Guns N’ Safety Measures: US Must Work to Bring in Stricter Handling Rules

As the United States has become embroiled in gun violence, something must be done to fix the problem, David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy at Harvard University, told Radio Spunik’s BradCast.

The issue of gun control has once again become a hot topic after a recent incident that left Carey Gabay in a coma and fighting for his life after being shot during the annual West India Day Parade in New York on Monday.

"How many incidents do we have to have, how many weeks do we have to have with the same story over and over and over about the insanity that this country is allowing to continue with violence and the loss of life of innocent people, because we have people, who have no business having guns, having guns?" — said Andrew Cuomo, the former assistant to New York's governor, for whom Gabay worked.

This is why the United States needs to have the political courage to step up and stop this gun madness, Professor Hemenway told Brad Friedman.

Hemenway also gave out some chilling figures about gun violence in the United States. Turns out, more Americans have died in gun-related homicides and suicides in the United States since 1968 than on the battlefields of all of the wars in American history. Guns kill almost 80 and injure over 300 people every day in the United States, Hemenway said.

The country might not eliminate gun violence completely, but it can certainly reduce the number of deaths. Similar to other consumer products, such as cars for example, guns should also become subject to certain safety measures. Hemenway brought up the example of how fatality rates from car accidents went down after the public health approach was introduced. Over the decades, roads became better and cars themselves were made safer resulting in the decline of car-related deaths.