More important, while mass shootings like the one in Newtown are always the catalyst for a debate over guns, they’re a tiny fraction of the problem. There are about 20 mass shootings a year in this country, which altogether take the lives of perhaps several hundred people. But there were over 32,000 firearm-related deaths last year, the majority of which (almost 20,000) were suicides. There were also almost 850 accidental deaths from firearms. Among homicides, “far more common than mass killings are altercations where, because there is a gun available, someone ends up dead instead of a less lethal option,” Wintemute said.
And this is the problem with focusing on how to stop mass killings: It ignores what happens when there isn’t one. “Let’s say we flood the country with guns. We put guns in every school, every hospital — more guns everywhere. This kind of thing happens about 20 times a year in the United States; what are the chances that any one of those guns is ever going to be used to help prevent or abort a mass murder? Vanishingly small,” Wintemute said.
“The problem is not the gun being there at that almost impossibly rare moment; it’s what happens to that gun all the rest of the time,” he said. With the introduction of the gun, regardless of its purpose, we can expect more violent deaths, Wintemute explained. We know, for instance, that the mere presence of a gun inside a house is associated with a nearly fivefold increased risk of suicide and threefold increased risk in homicide, according to a 2004 paper published by Centers for Disease Control researchers in the American Journal of Epidemiology. (That finding has been replicated in numerous studies.)
“Now, if there was somehow a way that we could make a gun magically appear when it was need, and disappear otherwise, I think that’s a good idea,” Wintemute added with a laugh.
