
Curbing Gun Violence through Public Health
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The statistics on gun violence are numbing—more than 45,000 firearms-related deaths in the US, far more than in any other wealthy country. Suicide is the leading cause of gun deaths, followed by homicides, and mass shootings are an almost-daily horror that have not lost their power to shock. Any reasoned debate about how best to curb the killing must also consider that 40 percent of all American households own guns—and that most of them are held legally. We urgently need public health tools to sharpen our knowledge about how and why firearms are misused and to identify and implement interventions and policies that will diminish the epidemic of violence.
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