Outrage and demands for action follow each all-too-common mass shooting in this country — and they should. On Thursday, nine people were killed by a heavily armed, angry, young man at a community college in Oregon. The responses were, as President Obama described them, “routine.”
These horrific events — the killing of 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado and the murder of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut — are seared into our national conscience. Yet political cowardice and intense lobbying from the gun industry stifle needed changes, such as required background checks for every gun sale, to reduce easy access to guns in the U.S.
Mass shootings are far more common in the United States than in other developed, democratic countries. There have been 51 in the U.S. since 1997; three have occurred in Switzerland and Germany in that time, just one in Britain, and none in Australia and Japan. There are many definitions of mass shootings; this one used four or more people killed.
The United States has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world, with 88.8 guns for every 100 people. Most of these guns are used safely, but with so many guns available and few restrictions on their purchase and use, it is inevitable that some will fall into the hands of those who will use them to kill others or themselves.
While mass shootings rightly grab headlines, most gun violence is more private, but no less painful for families and victims. If we are outraged by mass shootings, we also must be outraged — and prompted to act — by the day-to-day gun violence that doesn’t grab the spotlight.
Despite the high number of mass shootings in the U.S., suicide by gun is more common than homicide by gun. In 2013, 21,175 people committed suicide using a gun, compared with 11,208 who died in homicides involving a gun, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Men are about four times more likely to die by suicide than women, and men who kill themselves are more likely than women to use a gun. In 2012, 17,910 men killed themselves with a gun; 2,756 women did.
A study by the Harvard University School of Public Health found that suicides are more common in homes where guns are present and in states with high gun ownership rates. The rate of suicide by other methods was about equal across the states.
In 2013, more U.S. military members died by suicide than in combat, and such suicides were more common in locations where service members had greater access to guns — in the United States and in combat zones. “In general, U.S. military members have more limited access to firearms when serving in Europe/Asia than in other regions,” the Pentagon noted in a 2014 report. “Nearly all of the countries in Europe and Asia where U.S. service members are stationed have very restrictive weapons laws; in turn relatively few service members have opportunities to acquire privately owned firearms legally while assigned in Europe/Asia.”
Just as horrid, but more dispersed and out of the media spotlight, three women are killed each day in domestic violence incidents. Between 2001 and 2012, 11,766 U.S. women were killed by their current or former male partners. Maine, thankfully has few homicides compared to other states. However, half of those that do occur are attributable to domestic violence.
Women who are victims of domestic violence are eight times more likely to be killed by their partner if there is a gun in the home, researchers reported in a 2013 article in the American Journal of Public Health. A survey of battered women found that nearly two-thirds of the women who lived in a home where a gun was present reported that the gun had been used to threaten or harm them. Less than 7 percent of the women had used a gun against their partners.
If we are outraged when six or 20 people are killed in public by one gunman, we should also be outraged when women are killed, on a daily basis, by their partners. We should also be outraged that so many men are so discouraged that they are shooting themselves.
And, we should also be outraged that common-sense steps — like background checks before gun purchases, which are supported by 92 percent of gun owners — could help reduce these tragic numbers. What is missing is the political will to act.
