[Vision2020] Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 15, 2012
Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOF<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html>

IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one
thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do
cars?

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not
that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we
suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with
guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David
Hemenway <https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/david-hemenway/>, a public
health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun
violence.

So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis
that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically
isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.

American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern
stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus
drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The
only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of
regulations about
ladders<http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=standards&p_id=10839>,
while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill
around 300 Americans a year, and guns
30,000<http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-05-07/news/bs-ed-guns-letter-20110507_1_gun-violence-gun-injuries-bin>.


We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t
have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and
regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the
contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven,
feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?

As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting,
“It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”

Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my
dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is
fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use
headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be
equally adult about regulating guns?

And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always
be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more
than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths
by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.

Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns,
they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill
themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence
would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any
cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped
a mass shooting.

The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our
country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months
than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq combined <http://icasualties.org/>.

So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one
a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of
high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without
reloading.

We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with
private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back
California<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/code-on-shell-casings-sparks-a-gun-debate.html?pagewanted=all>in
its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each
shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,”
President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but
the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies.
Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.

Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of
35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime
minister<http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html>to
ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,”
as
it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for
licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of
firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely
to be used in mass shootings.

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but
not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate
with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data
compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research
Center<http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/files/bulletins_australia_spring_2011.pdf>,
and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.

Or we can look north to
Canada<http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/fs-fd/moving-emmenager-eng.htm>.
It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a
clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching
for them.

For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto
safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws
or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill
people, drunks do.”

Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash
safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and
tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced
America’s traffic fatality
rate<http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811346.pdf>per mile driven by
nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.

Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And
if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of
your children will die because of our failure.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the
Ground<http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground>.
Please also join me on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/kristof> and
Google+ <https://plus.google.com/102839963139173448834/posts?hl=en>, watch
my YouTube videos <http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof> and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/nickkristof>.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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