Gun deaths on the rise in Alabama

April 30--On Valentine's Day in 2015, 28-year-old Antonio Dujuan Billingsley was found shot to death in a parked car on Wilmer Avenue in Anniston.

On Oct. 30 of that year, Oxford teenager Broderick Taylor II was killed by a gunshot on Anniston'sWest 16th Street after what police later described as an argument with the alleged shooter.

Three months later, former Village Inn owner Elias Joubran shot his wife Sheila and himself in in their home in Jacksonville.

All those deaths were part of what federal statistics now show was Alabama's worst year for gun violence in more than a decade.

Gun-related deaths in Alabama spiked in 2015, according the most recent numbers collected by the Centers for Disease Control.

Police and crime experts say it's unclear why the numbers went up that year -- the last year for which data are available -- but gun-control advocates suspect a 2013 law expanding the right to openly carry firearms could be one reason.

"That would be my untested hypothesis for Alabama," said Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a California gun control group.

CDC figures show 958 gun deaths in Alabama in 2015, up from 815 in 2014. That's Alabama's highest death toll, and its highest per-capita rate of gun deaths, since at least 1999.

Most of those deaths -- 528 of them -- were suicides. That's typical; though people often worry about spree shootings and street crime, self-harm makes up more than half the number of gun deaths.

Homicides with guns were also up sharply, with 391 gun homicides in 2015 compared to 292 in 2014.

Trending, spiking

The CDC numbers were released months ago, to little fanfare. (State health officials say they are still compiling numbers for 2016.) Still, experts and police aren't entirely sure what could have caused the upswing.

"I really can't give you an answer without looking at the data closely," said Demopolis Police Chief Tommie Reese, president of the Alabama Association of Chiefs of Police.

David Hemenway, a Harvard University professor who studies gun injuries, said most causes of gun death tend to "trend" -- changing slowly and steadily over time.

"Suicides are usually flat or have slight trends," said Hemenway. "Homicides of older people have trends. They don't spike."

When spikes do occur, he said, it's typically because of young men, often in gang wars.

CDC numbers show a rise in gun homicide deaths in nearly every age group in 2015, though the biggest increases were among people aged 20 to 29. The only groups that saw a decrease were ages 35 to 39 and 70 to 74.

Hemenway's earlier research found that states with more guns have more gun-related homicides. Alabama in 2013 passed a wide-ranging open-carry bill that allowed people to wear visible, holstered firearms in many public places -- something that before 2013 often resulted in a minor criminal charge -- and allowed gun owners to challenge prohibitions on guns in government buildings. Since then, "no guns" signs have been removed from parks, libraries, zoos and city offices in dozens of cities.

It's unclear whether that bill actually led to wider gun ownership, and it's hard to say how much open carrying of weapons increased with the law. Gun deaths actually declined a little in 2014, the first full year the new gun law was in force, before the 2015 spike.

Carrying concealed

Numbers like that are becoming increasingly important to Alabama lawmakers, who are considering two bills that would further expand the right to carry a firearm. The state Senate earlier this month voted to allow gun owners to carry concealed guns in public places without a permit.

For decades, the state required concealed carriers to get permits through local sheriffs, who could deny them to people with mental health or alcohol addiction problems. The 2013 gun law made it harder for sheriffs to deny those permits, but didn't eliminate them altogether.

Lawmakers took public comment Wednesday on a House version of the concealed-carry bill. The House Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security is expected to move that bill to a subcommittee to give House members more time to study crime data from Alabama and other states.

Committee chairman Rep. Allen Treadaway, R-Birmingham, said lawmakers were hearing conflicting numbers quoted by both sides in the debate, and want to look closer at the data before acting.

"We're going to vet it," Treadway said. "I'm not going to be rushed as chairman."

Treadaway, a former police officer, said he didn't know why gun deaths in the state rose in 2015.

"As a law enforcement officer for 28 years, I can tell you that we're seeing an uptick in violent crime everywhere," Treadaway said.

The per-capita rate of gun deaths nationwide did increase in 2015, though not as sharply as it did in Alabama.

Eddie Fulmer, president of the open-carry advocacy group Bama Carry, said he doubts the 2013 open-carry law had an impact on overall gun deaths.

"I don't see how there could possibly be an effect, because it didn't really change anything," Fulmer said.

Open-carry advocates have long claimed that state law always allowed people to openly wear holstered pistols. The 2013 bill, advocates claim, merely clarified existing law. Still, Fulmer acknowledged that the bill changed the way pistol-wearers are treated in public spaces.

"Just take the library, for instance," he said. "If a library wanted to ban open carry, they'd have to get a guard and a magnetometer."

Asked if people seem to be carrying guns in public more often now, Fulmer said yes. But the rise in carrying could be a result of the rise in violence, not the cause, he said.

"I think the more dangerous the world gets, the more people want to open carry," he said.

Capitol & statewide reporter Tim Lockette: 256-294-4193. On Twitter @TLockette_Star.

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