A bipartisan U.S. Senate agreement negotiated after high-profile mass shootings in Texas, New York, and Oklahoma lacks gun access restrictions that advocates say are needed to prevent such attacks. But the deal’s focus on mental health has raised hopes — and doubts — that it will help reduce gun suicides, particularly in rural Western states with wide-open gun laws.
Conservatives in Congress, mirroring their counterparts in those Republican-led states, are resisting sweeping policies that would restrict access to guns, such as raising the minimum age for purchasing AR-15-style rifles to 21. Proposals to change age limits emerged after guns of that type were used recently in an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas; a grocery store shooting in Buffalo, New York; and a hospital shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But gun control advocates say the deal leaves out measures that have been shown to help prevent suicides — the leading cause of deaths involving guns in the U.S. — such as mandatory waiting periods and safe-storage requirements. They also caution against linking high rates of gun suicide to mental illness.
“It’s important to be really clear that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research for the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
However, Montana has almost no restrictions on who can buy a gun, what kind of gun a person can purchase, when it can be bought, or how it can be carried in public. The state no longer requires people to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public places, and lawmakers in Helena passed a law in 2021 that bars universities from regulating firearm possession on campus. That law has been temporarily blocked during a legal challenge.
Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho similarly have high rates of gun suicide and relatively few restrictions on firearm purchases and possession.
Andrew Rose, a 24-year-old living in Boise, Idaho, knows firsthand how permissive gun laws can have fatal consequences. Rose’s brother killed himself in 2013, using a gun he had purchased the same day.
Rose describes his brother’s suicide as “a moment of crisis,” one that might have passed if Idaho had a mandatory waiting period in place that forced him to pause and consider his plans. Rose believes “the accessibility of guns has everything to do with the suicide rate” and the death of his brother and others like him.
Proposals to restrict gun access in these states are regularly scuttled, so advocacy groups have focused on prevention through mental health care services.
But forcing someone who has a mental illness and is on the cusp of violence into treatment is difficult, said Matt Kuntz, executive director of the Montana chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “In a state like Montana, where we have so many people who value their gun rights but who also need help, how do you make it as easy as possible?” he said.
Provisions in the U.S. Senate deal are worth exploring, Kuntz said, but any successful federal gun control legislation must be based on state laws that have been tested. “States need to be the laboratories of innovation,” he said.
Waiting periods “create a buffer of time for a person in crisis to think,” Burd-Sharps said. “It can be the difference between someone walking out with a gun and carrying out their plan in a suicidal crisis or reconsidering and saving their life.”
Advocates for stronger gun laws say robust federal action beyond the current proposal is necessary to create real change.
“I wish everyone understood that if we act together we can make monumental change,” Rose said. “I wish people understood that it is fully within our power to save lives. We simply have to stand up and say the truth.”
