PERSPECTIVE ON HANDGUNS

Imagine how your holiday plans might have changed if you had learned that thousands of children and teens suffer sickness and death every year after eating Thanksgiving turkey. Imagine if public health researchers consistently traced a link between turkey and higher death rates among children. Even more terrifying, imagine if the turkey industry denied it had any responsibility to prevent these deaths and government agencies could do nothing to require the turkey industry to grow healthier birds, even though they knew how.

Don’t worry, your Thanksgiving turkey was safe. But another preventable epidemic has swept across our nation. It lives in our homes and it attacks our young disproportionately--it is an epidemic of gun death and injury.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that nearly 1.2 million latchkey children have access to loaded and unlocked firearms in their homes. It is no surprise, therefore, that children and teenagers cause more than 10,000 unintentional shootings each year in which at least 800 people die. In addition, about 1,900 children and teenagers attempt suicide with a firearm every year. More than three-fourths of them are successful.

For years, the gun industry has known of technology that would prevent the majority of these deaths and injuries. “Personalized guns”--weapons that can only be fired by the owner--would stop the curious child, the suicidal teenager and the thief from firing a gun found in a drawer or closet. The gun industry made a business decision not to develop and market this technology--a decision that contributes to thousands of unintentional shootings every year and costs hundreds of lives. Among these gun manufacturers is a cluster of Saturday Night Special makers located in Southern California--an area known as the “Ring of Fire.”

Only this September did Colt’s Manufacturing Co. finally unveil a prototype of a personalized handgun. To fire the gun, the user must wear a radio-frequency tag (which can be placed in a ring or wrist band) to transmit a signal recognized by a chip placed in the gun. Though Colt was careful to state that this prototype was intended only for police use, the gun was heralded by others as a way to prevent unintentional shootings that occur when children find handguns that have been stored unlocked in the home.

While gun manufacturers have been reluctant to implement such safety features, they continue to create guns that are deadlier--more compact, more concealable and more powerful. The gun industry then markets these increasingly lethal guns by playing on our fear of crime in their advertising and implicitly encouraging the dangerous storage and handling of firearms.

In one Beretta ad, for example, a pistol lies on a night stand with a bullet placed deliberately beside it. A woman and two young children peer innocently out of a photograph sitting next to the gun. The alarm clock shows 11:25 p.m. The headline reads, “Tip the odds in your favor.” The ad illustrates precisely how the gun bought for protection is often the most dangerous, as it is usually stored unlocked and loaded for use at a moment’s notice.

The makers of most consumer products, including turkeys, teddy bears and even toy guns--none of which are inherently lethal--are subject to stricter safety standards than are gun manufacturers. Only one death was reported between 1988 and 1992 as a result of eating bad turkey meat, yet regulations require turkeys to go through a minimum of seven major inspections before hitting the supermarket shelves. Guns, designed to kill, claim the lives of 38,000 people every year and no regulation requires gun manufacturers to make safer guns.

The gun lobby has ensured that this madness will continue by pressuring Congress to exempt the gun industry from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Gun manufacturers are the least regulated consumer product industry. But this is beginning to change. In Massachusetts, the attorney general is taking steps to impose safety standards on handguns. This is the direction we must go.

If any other consumer product took as many lives as guns do, we would see a public outcry so great that the manufacturer would be forced to make the product safer. We must demand the same level of responsibility from gun makers.