The morning after a mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, left four people dead and nine injured, members of the Georgia Senate Study Committee on Safe Firearm Storage gathered to discuss potential gun control legislation. The timing was a chilling coincidence; the committee had already been scheduled to meet prior to September 4, when 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle, killing two students and two teachers.
The tragedy at Apalachee High School — the 45th school shooting this year and the deadliest since March 2023 — has sparked renewed calls for legislation to address the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic. Georgia has some of the weakest gun laws in the country, including allowing residents to open carry guns without permits and purchase firearms without background checks. However, as is all too common in discussions about gun control in the United States, much of the conversation in recent weeks has been focused on solving the gun violence crisis through increased criminalization. This is not the way forward.
For those of us who support prison abolition, criminal legal solutions to the gun violence crisis can often feel like a double bind by attempting to reduce gun violence with increased state violence. But to tackle the crisis, we don’t have to embrace intensified policing or prosecution of gun owners, which will often disproportionately harm and be used to target people of color. In 2020, for instance, a group of public defenders found that 78 percent of felony........