Travel warnings, news reports on U.S. gun violence worry Southern California tourists

After seeing news about yet another round of mass shootings in the United States, Anu and Shivani Sharma were nervous about bringing their twin 9-year-old daughters from their home in Melbourne, Australia for a vacation in Orange County.

The parents are originally from India, so they worried their skin color could make them targets.

In the end, a desire to not give in to fear – and the allure of visiting Disneyland – won out. As they headed back to the busy theme park Tuesday, the family said the climate didn’t feel much different than back home in Australia. But Shivani Sharma said the concern did rear its head from time to time, like when her husband reminded her to ignore a man pushing his way through the line for a ride.

“Here in this country,” he said, “you don’t know who is carrying a gun.”

The United States’ global reputation for embracing gun ownership, coupled with news of mass shootings that claimed the lives of 31 people over the first weekend in August, has some international visitors reconsidering plans to come to Southern California – which depends heavily on tourism to help power its economic engine.

Those concerns for visitors were amplified by Amnesty International, which recently joined a growing list of organizations and countries that have issued travel advisories warning tourists about the risk of gun violence in the United States.

The advisory from the prominent human rights group “calls on people worldwide to exercise caution and have an emergency contingency plan when traveling throughout the USA.” It urges tourists to avoid places where large crowds gather, such as churches, schools and shopping malls, and to be cautious in bars and nightclubs. And Amnesty states that travelers could be at a higher risk of being targeted by gun violence depending on their “gender identity, race, country of origin, ethnic background, or sexual orientation.”

Uruguay and Venezuela also both issued U.S. travel advisories in the wake of the Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas shootings. However, Venezuela’s warning – which says U.S. officials encourage indiscriminate gun possession – is seen by some as the government equivalent of trolling, since it was issued four months after the U.S. State Department warned Americans not to visit Venezuela due to ongoing violence that continues to land the country at the top of multiple rankings of most dangerous countries in the world.

The Japanese Consulate in Detroit included this caution in an email seeking information on any Japanese people involved in the Dayton shooting: “Japanese residents should be aware of the potential for gunfire incidents everywhere in the United States, a gun society, and continue to pay close attention to safety measures.”

Other countries that have cautioned visitors to the United States about the prevalence of guns or gun violence in recent years include New Zealand, Belgium, Germany and Ireland. And a current advisory from Canada notes that while mass shootings do occur in the United States, such incidents account for only a small percentage of homicide deaths and are not likely to specifically target tourists.

The U.S. State Department routinely issues travel advisories for other countries, ranking them in terms of safety on a scale from one to four based on assessed risks for crime, terrorism, civil unrest, natural disasters and more. An official with the department said they don’t offer any guidance on safety within the United States. And, while an official map ranks the U.S. as a low-risk destination, with the last U.S. update late last year, he declined to comment on how this country would rate itself on the four-point scale based on current conditions.

But the recent warnings about travel to the United States, along with a closer look at safety statistics, flip that traditional narrative on its head.

Data from different groups and tracking a variety of security issues put the United States just above the middle of the pack when it comes to international safety rankings. For example, the latest Global Finance report on the world’s safest countries – which factors in political unrest, personal security and natural disaster risk – ranks the U.S. at No. 65 out of 128, primarily because of a higher-than-average homicide rate.

The United States has the 28th-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world, according to recent figures from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. By that metric, the U.S. is on par with South Africa and four times more dangerous than Turkey.

But a vast majority of that gun violence in the United States takes place in homes or on streets, not in gathering places where tourists are likely to congregate. And most people who are shot knew their assailants. When data is stripped out to focus on random violence, the risk of tourists or anyone else dying in a mass shooting is statistically lower than the risk of dying in a plane crash or by choking on food.

Still, while most violent crime in the United States has become less frequent over the past 25 years, that’s not true of mass shootings. A recent Harvard study found the frequency of mass shootings tripled from 2011 to 2014.

Karolina, a woman who lives in Norway and is going by her first name due to privacy concerns, was planning a trip to the United States with her husband for her birthday in February. The plan was to fly into San Diego and drive up the coast through Orange County to San Francisco before heading to the Grand Canyon.

“But then after the recent mass shootings, especially the one in the Walmart in Texas, everything changed for me,” Karolina said in a Facebook message to the Southern California News Group. “I was reading an article on the news about the shooter, how he was specifically targeting Mexicans and brown people. This is literally genocide. He was hunting them as if they were animals. And still no change. This is too much for me.”

She’s hoping to reschedule if there are changes to U.S. gun policies and the political environment.

Local tourism bureaus weren’t eager to discuss the issue, either ignoring or declining interview requests.

While tourism worldwide continues to grow, international tourism to the United States is already on the decline and expected to continue falling for at least another few years, according to projections from the U.S. Travel Association.

The United States’ share of the international travel market reached a high of 13.7% in 2015. But it’s been dropping since then, the travel association reports, to 11.7% in 2018. That translates to 14 million fewer international visitors, which the travel association says has triggered a $59 billion drop in traveler spending and a loss of 120,000 U.S. jobs.

The United States also recently dropped from No. 2 to No. 3 on the list of most-visited countries, with France and Spain now holding the first two slots.

Travel economists peg the decline on several factors, including the strong U.S. dollar and soft global market. But they’re also saying domestic politics play a role, triggering what’s come to be called the “Trump slump.”

A report from Oxford Economics, for example, cites “uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration” as a contributing factor to declining international tourism. A Tourism Economics study attributes steep drops in visitors from China on trade tensions under Trump and declines in German visitors on “unpopular U.S. diplomacy and policies.” And other studies show drops in visitors from Muslim countries under Trump’s travel ban plus fewer international workers due to increased visa restrictions.

Those factors all matter to Linda Freeman. The British Columbia resident loves Las Vegas and other parts of the United States, but she says the gun violence and other political rhetoric will keep her away.

“(It’s) definitely affecting my future travel plans,” Freeman said, citing “fear of getting mowed down, lack of political action with gun control, heightened racism and the political climate.”

Such sentiments aside, critics of the Amnesty International advisory note this is the first time the organization has issued such a warning. They note that Amnesty hasn’t issued an advisory for, say, North Korea or Venezuela.

Amnesty officials acknowledge the advisory wasn’t just about statistics.

The warning was also a political statement aimed at bringing attention to the lack of movement by the U.S. federal government to enact gun safety laws, according to Ernest Coverson, campaign manager for Amnesty’s End Gun Violence campaign.

He said the United States has an obligation under international human rights law to regulate access to guns and protect people’s right to move about freely, and that his organization believes the U.S. isn’t doing enough to try to meet that obligation.

Coverson added that Amnesty will consider lifting its travel advisory for the United States if the federal government starts to put in place “commonsense gun laws.”

Trump has said he supports increased background checks and so-called “red flag” laws, which let authorities take guns from individuals if a judge deems them dangerous. But he’s since issued conflicting statements on some of those positions. And so far, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked related legislation passed by the House from making it to the Senate floor.