Regulate Guns

I love Nicholas Kristof’s column today.  He compares the need for gun regulation to the need for regulation of cars.  Apparently, I’m not the only one to make that analogy.  Here’s a bit of what he says:

If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents….

That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.

It’s an interesting comparison.  Kristof shows that historically, cars have acquired more and more safety regulations; guns have acquired fewer and fewer.  Something is wrong here.

Quick and Dirty Messages to Legislators

If you’re like me, you don’t write to your representatives as often as you’d like.  I do, occasionally, write an official letter composed entirely from my own careful thoughts on the matter.  Other times, I do a quickie. For example, few days ago, I received this email from Americans for Responsible Solutions:

Victims of domestic violence and stalking are at an unacceptable risk of gun violence. In fact, 52.5% of people in the United States killed by their intimate partners were murdered with a gun.

That number is unacceptable. But there's a bill in Congress that will make it much more difficult for convicted stalkers and abusers to own a gun. Next week, for the first time in history, the Senate will hold a hearing on the links between gun violence and domestic violence.

People need to know the harsh realities of guns and domestic violence if we're going to change the law. Can you share this image to let your friends and family know how people are at risk of gun violence by their partners?

I did a little cutting and pasting (with no worries about plagiarism) and sent the following message to my Senator Joe Donnelly:

Vote

On The Diane Rehm Show this morning, she and her guests discussed ways to get more voters to participate in primary elections.  Here, in no particular order, are some of those suggestions:

• Have one national primary day when all states would hold their elections.
• Hold primary elections on weekends.
• Implement bipartisan redistricting.
• Rank your choice of candidates.
• Hold elections only ever four year (don’t know how this works with two- and six-year terms).
• Implement penalties for not voting.
• Change the money system.

Listen to the entire show here.

Hold My Hand, Please

A. J. Jacobs, in his odd book Drop Dead Healthy, writes about holding hands:

Holding hands is healthy.  A study by James Coan, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Virginia brought sixteen married couples into his lab and subjected them to the threat of electric shock while he studied their brains on an fMRI machine.  He found that wives who were holding their husbands’ hands experienced less stress.  Even holding a stranger’s hand calmed the women’s brains, though not as much.

Jabobs, male, apparently concluded that the benefits of hand holding applied to men as well as women and began holding hands more often with his wife and his children.  Unfortunately, in the United States, hand holding seems to be something we do only with romantic partners and children. I’d like to see that change. Also, if this information makes you long for a dose of the Beatles, here it is.