WHAT WE CAN DO TO STOP IT
COLUMBINE. SANDY HOOK. VIRGINIA TECH. Las Vegas. The names of America’s mass shootings have become as hauntingly familiar as the responses to them—a now predictable cycle of thoughts and prayers, calls for new gun laws, debate over their need and then, usually, little else. Until the next one.
No other developed country has such a high rate of gun violence. A March 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that Americans are 25 times more likely to die from gun homicide than people in other wealthy countries. There are commonsense steps we can take to reduce that toll, but they require acknowledging certain truths. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, and there are approximately 265 million privately owned guns in the U.S., according to researchers from Northeastern and Harvard universities. Any sensible discussion about America’s gun-violence problem must acknowledge that guns aren’t going away. “We have to admit to ourselves that in a country with so many guns, progress is going to be measured incrementally,” says Jeff Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine.
What does that mean in practice? It requires a shift in our collective perspective. While legislators in statehouses and Washington can pass laws that may—or may not—help, the most effective way to tackle our national problem is to stop
