“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”
“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Bumper sticker thinking won’t save lives. And narrowing the issue doesn’t help either. Yesterday, President Obama outlined a comprehensive program designed to reduce gun mediated violence and death. Knee jerk reactions quickly surfaced from those who clearly hadn’t yet read the proposals. I searched long and hard, but nowhere among them did I see anything which directs agents of the Federal government to seek out and destroy guns already in the possession of law-abiding American citizens.
Also, some people think the point of the proposals is to reduce the risk of school children getting killed by a random deranged gun wielder. Our President has a bit more vision than that. Since the Sandy Hook massacre, close to 3,000 other Americans have died from gun shots, two-thirds of them suicides. And a lot of the others are young people caught up in the consequences of a series of poor choices.
That’s probably ten times the average number of Facebook friends someone has. What if, overnight, ten people lost all of their “friends” to violence. Ten people would become immediately radicalized, I suspect.
Every two days, 80 people die this way. What if, every other day, a fully loaded 737 fell from the sky? Would we as a nation consider that something worthy of our attention?
Fact: most firearm-mediated deaths are either suicides or committed by a family member or friend.
Fact: Having a gun in the house increases the rate of homicide in that household three times, suicide by an equal amount.
As a physician, I see this as a public health issue. As an American, I respect the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, both the part that talks about gun rights and the part that talks about the right to life.
We have put in place many “car controls” and “tobacco controls” to successfully reduce car- and tobacco-mediated deaths without banning cars or cigarettes. We can and must take the same approach with guns. Reducing such deaths by 25% would save 7,500 lives a year. Why should we just abandon those folks to their fate?
I’m hoping that this is the beginning of a fifty year effort on the part of opinion leaders in our country to change the culture, the way we did with car deaths and tobacco deaths. No one report, or law, or regulation did the trick. But persistence in pointing out what’s wrong with people dieing needlessly does make a difference. Opponents of reasonable actions which can reduce death do NOT have the moral high ground, and should be called on that.