Two very interesting articles today at The Trace

[flamin lib]

http://www.thetrace.org/

One is about the current gun death rate of 32,000 people a year and how can it be reduced. The other is tangential to it and deals with suicides which make up a large portion of the 32,000 deaths.

The first asks:
Can the U.S.’s 32,000 Annual Gun Deaths Really Be Cut in Half?
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/yearly-gun-death-united-states/

The answer is a qualified yes over ten years if the proposed regulations in Martin O'Malley's detailed proposal (or something like it) can be enacted and if the congress has to will to act. O'Malley's memo here: http://martinomalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/OMalley-Gun-Violence-Prevention.pdf

From the Trace article:

“If you compare the U.S. to other high-income western democracies, and account for all the different metrics, we are not a more violent nation,” Daniel Webster, the Director of the John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, tells The Trace. “Our teens don’t get into more fights. There’s not more bullying, or substance abuse, or more general urban crime. What makes us unusual is our homicide rate, which is almost seven times higher. And that’s because our gun homicide rate is about 19 times higher. So if we could get anywhere closer to the norm of those high-income countries, we’d have well more than a 50 percent reduction,” Daniel Webster, the Director of the John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

The second is about Suicide and how gun regulations can affect it:
Why Suicide Prevention Depends on Gun Restrictions
http://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/suicide-prevention-gun-research/

As the Brady report points out, most suicides are impulsive actions, with 71 percent of suicide attempts occurring within an hour of the decision to commit the act. This means that even small barriers can help prevent suicides, and prevent them for good: Ninety percent of people who survive an attempt do not try again.

But few people survive a suicide attempt with a firearm. Such attempts are successful more than 85 percent of the time, compared with a success rate of 3 percent or less for overdosing and wrist-cutting, two of the most common suicide attempt methods.

Considering that up to 66% of deaths from gun are suicides I would think that a good part of any solution to reducing deaths by gun and suicides in general. Gun rights supporters will say that if not a gun then a suicide will choose some other method but that is clearly not true.

There are 24 different studies that show a failed suicide attempt is only 10% likely to try a second time. The issue with guns is that they are so effective on the first attempt.

The most recent evidence comes from a 2015 study by Daniel Webster and several colleagues at the John Hopkins Bloomberg school of Public Health. Examining data from Connecticut passing a Permit-to-Purchase (PTP) law in 1995, and Missouri repealing it’s PTP law in 2007, Webster found that firearm suicide rates dropped by 15.4 percent in Connecticut, but rose by 16.1 percent in Missouri. While suicides by methods other than firearms also dropped in Connecticut, in Missouri, there was no change in suicides by other means — what’s known as the substitution effect.
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Backed this overwhelming research, some groups are experimenting with policies and programs that can reduce the prevalence of suicide by limiting a depressed individual’s access to firearms. The clearest example is the “Perfect Depression Care” initiative created by the Henry Ford Health System, a large scale suicide prevention program caring for nearly 200,000 high risk patients. This pioneering program initiated a number of policies, including asking patients about weapons (particularly firearms) in the home and strongly recommending that they be removed. The results were staggering. Before the initiative began in 2001, the patient group was suffering a suicide rate of 89 per 100,000 (much higher than the general population). By the end of the study period in the first quarter of 2010, the patient group hadn’t experienced a single suicide since 2007. The program’s policies limiting access to firearms likely saved hundreds of lives.
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“Patients have come to us and said, ‘It’s a good idea that you had me take the gun out of my house; some nights I’d sleep with it on the pillow beside me.’”

So it appears that something can be done about gun violence in America and without violating the Second Amendment or imposing undue restrictions on gun ownership. It just takes us, all of us who want to reduce gun violence, calling and writing and emailing our congress persons to let them know that what the Gun Lobby has in money we have in votes. And we can take them away.