The United States has an enormous public health and safety problem from guns. The number of American civilian gun deaths in the twenty-first century through 2015 is greater than the sum of all US combat deaths in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Given our love affair with guns, the overriding policy goal has to be to reduce the toll of deaths and injuries without substantially reducing the number of civilians with firearms. There are harm reduction lessons to be learned from many public health successes combating other kinds of foreseeable deaths and injuries. For example, motor vehicle deaths per mile driven have fallen more than 85 percent since the 1950s, primarily by making it harder for drivers to make mistakes or behave inappropriately and by reducing the likelihood of severe injury if they do. The success was not primarily due to changing drivers but to making cars and roads safer. The public health approach to guns is to make it difficult rather than easy for violence-prone, anger-prone, or other at-risk people to shoot and kill. Numerous policies and programs could help. Particularly promising ones include changing guns to make them safer, changing the distribution system, increasing gun owner responsibility, and creating a violence prevention administrative agency.

中文翻译：

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减少枪支暴力

枪支给美国带来了巨大的公共健康和安全问题。到2015年的21世纪，美国平民枪支死亡人数大于20世纪和21世纪美国所有战斗死亡人数之和。鉴于我们对枪支的热爱，首要的政策目标必须是在不大幅减少拥有枪支的平民人数的情况下，减少伤亡人数。从减少其他可预见的死亡和伤害的许多公共卫生方面的成功中可以汲取减少危害的经验教训。例如，自1950年代以来，每英里行驶的机动车死亡率下降了85％以上，这主要是通过使驾驶员更容易犯错误或行为不当以及减少严重伤害的可能性而造成的。成功的主要原因不是因为驾驶员的更换，而是因为汽车和道路的安全。枪支的公共卫生方法是使暴力倾向，愤怒倾向或其他高危人群射击和杀伤变得困难而不是容易。许多政策和计划都可以提供帮助。特别有前途的措施包括更换枪支以使其更安全，改变分配系统，增加枪支拥有者的责任以及建立预防暴力管理机构。