from The Boston Globe, November 2, 2018
Many Americans presume that those bent on inflicting violence upon others or themselves will go through with it, no matter what. We can never legislate the hate out of people’s hearts or deadly compulsions out of their heads. But is there nothing else we can do to keep our fellow citizens from becoming gunshot victims?
By keeping guns mostly out of the public square, many other nations have largely managed to prevent those consumed by bigotry and rage from doing the irreversible harm suffered by innocents in Louisville and Pittsburgh. But here, as we’ve seen after so many past massacres, the debate on gun regulation quickly devolves into political kabuki. For the last 40 years, the view that the Second Amendment guarantees an almost unlimited right to bear arms for personal protection has dominated. Yet a close reading of the data on who dies by the bullet reveals that, for all the talk of keeping malevolent intruders at bay, guns kill those closest to them: Two out of every three people who die by a bullet each year do so at their own hands — 22,938 of us in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available. In other words, those most likely to suffer gun violence are gun owners and those close to them.