Part Two: When the Warning Signs Are Already There
Warning signs are often visible long before violence erupts, yet families, schools and authorities can struggle to know when concern should become intervention. Behind every tragedy lies the difficult question of whether somebody could have acted sooner, and whether doing so might have saved a life.
By Staff Reporter
The argument over firearms cannot end with statistics. Numbers can tell us how many people have died, where the deaths occurred and, if properly constructed, something about the circumstances surrounding them. They cannot by themselves explain the decisions, failures and warning signs that preceded an individual act of violence.
That is where the debate becomes much more difficult.
The word “violence” deserves scrutiny too
The Safe Citizen review also questions the broad expression “firearm violence”, arguing that it can collapse homicide, suicide and accidental injury into one emotionally powerful category.
There is a legitimate debate here because language shapes the way the public understands a problem.
When someone is murdered with a knife, the incident may be described as murder or knife crime. When a firearm is involved, “gun violence” has become the dominant expression. There is nothing inherently wrong with that description, particularly when the availability and use of firearms are central to the issue being examined, but it should not obscure the circumstances in which the firearm was used.
A firearm can be used lawfully, negligently, accidentally, in suicide, in self-defence or to commit a crime. The moral and legal character of the act does not come automatically from the object; it comes from the circumstances and the conduct of the person using it.
That does not make access to firearms irrelevant. Quite the opposite: it makes the relationship between access, behaviour and circumstance more important.
The “children” statistic also requires care
The review challenges the presentation of firearm deaths among people aged one to 19 as deaths of “children”, noting that in the 2022 figures it examines, those aged 17 to 19 accounted for 55.62% of deaths within the broader under-20 category.
The death of an 18- or 19-year-old is no less tragic than the death of a six-year-old, and the purpose of making this distinction should not be to diminish the seriousness of either. It is about whether grouping vastly different ages helps policymakers understand the circumstances in which those deaths occur.
A six-year-old who gains access to an unsecured firearm has a different risk profile from a 19-year-old killed in gang violence. Both deaths are devastating, but preventing one may require safer storage and adult responsibility, while preventing the other may require intelligence-led policing, intervention in criminal networks and efforts to reduce gang recruitment.
Statistics become genuinely useful when they help policymakers see those differences rather than hide them.
The racial dimension cannot simply be wished away
The Surgeon General’s advisory highlights the disproportionate burden of firearm-related harm experienced by Black and Hispanic Americans.
The KFF figures cited in the review include 31% of Black adults reporting that they had personally witnessed someone being shot, 34% saying a family member had been killed by a gun, and 32% saying they worried every day or almost every day about themselves or someone they loved becoming a victim of gun violence.
Those disparities cannot simply be dismissed because one disagrees with the policy conclusions drawn from them.
Questioning how a statistic has been constructed or interpreted does not mean questioning the suffering that the statistic describes.
The deeper question is why particular communities experience disproportionately high levels of violent death. The review itself points to the complexity of socioeconomic conditions, education, employment, poverty, policing, community circumstances and individual behaviour, while cautioning against treating correlation as proof of causation.
That is the more useful conversation because a community can experience disproportionately high firearm homicide without the firearm itself being the complete explanation for why homicide is disproportionately high there.
A gun can make violence more lethal without being the origin of every social condition that produces the violence.
When the warning signs are already there
The review’s examination of the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia moves the discussion away from percentages and into the lives of the people involved.
On 4 September 2024, 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly shot fellow students and staff at Apalachee High School, killing four people and injuring nine others. The review records allegations that authorities had previously received an FBI tip concerning online threats, that the teenager had been interviewed and that firearms were present in the family home.
The subsequent material cited in the review raises still more troubling questions. Gray’s mother reportedly contacted the school on the morning of the shooting and warned of an “extreme emergency”, while the school was attempting to locate him shortly before the shooting began. The family had also been discussing his mental health, and relatives had expressed concerns about homicidal and suicidal thoughts.
None of this means that the tragedy could certainly have been prevented. Hindsight can create a false sense of certainty, particularly when events are reconstructed after people have died.
It does, however, force a difficult question into the open: when warning signs accumulate, at what point does a warning become an obligation to act?
That question is far more difficult than the political slogans that usually surround the gun debate.
Prevention is harder than punishment
The review makes a similar point through its discussion of the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan, in which 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley killed four students and injured seven others. It describes disturbing drawings discovered at school, meetings involving school officials and his parents, and the subsequent criminal convictions of his parents for involuntary manslaughter after they were found responsible for their role in providing him with the firearm and failing to respond adequately to warning signs.
Whatever one’s position on American gun law, the case raises a difficult question about parental responsibility.
When an adult knows that a child is displaying disturbing behaviour, knows that the child is struggling psychologically and knows that a firearm is accessible, what level of responsibility follows from failing to take reasonable precautions?
The Safe Citizen review argues that responsible firearm ownership includes keeping guns away from children and other unqualified people.
That should not be an especially controversial proposition. A responsible firearm owner should have no interest in allowing a child, a criminal or anybody else who is not legally entitled to possess the weapon to gain uncontrolled access to it.
Warning signs are not a licence to profile people
The review identifies characteristics that recur in some school-shooting cases, including the predominance of male perpetrators, adolescence or young adulthood, social rejection, bullying, isolation, psychological distress, suicidal thinking, fascination with previous shootings and threats or other concerning behaviour.
But the existence of these characteristics does not create a reliable predictive profile.
Most young people who experience depression, bullying, isolation or psychological distress will never become violent. Most troubled teenagers are not future murderers.
That distinction matters because prevention should mean identifying credible risks and providing appropriate intervention, not turning broad categories of vulnerable people into suspects.
The difficult space between civil liberties and prevention
The review argues that authorities can hesitate when confronted with disturbing behaviour because of legal restrictions, uncertainty about the credibility of threats, insufficient evidence, investigative considerations, limited resources, concern about civil liberties or the need to involve mental-health professionals.
Those concerns are legitimate. Police cannot arrest people simply because somebody finds them disturbing, and an accusation should not automatically give the State unlimited power to search homes, seize property or strip people of their rights.
But there is a corresponding danger when institutions become so cautious about acting that credible warnings remain trapped between the family, the school, the police and other authorities until the feared event becomes a reality.
A parent may notice something disturbing, a teacher may become concerned, a friend may hear a threat, and police may receive information. Somewhere along that chain, an official may conclude that the evidence is insufficient for decisive action or that the legal threshold has not been reached. The warning is then left in an institutional grey area until somebody is killed, at which point the question that should have been confronted beforehand returns with devastating force: why did nobody act?
That is the terrible difficulty of prevention. The State has to act early enough to prevent tragedy without allowing suspicion to become a substitute for evidence or guilt.
Red-flag laws sit on that fault line
This is where America’s debate over Extreme Risk Protection Orders becomes relevant.
Red flag laws allow courts, under varying state systems, to temporarily remove firearms from people considered to pose a significant risk to themselves or others. Depending on the jurisdiction, applications can be made by family members, law enforcement and, in some cases, other people such as health professionals or school personnel. Some systems permit an initial order before the affected person has been heard, followed by a hearing at which the order can be challenged.
The argument in favour is straightforward: where there is a serious and credible risk that somebody will use a firearm to harm themselves or another person, temporarily removing access to the weapon may prevent a death.
The argument against is equally serious because a person can lose access to a firearm without having committed a crime, raising questions about due process, evidentiary standards and the possibility of misuse.
Neither concern should be mocked.
A society that cares about public safety must also care about due process. The power to remove property and restrict a constitutional right should not be exercised casually.
But neither should the State wait for a massacre before admitting that credible warnings deserved attention.
The challenge is to construct a system in which genuinely dangerous circumstances can trigger timely intervention while the person affected retains meaningful protection against arbitrary action.
That is difficult precisely because both interests are important.
South Africa should ask its own version of the question
South Africa does not have America’s Second Amendment, and there is no reason to transplant American constitutional arguments wholesale into our own legal and social circumstances.
We do, however, have our own firearm crisis and our own questions about prevention.
If the official parliamentary figures cited above show an overwhelming association between firearm murder and illegal, unlicensed weapons, then South Africa’s policy debate needs to devote far more attention to the illegal firearm ecosystem.
Who supplies the weapons? Who transports them? Who sells them? Who steals them? Who buys them? Who protects the traffickers? Who fails to trace the weapons? Who profits from their circulation?
Those questions are less politically convenient than another argument about legislation affecting lawful firearm owners. They are also much harder because they require intelligence, policing, forensic tracing, border controls, prosecution and sustained institutional effort.
But difficulty cannot become an excuse for avoiding the source of the problem.
If the objective is to reduce murder, the illicit supply of weapons has to be treated as a central part of the problem rather than as an uncomfortable footnote.
The real lesson is precision
The American experience and the South African experience are obviously different, but they converge on an important principle: public policy becomes weaker when it begins with an imprecise diagnosis.
If murder is being measured, we should know how many murders occurred and under what circumstances. If suicide is being measured, the causes and circumstances of suicide should not disappear into a larger category simply because a firearm was involved. If accidental deaths are being counted, policymakers need to understand how the accidents happened. If illegal firearms are driving criminal violence, the weapons and the networks supplying them need to be traced and disrupted.
The same principle applies to prevention. When a young person is showing signs of serious distress, making credible threats and has access to a firearm, the question is not whether every troubled young person should be treated as dangerous. It is whether institutions have a lawful and effective way of responding when the available evidence points to a genuine risk.
The Safe Citizen review itself argues for a firearm debate grounded in fact and rationality rather than ideology, while accepting that responsible firearm owners have obligations and that reasonable measures to keep firearms away from children and criminals are legitimate.
That is a useful place to begin because the choice should not be between pretending that guns are harmless and pretending that guns are the cause of every form of violence.
The reality is considerably more complicated. Firearms can be used lawfully or unlawfully, for protection or intimidation, in self-defence or suicide, through negligence or deliberate criminal intent. Understanding the difference is not an attempt to soften the seriousness of firearm-related harm. It is the only way to develop policies capable of addressing its different causes.
The same applies to the distinction between a lawful firearm owner and a criminal carrying an illegal weapon. Treating them as though they present identical risks may be politically convenient, but it does not necessarily produce effective policy.
And this is where the American debate and the South African evidence ultimately meet.
The United States is wrestling with the consequences of combining public-health arguments, firearm statistics, constitutional rights, criminal violence, suicide and public fear within one increasingly polarised debate. South Africa faces a different but equally urgent challenge: if the official figures cited in parliamentary responses show that illegal, unlicensed firearms were associated with an overwhelming proportion of the firearm-related murders recorded over four financial years, then the country must ask whether enough attention is being paid to the people and networks putting those weapons into criminal hands.
Neither country will solve its problem by shouting louder.
The public deserves better than frightening headlines, convenient categories and statistics presented without sufficient context. It deserves to know which guns are involved, who possesses them, who is being harmed, what circumstances produced the violence and, crucially, where the weapons came from.
That is not an argument for ignoring firearms. It is an argument for understanding them properly.
The numbers matter because they tell us something about the scale of the tragedy. But numbers without context can obscure the very thing policymakers need to understand: the human circumstances behind the statistic and the chain of decisions that produced the death.
The dead deserve better than a number stripped of its meaning. The living deserve policies based on what actually happened, rather than on whatever statistic makes the most frightening headline.
The numbers matter. But getting the diagnosis right matters more.