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发帖数: 4174 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=1&r
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Not Regulate Guns as Seriously as Toys?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 12, 2011
Jared Loughner was considered too mentally unstable to attend community
college. He was rejected by the Army. Yet buy a Glock handgun and a 33-round
magazine? No problem.
To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds
. So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce
the toll from our domestic arms industry?
Look, I’m an Oregon farm boy who was given a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday
. I still shoot occasionally when visiting the family farm, and I understand
one appeal of guns: they’re fun.
It’s also true that city slickers sometimes exaggerate the risk of any one
gun. The authors of Freakonomics noted that a home with a swimming pool is
considerably more dangerous for small children than a home with a gun. They
said that 1 child drowns annually for every 11,000 residential pools, but 1
child is shot dead for every 1 million-plus guns.
All that said, guns are far more deadly in America, not least because there
are so many of them. There are about 85 guns per 100 people in the United
States, and we are particularly awash in handguns.
(The only country I’ve seen that is more armed than America is Yemen. Near
the town of Sadah, I dropped by a gun market where I was offered grenade
launchers, machine guns, antitank mines, and even an anti-aircraft weapon.
Yep, an N.R.A. dream! No pesky regulators. Just terrorism and a minor civil
war.)
Just since the killings in Tucson, another 320 or so Americans have been
killed by guns — anonymously, with barely a whisker of attention. By
tomorrow it’ll be 400 deaths. Every day, about 80 people die from guns, and
several times as many are injured.
Handgun sales in Arizona soared by 60 percent on Monday, according to
Bloomberg News, as buyers sought to beat any beefing up of gun laws. People
also often buy guns in hopes of being safer. But the evidence is
overwhelming that firearms actually endanger those who own them. One scholar
, John Lott Jr., published a book suggesting that more guns lead to less
crime, but many studies have now debunked that finding (although it’s also
true that a boom in concealed weapons didn’t lead to the bloodbath that
liberals had forecast).
A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine
by David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few
years ago reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear
that a gun in the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident
, by suicide or by homicide.
The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are
unbelievably remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury
than brandishing a weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that
American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than in
other developed countries, because of the prevalence of guns.
Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because
there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher. And
because most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances
— not by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the
risk of a gun murder in that home.
So what can be done? I asked Professor Hemenway how he would oversee a
public health approach to reducing gun deaths and injuries. He suggested:
• Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun
trafficking. And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who
sell cigarettes to minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.
• Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.
• Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day
waiting period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-
bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload
after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in
new technologies such as “smart guns,” which can be fired only when near a
separate wristband or after a fingerprint scan.
We can also learn from Australia, which in 1996 banned assault weapons and
began buying back 650,000 of them. The impact is controversial and has
sometimes been distorted. But the Journal of Public Health Policy notes that
after the ban, the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over
the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Congress on Wednesday echoed with speeches honoring those shot in Tucson.
That’s great — but hollow. The best memorial would be to regulate firearms
every bit as seriously as we regulate automobiles or toys. |
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