By Michel Shane, Columnist
Thirteen years ago, a reckless driver on Pacific Coast Highway left an empty chair at our family’s dinner table. Our thirteen-year-old daughter, Emily, was gone. That unbearable loss became the catalyst for The Emily Shane Foundation. We channeled our grief into an education-based mission, helping underserved middle schoolers who feel lost or invisible find their path to success.
Now, we are returning to the very issue that created us. Through our new division, Driving Change, we are launching educational programs aimed at making our streets safer for everyone. But this work on street safety is happening against the backdrop of a much larger crisis of preventable death. The violence consuming our country has shattered something fundamental in me.
We talk endlessly about solutions, yet we’re trapped in an endless cycle — as if we’re destined to accept this as our new normal. But here’s what we must face: Gun deaths now exceed motor vehicle deaths in America. Let that reality settle in.
For decades, car crashes were the leading cause of injury-related death in America. Not anymore. In 2022, firearms claimed 48,204 lives — the second-highest total ever recorded. Motor vehicle deaths? 43,273. Gun violence has become the leading cause of death for our children and teens, surpassing car crashes, overdoses, and cancer.
In 2022, gun deaths outpaced motor vehicle deaths in 35 states and DC. In 2010, that grim milestone existed in only 13 states. We’re watching a crisis accelerate in real time.
As someone who grew up in Canada, this reality feels incomprehensible. Yes, Canada faces gun violence, but it’s rare — not the daily drumbeat that defines American life.
Here’s what makes this comparison so damning: We actually solved the car death crisis. It didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t easy. The auto industry fought seat belt mandates for years. Drunk driving was once considered a minor social transgression. But we persisted with mandatory seat belts, airbags, drunk driving laws, improved road design, and vehicle safety standards — comprehensive public health measures that worked. Motor vehicle deaths have plummeted by more than 50% per mile traveled since the 1970s, while we implemented evidence-based safety regulations.
Except when you look at Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) — even with national improvements in vehicle safety and driver behavior, the unique combination of road design, speed, and high traffic can still create a dangerous environment in our community, with deaths on the rise, not lowering.
With firearms? We’ve chosen paralysis over progress. No comparable federal safety regulations. No unified approach to prevention. No willingness to treat gun violence as the public health crisis it clearly is. Just endless debate while 132 people die from gun violence every single day—and we’ve somehow accepted this as normal. We’ve normalized the abnormal.
But this isn’t just about guns or cars—it’s about our collective disconnection. We’ve forgotten how to disagree without demonizing, how to find common ground when stakes feel existential. We live in separate information bubbles, consuming news that confirms our biases rather than challenges our thinking. Social media algorithms feed us outrage because anger drives engagement, and engagement drives profit. We’ve traded real community for virtual connections that often leave us more isolated than before.
This disconnection breeds the desperation that fuels violence. When people feel invisible, unheard, and hopeless, believing their problems don’t matter to anyone else, some choose destruction. They decide to make their pain visible in the most horrific ways possible.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox hit the nail on the head after the recent shooting of Charlie Kirk, a devoted Utah father and community leader. He said, “Log off, take a walk, hug a loved one, and go out and do some good in your community.” This isn’t just naive optimism—it’s the foundation of real change.
Through our “Pass It Forward” campaign, we generated hundreds of thousands of good deeds, proving that our core humanity is to help, comfort, and create.
We’re all on the same side—humanity’s side. Until you’ve sat across an empty chair and felt the weight of a life cut short, it’s easy to forget how precious existence truly is, regardless of our beliefs. You never want to join the “Empty Chair Club.”
The solution isn’t complicated, but it requires each of us to choose connection over convenience, community over comfort. We’ve learned through years of grief work that helping others without expecting anything in return brings the fulfillment that technology and isolation have stolen from us. When we show up for struggling students, when we check on lonely neighbors, when we listen to people whose views challenge our own—that’s when real healing begins.
This isn’t about left versus right, urban versus rural, young versus old. It’s about choosing humanity over ideology. It’s about remembering that behind every statistic is someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s irreplaceable person.
Because here’s the truth: We can regulate firearms just as we regulate cars. We can choose community over isolation. We can pass forward kindness instead of anger. We’ve done it before—with drunk driving, with smoking, with seat belts. We can do it again.
The question isn’t whether change is possible. The question is whether we’ll choose it.
Log off. Take a walk. Hug someone you love. Find a way to make a positive difference in your community. That’s how we honor every empty chair and prevent countless others.
Our children’s lives depend on it.