Six Steps That We Can Take To Reduce America's Gun-Violence Problem
Gun Violence in the U.S.: 6 Real Ways We Can Help Reduce It 1. Buying a gun should be like buying a ca r The reduction in U.S. motor-vehicle deaths over the past 50 years is one of the great triumphs of public-health intervention. Safer cars, stronger seat-belt laws and fewer teenage drivers have helped reduce car fatalities, which dropped from 33.5 deaths per billion miles travelled in 1975 to 11.8 in 2016. Gun deaths have increased steadily since 2009 and are now nearly as lethal as traffic accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Lawmakers can learn lessons from auto safety. To start, they can put in effect more rigorous requirements for owning firearms. “For the most part, it is much easier to be a legal gun owner in America than it is to be a legal driver,” says David Hemenway, director of the Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Publ...