With a number of stories in the news lately about toddlers and young children accidentally shooting, and sometimes killing, themselves and their family members with unlocked guns, President Obama has made a priority of putting new protections in place to help curb the gun violence epidemic that has infected our country.  These new protections focus primarily on the practical safety measures and better screening and reporting for mental illness, and are aimed to be less controversial than past attempts to reduce gun violence. We’ll take a look at the current measures being pursued and what they might mean.

Smarter Handguns

The first and most well-known idea the administration is pushing is the use of smart-gun technology, designed to prevent people either than the gun owner from firing a handgun. The goal of this technology is to keep guns out of the wrong hands, prevent children from firing unlocked guns, and curb the illegal sale of firearms.

The current challenges facing this technology are largely practical: Are these guns equally effective in the hands of police and military personnel as current firearms? And can manufacturers be convinced to produce these new smart guns efficiently?

The administration hopes to answer these questions by running military tests and incentivizing both manufacturers and local governments from adopting smart gun technology.  A fully report on the processes being implemented can be found here.

While responsible gun owners have long touted the policy of “lock up your guns”, the government has now chosen to have a hand in making this more of a mandatory process than a friendly suggestion. While it may not solve the issue of legal gun owners committing violent crimes, it does provide a welcome safeguard against accidental violence and some amount of black market gun sales.

Focus on Mental Illness

Currently, laws do not allow doctors to collect or share data on gun violence, despite the fact that many doctors now choose to screen for gun violence with their patients. As a result, the president has focused on the background checks system as the current most important stage of screening. The proposed rule the administration is publishing is designed to ensure that mental health information is appropriately reported during background checks while attempting to obtain a firearm. It also seeks to provide an exemption policy from people with mental health issues that nevertheless seek to be cleared to own a firearm.

This policy change would still not fix the knowledge gap we have artificially created which prevents doctors from compiling gun violence records for study. Only by changing the laws in a significant manner could we do that, but heavy lobbying from the NRA has thus far been successful in preventing this from happening. Hopefully, myself and fellow medical professionals will one day be permitted to gather real, concrete data to better understand the gun violence problem we have as a nation, but for now steps like this may help staunch the bleeding.

State and Local Collaboration

This is the least concrete of the initiatives, as it simply announces a 50-state initiative to combat gun violence on the state and local level.  The 50-State Gun Violence Prevention Convening will focus on legislative and executive actions to fight gun violence, as well as a forum to discuss the current background system and reporting tools available to the states.

While it’s difficult to see significant change arising from this initiative, the current issues with reporting on gun violence and the background check system make things like this necessary to better understand the challenges faced at the state and local level.

There’s little doubt that the Obama administration has been frustrated by past attempts to fight gun violence in this country. This recent announcement reflects some of those frustrations, focusing instead on practical, less-controversial measures to fix what can be fixed. Let’s hope these small measures result in real change, and that this is the first step toward a country free of the fear of day-to-day gun violence.