How to prevent the next Miles Pfeffer | Will Bunch Newsletter

So there are some advantages to an 80-year-old president. The thing about growing older is that one becomes (OK, maybe slightly) less fearful of risking death, so it was fitting and kind of cool that the first octogenarian POTUS celebrated President’s Day by landing in Kyiv’s combat zone. I think I’ve shown in nearly two decades as an opinion writer that I detest war. One of the few things I hate more is a land-grabbing dictator. Stay the course, Joe.

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It looked like some kind of bizarro-world rite of passage for an affluent suburban kid on the back edge of 17, sleeping by night in a sprawling Bucks County farmhouse yet posing as a gangsta by day on Instagram with a wad of cash obscuring his face and what appeared to be a Ruger handgun tucked inside his waistband.

Today, the world only knows about 18-year-old Miles Pfeffer and his online love affair with firearms because of the despicable act he stands accused of committing on Saturday night with his weaponry: the cold-blooded murder of a popular Temple University police officer and father of four, Christopher Fitzgerald.

For some, the stereotype-bending facts of the killing — a rich, white suburban kid accused of murdering a Black cop in the mostly Black neighborhood near Temple where rising crime was already setting off alarms — made Pfeffer’s arrest seem like some kind of fluke.

But it wasn’t.

To the contrary, Pfeffer appears to be an avatar of one of the most alarming trends to hit 21st century America: an extraordinary surge in the number of teens carrying guns.

Here are some important things to know. First, the statistics show that gun possession has been rising rapidly among every type of youth: rich, poor, white, brown, Black, rural, suburban, urban, female, and (especially) male. And the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics say the biggest surge is among young men who look just like Pfeffer: affluent, white, living far from the city.

The doctors’ group reported late last year that its massive annual survey of around 300,000 12-to-17-year-olds saw a whopping 41% rise in teens carrying guns from 2002 through 2019 — or just before the pandemic. Since then, the numbers have probably only risen further, Naoka Carey, a Boston College doctoral candidate who was one of the report’s co-authors, told me. That’s because of the social pressures and the surge in overall gun-buying tied to COVID-19.

Experts blame a perfectly destructive storm of events — a push by many state legislatures to make it easier to carry a concealed weapon, gun manufacturers bombarding a younger market with slick ads, and a culture shift that’s made too many boys think that packing heat is cool.

“A lot of this has to do with access to guns,” Eric Fleeger, a pediatric ER doctor and associate professor at Harvard Medical School who studies gun violence against youths, told me by phone on Monday. Indeed, it’s well-known that America has more guns than people — no other nation, including war-ravaged Yemen, is like this — and it’s getting worse. “We are a society that is making guns more and more accessible” — even as guns become the No. 1 killer of our own children, as both murders and suicide increase in younger age brackets.

The biggest problem with so many more young people carrying guns is that, increasingly, they use them — especially in a time when post-pandemic rage remains high and teen mental health is in crisis. You see it in the headlines — whether it’s the sickening spate of mass shootings from Uvalde (age of the suspected gunman: 18) to Buffalo (18) to Newtown (20), or the steady drum beat of homicides here in Philadelphia that are increasingly committed by teens, like the murder of a high schooler after a Roxborough football scrimmage (the five suspects are aged 21, 17, 16, 15, and 15). Another numbing stat: The number of homicide victims younger than 19 rose sharply in Philadelphia from 119 in 2019 to 197 in 2020 — most of them shot by their peers.

But here’s something else that’s tragic: the fallacy that we’re powerless to do anything about this.

If you are of a certain age, think back to the 1980s, when different types of problematic behavior by America’s young people — drunken driving, and later in the decade a rising rate of teen pregnancy — felt just as unsolvable as gun violence looks right now. But then we did things. In the case of DUI, Congress — controversially, at the time — raised the nationwide drinking age to 21. On both issues, advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy worked tirelessly, and with innovation. Schools opened up their classrooms to discuss these difficult topics.

The results? Drunken-driving deaths under age 21 have fallen a whopping 83% since 1982. Teen pregnancies plunged by 75% from 1991 to 2020. Why can’t we work the same magic around young people carrying guns?

We can start with the hodgepodge of laws that make little sense. Across America, youths under 21 are barred from buying handguns — from a gun store, but typically not from an unlicensed dealer. And in the vast majority of states, teens as young as 18 can legally purchase long rifles — a throwback to the time when those weapons were meant for deer hunting and not the deadly AR-15-style assault rifles marketed to young buyers. And teens generally can possess any type of gun if it’s gifted to them by an adult. This isn’t rocket science: a nation that figured out how to stop under-21-year-olds from buying booze can do the same with deadly firearms.

But stricter laws will matter most when the culture changes. The education efforts in schools and by outside groups like MADD, or the anti-teen-pregnancy campaign, aided by considerable dollars, shifted opinions over a long period of time to the point where most teens now believe getting sloshed and getting behind the wheel is pretty uncool (especially when nowadays you can call Uber). But the politics of making that work around gun safety are a lot trickier.

“It takes time and a really concerted effort,” said Fleegler, but he also noted that activities like driving while intoxicated or unmarried teen motherhood are almost universally discouraged by adults — while guns are a little different. Millions of American parents embrace — worship, arguably — the politics of the gun culture and nearly unfettered access, which gets passed down to their children.

We know how to prevent the next Miles Pfeffer, but the kids won’t be alright until the grown-ups start acting their age.

Question: Can we just let the red states leave? — Via Richard McGovern (@richardmcgovern) on Twitter

Answer: Heh...Richard’s question is tied to one of the few things that folks were talking about on a boring (except, arguably, for Biden’s trip) President’s Day: an incendiary tweet from a probably equally bored Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. A rising star in the increasingly whacked-out GOP, the second-term Georgia congresswoman tweeted, in part: “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” The reality? Republicans and the states they control will never secede from the union. It’s too much effort for them, and they would have to actually govern. But we are entering what I would call a Cold Civil War. Somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, a land with very different laws regarding LGBTQ people and voting or book learning is taking shape, and it’s going to feel like you need a passport. What the blue states around these parts need to do is to start matching red states’ intensity — to show what public education and a caring government can actually accomplish.

What does Nikki Haley really believe? It always seems to depend on who the only announced rival to Donald Trump in the GOP’s 2024 White House sweepstakes is talking to that particular day. Never forget that the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador was against the Confederate flag before she was for it, as she pandered to an increasingly extreme Republican Party. But Haley’s greatest flip-flop may be her attitude toward a civic landmark right here in the Philadelphia region: Villanova University, currently home to son Nalin Haley, youngest of her two children.

In 2020, Haley seemed more than a little proud when Nalin was admitted to the Augustinian university and NCAA basketball powerhouse out on the Main Line. “Our little one has finally picked his second home,” Haley posted on Facebook that spring. “Nalin is #GoingNova and we couldn’t be more excited for him.” But since then something has changed. Haley seemed to remember that Republicans hate college almost as much as they hate Philadelphia.

“My son goes to school here in Pennsylvania,” Haley said last October in a speech backing Mehmet Oz for Senate. “And as a mom, I worry about his safety every single time he steps foot off campus.” Never mind that when Nalin — now a junior — does that, his feet land first in Radnor Township, an affluent safe haven where most “crime” is bored cops looking for expired inspection stickers. Now that Haley is running for president, #GoingNova for the South Carolinian means taking a potshot at the college’s....”wokeness”?

“I have a son in college and I see how hard it is that he’s having to make sure he writes for the professor to get an A instead of writing what he really thinks,” Haley said at an event last week for her just-launched campaign, as recorded by Washington Post campaign reporter Dylan Wells. That was apparently Haley’s effort to complain, in a frequency that can only be understood by Fox News watchers, that Nalin must craft his papers to appease his liberal, ultra-”woke” profs. This seems more than a tad silly, given the Catholic university’s reputation as one of the more conservative campuses in the Philly region. (True story: my first-ever visit there in 1996 was in its old gym that was packed with a throng of cheering students...for Bob Dole.) An admittedly unscientific poll of students on Niche.com to describe politics at Villanova answered with 8% “very conservative,” 40% “conservative,” 26% “moderate” — and “liberal” isn’t even an option. In using her only son’s college years as a political prop, it’s not clear whether Haley is vying for the White House or a Pulitzer Prize in fiction.