Local responses to shootings include requiring gun shops to post warnings

Warning labels will soon be required where guns are sold in Westchester County, New York. This week’s unanimous vote by a state county board is among the local responses to armed violence, including recent shootings in BuffaloNew York; Orange County, California; i Houston.

Access to a firearm increases the risk of suicide, homicide and accidental death, and warning labels can be an important tool in educating people about a risk to public health and safety, according to Christian Heyne. vice president of policy for the Brady campaign to prevent guns. Violence.

“There’s a misconception in this country that bringing a gun home can make it safer, when it increases the likelihood that you and your family will be shot,” Heyne told CBS MoneyWatch. “We have a responsibility to make sure that people who exercise their Second Amendment rights do so with a full understanding of the risk.”

The idea is promoted by the Gun Shop Project, a national association of gun owners and suicide prevention advocacy groups that encourages stores to display and transmit materials on firearms and suicide.

“This is just to post a warning sign so people are better informed,” Williams Johnson, a Westchester county lawmaker who helped sponsor the measure that required warning signage, told CBS MoneyWatch Jewel.

While most Americans favor it some form of gun control, “that’s not it,” Johnson said of the new law, which was passed Monday and will go into effect in three months.

“If this legislation and the warning signs in gun shops help make any gun owner think twice and be more diligent,” avoiding a single incident of domestic violence, suicide or unintentional death of a child, it is worth the effort, said Johnson, who noted that there are about 40 gun shops in the county.

According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 54% of all gun deaths in New York City are suicides, and more than 27% of all suicide deaths in the state involve firearms. In addition, nearly 37% of New York’s intimate partner homicides involve a handgun.

To show retailers and hand them over to gun licensors in the county, the notices will also include contact information for the county’s crisis prevention and response team and the national suicide line hotline. .

Divergent paths between states

Other cities and states in the country are taking action against weapons, with some localities easing restrictions and others tightening them. Texas, for example, stopped demanding residents from September get permission to carry a gun. The 18-year-old who shot dead 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, he legally bought the weapon he used, law enforcement said Wednesday.

At the other end of the spectrum, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed this month to work to raise the state’s minimum age for buying a gun from 18 to 21 “at a minimum.”

While polls show that most Americans support a ban on assault-style weapons, none of the 30 states with a Republican-controlled legislature have implemented a policy, according to Christopher Poliquin, a professor of strategy at UCLA that has investigated weapons policy.

While paralysis on the issue at the federal level is now the norm, “both advocates and opponents of the new restrictions should look beyond Washington to take action on arms policy,” Poliquin wrote Wednesday in an essay published in TheConversation.com.

In Colorado on June 7, Boulder City Council is scheduled to consider a collection of proposed firearms laws that includes reactivating the 2018 assault rifle ban, now that the state has lifted the ban on local arms control measures. The city will also vote to raise the age to 21 to buy and own a firearm; add a 10-day waiting period to buy a gun; and prohibiting gun owners from carrying a concealed firearm near parks, playgrounds, churches, and schools.

As in Westchester County, New York, Boulder officials are also seeking to have their two gun stores issue a health warning about the dangers of guns to homeowners, family members and others.

As of 2018, gun dealers and gun ranks in King County, Washington State must post signs warning of the risks of firearms.