
Prevention efforts can also reduce the relatively rare occasions when severe mental illness contributes to homicide or the more common circumstances when depression or other mental illness contributes to suicide. Prevention efforts guided by research on developmental risk can reduce the likelihood that firearms will be introduced into community and family conflicts or criminal activity. The most consistent and powerful predictor of future violence is a history of violent behavior. Although many youths desist in aggressive and antisocial behavior during late adolescence, others are disproportionately at risk for becoming involved in or otherwise affected by gun violence. Instead, gun violence is associated with a confluence of individual, family, school, peer, community, and sociocultural risk factors that interact over time during childhood and adolescence. For this reason, there is no single profile that can reliably predict who will use a gun in a violent act. Antecedents to Gun Violence: Developmental IssuesĪ complex and variable constellation of risk and protective factors makes persons more or less likely to use a firearm against themselves or others. More information and supporting citations can be found within the chapters themselves.

STEVE PEARCE GROWING UP POOR GUN VIOLENCE HOW TO
Toward this end, in February 2013 the American Psychological Association commissioned this report by a panel of experts to convey research-based conclusions and recommendations (and to identify gaps in such knowledge) on how to reduce the incidence of gun violence - whether by homicide, suicide, or mass shootings - nationwide.įollowing are chapter-by-chapter highlights and short summaries of conclusions and recommendations of the report’s authors.

Psychology can make important contributions to policies that prevent gun violence. It requires evidence-based, multifaceted solutions. And they will apparently use anything they can think of to excuse it - including a genocide 25 years ago and 7,000 miles away.Gun violence is an urgent, complex, and multifaceted problem. Republicans like Pearce are twisting themselves into knots to explain why they won’t support tightening gun laws. But that would be a ridiculous explanation nonetheless for the deadly increase in mass murders since Republicans allowed the assault weapons ban to expire in 2004. Incidentally, Pearce is flat wrong about a supposed “breakdown” of the American family. Rick Santorum, Pearce declared that there’s been a “complete breakdown in the values of our country” which is “coming straight from a breakdown in the family.” In the radio interview, Pearce also blamed societal ills for the constant parade of mass shootings in the U.S.Įchoing former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Instead, he wants people to be allowed to carry concealed weapons around school campuses. Yet Pearce doesn’t support laws to keep military-style rifles out of the hands of these “evil” people. Pearce declared that he thinks there’s “evil that is coming loose now” and “stuff percolating in people’s hearts.” And it takes callous advantage of a horrific episode in history to try to justify his own dismissal of the gun violence crisis. because the Rwandan genocide was carried out without guns is ludicrous. Pearce’s suggestion that new gun laws won’t make a difference in the U.S. The government sponsored the 100-day genocide, and the perpetrators did indeed use machetes. In 1994, members of the Hutu majority government oversaw a genocidal mass slaughter of nearly one million people in Rwanda.

This new attempt to deflect responsibility for stopping gun violence is not only strange - it’s despicable.

They killed a million people with machetes because of the evil in the hearts of people.” “Gun control itself is not going to be the answer,” Pearce said regarding the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives. Specifically, he insisted that passing gun safety laws won’t stop school massacres because “evil” people can still use machetes. In a radio interview, Pearce attempted to draw a line from the mass genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and gun violence in America today. But New Mexico representative and gubernatorial candidate Steve Pearce offered the most bizarre excuse yet for opposing gun control. Republican lawmakers have by and large stubbornly refused to take action on gun safety.
