“In our [2017 Policy Studies Journal] paper, we mostly looked at overall gun control policies and access to mental health rather than specific policies,” Smith said, explaining that most states which implement gun control laws do so more with more than one, making it difficult to assess which laws have caused what specific effect. Despite this challenge, Smith and his team still found a definite pattern in terms of how gun control laws impacted suicide rates.

“What we do find in our research is that states with more gun control laws have fewer gun deaths (including those who die by suicide from guns) and for non-suicides (homicides and accidental discharge together), a combination of more access to mental health services and an overall stricter climate for gun control laws correlates with a particularly lower rate of gun deaths,” Smith said. Specifically, the team found that more access to mental health care did not correlate with lower rates of suicide by gun; stricter gun control laws, however, had that desired impact.

“This relationship is perhaps due to the fact that many mental health treatments take time to have an effect, while the effect of removing a gun (or preventing one from having it in the first place) is immediate,” Smith said, adding that more access to mental health care is still good for other reasons. “It is also very difficult under existing law to remove a gun due to mental illness, but having stricter gun control laws generally can either prevent (assault weapons ban) or delay (through background checks) when one has access to a gun.”

They have Janae Sepulveda, a student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), to thank for it.

Sepulveda came up with the phrase last fall while creating a class campaign for her Social Policy II: Policy Practice and Human Rights Advocacy course. She and three classmates—Jonathan Wilson, Melinda Lehman, and Krista Amato—focused on gun safety. They set their sights on supporting Nicholas’s Law, proposed state legislation dedicated to Nicholas Naumkin, who was killed in December 2010 by a 12-year-old friend playing with a handgun he found in his father’s dresser. The law would require gun owners to either secure their weapons in a safe or render them unable to be fired whenever the gun is out of their possession.

The safe-storage bill passed the Democrat-led State Assembly this year, but the Republican-led Senate has refused to pass it. This defied explanation for Sepulveda, who noted that an average of two children a week in the state are killed in unintentional shootings.

“I have a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old, and it never dawned on me to ask before play dates, ‘Do you have guns in the house, and are they locked up?’ You just have to be so vigilant, in the times we’re living in, about guns,” she said.

When the GSS students first met in September, Sepulveda said she already knew she wanted to devise a brand approach to advocacy against gun violence—something symbolic, like the pink ribbon that has become synonymous with breast cancer research.

“First we had ‘Safe Storage Saves Lives’ on the back of the T-shirts,” she said. “Then I thought of how guns usually are described by the military as ‘locked and loaded.’ And I thought, ‘How about ‘Locked and Unloaded?’” They adopted the phrase as their slogan.

Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of NYAGV, found out about the students’ T-shirt slogan, which debuted at a poster presentation at Fordham’s Westchester campus last semester. She said it perfectly captures the intent of Nicholas’s Law, and asked if NYAGV could use it in their campaigns.

Barrett doesn’t expect the Senate to pass the law this year, but NYAGV is using the slogan to push similar legislation locally. A gun safety bill went into effect in Albany on Jan. 1, and NYAGV is lobbying in Schenectady, Troy, and Newburgh.

“‘Locked and Unloaded’ is really what we want gun owners to do with their guns when they’re not in their immediate possession or control—not just to keep them away from children who might shoot each other or bring a loaded gun to school, but also to prevent suicides, domestic violence, and gun thefts,” she said.

“We lock up other valuables in our home … [so]we need to make sure our firearms—weapons designed to kill—are too.”

GSS student Melinda Lehman said that the political climate around guns has become so toxic that opponents of regulation have adopted a “Give an inch, they’ll take a mile” attitude. So when the classmates chose the topic, they agreed their message should emphasize safety.

“We’re not trying to amend the U.S. Constitution or get rid of the right to bear arms. That wasn’t our goal,” said Lehman, who said she is acting on behalf of her children’s safety after having grown up in a household where there were loaded guns.

“Guns aren’t evil, but there’s a responsible way to own them. We’ve gotten to a point in this country where too many innocent people are getting hurt.” (Featured photo: Erich Ferdinand)

One year ago this week, the nation reeled from tragic events that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza gunned down 20 children and six adults. As Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, bid farewell to students leaving for the 2012 holiday break, he said that we would normally celebrate this time of year with great joy, “but not this year.”

The event galvanized a nationwide debate on guns, as gun control advocates seized the moment to reframe the conversation and gun advocates reasserted their right to bear arms. National attention on the issue waned as the year’s news cycle played out and a congressional law that would have expanded background checks was defeated in the spring.

In light of the tragedy, vigorous communities of both pro-and anti-gun advocates have sprung up online in what Saul Cornell, Ph.D., the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History and leading expert on the Second Amendment calls “a new sphere of cyber space where they can continue to advocate.”

On Jan. 21, 2014, at 6 p.m. Fordham University’s Department of History will get involved in the conversation when it sponsors “The Future of Commonsense Gun Regulation: Where do We Go From Here?” The event will take place in the Corrigan Conference Center on Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus.

Cornell will moderate the conversation of panelists who include:

• Robert Spitzer, distinguished service professor and chair of political science at SUNY Cortland, a leading authority on the politics of gun control, the presidency, and congress.

• Kristin A. Goss, associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, an expert on the gun control movement, woman’s political activism, and philanthropy.

This session will take stock of the current situation and offer some insight into the future of the gun debate in America.

“It’s been about a year and legislation is stalled at the federal level and all too predictable at the state level where states with high gun controls got tighter restrictions and states with low gun controls got more lax,” said Cornell. “The problem is we’re in a nation where there’s not a unified gun market. We’ll look at what the options are, what is politically feasible, and what needs to be done.”