The US has mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief. It is time for a new approach to gun violence.
People are angry, but they also need to be smart. Frankly, liberal efforts, such as the assault weapons ban, were poorly designed and saved few lives, while brazen talk about banning guns just sparked a backlash that empowered the National Rifle Association.
What is needed is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model that was used to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things in society, from swimming pools to cigarettes. Guns are not going to be eliminated in the US, so people need to figure out how to coexist with them.
First, people need to comprehend the scale of the problem: It is not just occasional mass shootings like the one at an Oregon college on Thursday last week, but a continuous deluge of gun deaths, an average of 92 every day in the US. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all US wars going back to the American Revolution.
When I reported a similar figure in the past, gun lobbyists insisted that it could not possibly be true. However, the numbers are unarguable: Fewer than 1.4 million war deaths since 1775, more than half in the Civil War, versus about 1.45 million gun deaths since 1970 — including suicides, murders and accidents.
If that does not make one flinch, consider this: In the US, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013), according to figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.
More than 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, and most of the rest are homicides. Gun enthusiasts scoff at including suicides, saying that without guns people would kill themselves by other means. In many cases, though, that is not true.
In the UK, people used to kill themselves by putting their heads in the oven and asphyxiating themselves with coal gas. This accounted for almost half of British suicides in the late 1950s, but Britain then began switching from coal gas to natural gas, which is much less lethal. Sticking one’s head in the oven was no longer a reliable way to kill oneself — and there was surprisingly little substitution of other methods. Suicide rates dropped, and they stayed at a lower level.
The UK did not ban ovens, but they made them safer. The same must be done with guns.
When I tweeted about the need to address gun violence after the college shooting in the Roseburg, Oregon, a man named Bob pushed back.
“Check out car accident deaths,” he tweeted sarcastically. “Guess we should ban cars.”
Actually, cars exemplify the public health approach that needs to be applied to guns. Cars are not banned, but people do require driver’s licenses, seat belts, air bags, padded dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. The auto fatality rate has been reduced by 95 percent.
One problem is that the gun lobby has largely blocked research on making guns safer. Between 1973 and 2012, the US National Institutes of Health awarded 89 grants for the study of rabies and 212 for cholera — and only three for firearms injuries.
Daniel Webster, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, said that, in 1999, the government listed the gun stores that had sold the most weapons later linked to crimes. The gun store at the top of the list was so embarrassed that it voluntarily took measures to reduce its use by criminals — and the rate at which new guns from the store were diverted to crime dropped 77 percent.
However, in 2003, the US Congress barred the government from publishing such information.
Why is Congress enabling pipelines of guns to criminals?
Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.
A poll this year found that majorities even of gun owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.
We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a personal identification number or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.
It is not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. However, Webster says that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that is thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.
The gun lobby argues that the problem is not firearms; it is crazy people. Yes, the US’ mental health system is a disgrace, but to me, it seems that everyone is crazy if people as a nation cannot take modest steps to reduce the carnage that leaves the US resembling a battlefield.
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