency room the next day with a panic attack. She, like her classmates from Botswana and India and Indonesia and Niger, had come to mid-Missouri to learn how to prevent disease and injury, in many cases to take those skills back to their homelands. Now they were struggling to make sense of life in a country in which firearm-related deaths are 10 times more likely than in any other industrialized nation, in which a student’s social-media post could empty out their classrooms and the student union and make students sleep in their bathtubs.
The Missouri legislature voted last week to override the governor’s veto and allow an extreme loosening of the gun laws in the state. The law eliminates requirements that individuals obtain training, education, a background check, and a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Research suggests that more people will be shot as a result, and I suspect that more people will be sleeping in their bathtubs trying not to be.
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