A new report detailing final recommendations from the Michigan Gun Violence Prevention Task Force came out Monday.
The 50-page report largely details ways the state could better support its gun safety laws, including ones requiring safe firearm storage and suspend gun rights for people considered a threat to themselves or others. Those laws passed in 2023 but took effect last year.
The recommendations, developed over more than a year since the task force's first meeting last October, include giving out free gun locks, creating a statewide school safety tip line, and standardizing training for school resource officers.
Michigan Chief Medical Executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian chairs the task force. She said the laws are only as good as their implementation.
“If people don't understand what secure storage is, if they don't understand how to securely store their weapons, if they don't understand the risks of not securely storing their weapons. And if they don't have access to tools like gun locks, then the legislation becomes meaningless,” Bagdasarian said.
Much of the report focuses on recommendations state departments could put in place themselves without the need for new laws. The report categorizes them by importance level and the amount of funding and other resources, like “administrative” or “legislative,” that they would need. The two most expensive items are stopping community violence through boosting employment, mental health, housing, and other programs that target root causes, and increasing prevention funding for school safety and mental health services.
Bagdasarian said the report takes a practical approach.
“There are some things that are working that need to be expanded that need to be beefed up a little bit, and if we can start working on the things that are those low-hanging fruit first I think that really keeps the momentum going,” Bagdasarian said.
The report calls for creating a new group to hold the state accountable for meeting some of the new goals.
Policy recommendations that would require new laws, however, have struggled to gain enough traction to pass in the state legislature. Those include raising the firearm purchase age, banning assault weapons and serial numberless home-built “ghost guns,” and outlawing bump stocks.
Bagdasarian said those policies have worked in other states.
She stressed firearms are the leading cause of death in teens and children both in Michigan and countrywide, surpassing motor vehicle accidents in national statistics in 2020. She compared work to lower gun deaths for young people to car safety laws requiring seatbelts and lower speed limits.
“All of these things took decades. But we eventually essentially made a lot of headway and motor vehicle accidents are again no longer the number one killer of children and teens. And I think we made that type of incremental movement because we looked at this as a public health issue, not a political issue. And we need to do the same here with firearm violence,” Bagdasarian said.
