How to Reduce Shootings
By Nicholas Kristof
NY Times, Nov. 6, 2017
"More Americans have died from gun violence, including suicides, since 1970 (about 1.4 million) than in all the ward in American history going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.3 million)."
How to reduce gun shootings? Nicholas Kristoff's approach is well worth considering. He recommends a "public health" approach using auto-safety as a model. "We don’t ban cars," he writes, "but we work hard to regulate them — and limit access to them — so as to reduce the death toll they cause. This has been spectacularly successful, reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent since 1921." We can do something like this with guns. Here are some of the public health policies he recommends.
How to reduce gun shootings? Nicholas Kristoff's approach is well worth considering. He recommends a "public health" approach using auto-safety as a model. "We don’t ban cars," he writes, "but we work hard to regulate them — and limit access to them — so as to reduce the death toll they cause. This has been spectacularly successful, reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent since 1921." We can do something like this with guns. Here are some of the public health policies he recommends.
Excerpts from Kristoff's Article
The first step is to understand the scale of the challenge America faces: The U.S. has more than 300 million guns — roughly one for every citizen — and stands out as well for its gun death rates. At the other extreme, Japan has less than one gun per 100 people, and typically fewer than 10 gun deaths a year in the entire country.
The left sometimes focuses on “gun control,” which scares off gun owners and leads to more gun sales. A better framing is “gun safety” or “reducing gun violence,” and using auto safety as a model—constant efforts to make the products safer and to limit access by people who are most likely to misuse them.
Critics will say that the kind of measures I cite wouldn’t prevent many shootings. The Las Vegas carnage, for example, might not have been prevented by any of the suggestions I make. That’s true, and there’s no magic wand available. Yet remember that although it is mass shootings that get our attention, they are not the main cause of loss of life. Much more typical is a friend who shoots another, a husband who kills his wife — or, most common of all, a man who kills himself. Skeptics will say that if people want to kill themselves, there’s nothing we can do. In fact, it turns out that if you make suicide a bit more difficult, suicide rates drop. Here are the figures showing that mass shootings are a modest share of the total, and the same is true of self-defense — despite what the N.R.A. might have you believe.
