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Then come the accidental shootings, many by klutzes who never bother to learn how to handle their weapons. More heartbreaking are the frequent incidents of children picking up their parents' guns and finding out in the most disastrous way that they are not toys; for example, an eight-year-old boy who shot his six-year-old sister dead last week in Fairfax, Va. Then there are the quarrels between spouses, between parents and children, between neighbors and friends that suddenly turn lethal because one or both can pick up a gun. Police commonly estimate that if a household gun is ever used at all, it is six times as likely to be fired at a member of the family or a friend as at an intruder. (It is even more likely, says Dr. Carl Bell, a Chicago psychiatrist who has conducted research into crime and victimization, that the gun will be stolen; guns are prime targets for burglars because they can be easily and profitably sold to other criminals.) And finally, in the relatively rare shoot-outs between householders and burglars that do occur, it might easily be the burglar who proves more skilled in handling his gun and the householder who winds up in the morgue.
Adding all types of deaths together, James Mercy and Vernon Houk, researchers from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control, point out that "during 1984 and 1985, the last two years for which data are available, the number of people who died of injuries inflicted by firearms in the United States (62,897) exceeded the number of casualties during the entire 8 1/2-year Viet Nam conflict." Writing in the Nov. 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Mercy and Houk judged that "injury from firearms is a public- health problem whose toll is unacceptable." Gunfire is, in fact, the eleventh most frequent cause of death in the U.S. and sixth among people under 65. For young black men in the inner city, homicide is the leading cause of death.
In the same issue of the journal, another group of researchers presented evidence that lax U.S. gun laws might be to blame. The team, headed by emergency room surgeon John Henry Sloan, studied a pair of cities just 140 miles apart: Seattle and Vancouver. The two cities had similar unemployment rates, household incomes, law-enforcement policies and even favorite TV shows. Two differences: in Canada, handgun ownership is tightly restricted; in Washington State, guns are more easily purchased. And between 1980 and 1986 Seattle had 388 homicides, vs. 204 in Vancouver. The divergence in murder rates cannot be fully explained by different attitudes toward law-and-order. The two cities had almost identical robbery and burglary rates and even virtually the same number of killings by non-gun methods, but gun homicides were five times as common in Seattle. The research team's scientifically understated conclusion: "Our results suggest that a more restrictive approach to handgun control may decrease national homicide rates."