Minnesota has permissive gun laws. Yesterday showed us what that means for kids.

Yesterday, two children were killed in a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota. The fates of the seventeen others who were hospitalized with injuries remain unknown. These terrible murders occurred during a prayer service. So, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, thoughts and prayers are not enough. “These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church,” he said.

As we mourn yet another iteration of the peculiar American cliché (i.e., mass shootings), we also know that policy matters. That’s why my colleagues and I set out to document the differences in pediatric fatalities from firearms by states with varying gun laws. Our findings were published in JAMA Pediatrics earlier this year (which I wrote about here in Inside Medicine as well).

My friend Dr. Nini Munoz (co-author on this post) graciously offered to creatively rework some of the data into some fresh new infographics for Inside Medicine (and for a shared post we put on Instagram yesterday). The visuals powerfully bring home the point that states with more permissive gun laws have had major upticks in pediatric gun fatalities since 2011. You’ll note in the third image below (the table), that among the 50 states, Minnesota had a pediatric firearm mortality rate that was somewhat on the lower side of things (although higher than peer nations), but that the rate went up after 2011, the year of McDonald v. Chicago. (Note: the increase in Minnesota was indeed statistically significant.)

A resource we need, unfortunately.

Another reason I led this research in the first place—this is admittedly depressing—was to create a resource for myself. I wanted a good compendium of information to refer to when, predictably, the latest mass shooting involving kids occurred. Tucked into the appendix of our study, therefore, are two resources that I referred to yesterday—and that I know I’ll have to call upon again the future, I’m sorry to say. (My thanks to Harvard undergraduate student Shriya Bhat for compiling these tables for our paper). In the first table, Shriya listed all the states’ grades on gun laws. Minnesota’s marks were dicey (B, C+, C+, with a 53.5 from Everytown for Gun Safety, which is a mediocre score).

In the second table in the appendix, Shriya listed every new gun law enacted this century, by state. That way, we’d always have an easy resource to consult after these awful shootings. Did I mention that I hate that we need this? (The L’s refer to laws that made access to firearms less restrictive, while the S’s refer to laws that made firearm access stricter.)

As you can see, Minnesota’s newer firearm laws have been something of a mixed bag. (Its laws, both existing and newly enacted, placed the state into the “middle” or “permissive” category in our study). Meanwhile, other states have enacted only less restrictive laws—including some that specifically allow firearm carry in churches.

Of course, even in states on the lower end of the US spectrum of firearm death rates, rates remain higher than those seen in peer nations. So, tragedies like yesterday’s shooting in Minnesota can happen anywhere in this country, but they are far more likely in some states. So perhaps, Minnesota will do what Connecticut did after the Sandy Hook tragedy by enacting sensible reforms that make the community safer, while respecting the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Given our system, that’s about the best we can hope for.

Special thanks to Dr. Nini Munoz for the excellent infographics in today’s post!

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If you have information about any of the unfolding stories we are following, please email me or find me on Signal at InsideMedicine.88.