Want to stop mass shootings?

AP photo

A public-health prescription: Tougher laws, an NHTSA for guns, and politicians who look more like America

The mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed at least 31 people and wounded scores more. Those incidents were just the latest such deadly attacks in the United States, which has tallied more than 250 since Jan. 1, according to a new report by Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as one that claims the lives of at least four victims. David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and author of the 2006 book “Private Guns, Public Health,” has spent much of his career studying gun violence. He spoke with the Gazette recently about what can be done to stop mass shootings.

что такое NHTSA — см совсем ниже, выделено цветом

кое-что из нутри :

пральная мысль:
Do we really want continuously to train millions of people for an event that virtually almost none of them will ever encounter?

это сомнительно (для меня):
The elephant in the room, the thing that makes us stand out among the 29 other high-income countries, is our guns and our weak gun laws.

Любопытный вопрос: дóлжно ли обществу вмешиваться в случае самоубийства?
The evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide. More people die from gun suicide than gun homicide, and the people dying are gun owners and their families.

и невозможное для РФ:
...we now have three states that are funding gun research (New Jersey, California, Washington).
...We now have The Trace, a daily journalism outlet devoted to gun-related issues in the U.S.

Women are so much better at understanding gun issues than men because for men it’s somehow bound up with notions of virility and masculinity and protecting the home.

наше любимое звено, ухватившись за которое (с):
GAZETTE: What is the one most important thing to do?

HEMENWAY: You can’t just do one thing. That’s the whole point. It’s like asking what’s the one thing you can do to reduce cancer in the U.S.? There are many things. Some might say you could ban smoking, but there is a lot of cancer among nonsmokers, and banning smoking wouldn’t stop smoking and will create black markets. It’s a bad policy. Instead, the public health approach is focused on harm reduction. So if we are going to have lots of guns — which we clearly are for the next 50 years at least — we have to do lots of things. One of the many big success stories in injury prevention has been the reduction in the rate of motor vehicle deaths. Years ago, when I worked for Ralph Nader, if you had asked me for the one big thing to improve motor vehicle safety I would have said the airbag. The airbag is great, but it only reduced motor vehicle deaths by about 10 or 11 percent — it doesn’t save pedestrians or bicyclists and hasn’t been effective in rollovers. Yet overall, since I got my first driver’s license, motor vehicle deaths per vehicle mile have fallen over 85 percent — because we did lots and lots of things. And if we are going to have lots of guns, that’s what we need. If I were required to pick one thing we should do that’s semi-feasible I would say licensing of gun owners and all that entails, including strong background checks, and only allowing firearm sales to a licensed owner. More broadly, we need something like a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for guns, which would address the issue in a range of ways.