6 x 9. 344 pgs. 16 tables, 3 illustrations. (2004) Cloth 978-0-472-11405-4 $27.95S  Available Add to Cart Paper 978-0-472-03162-7 $20.95T  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Subjects Health & Medicine--Health Policy & Management / Political Science--American Politics

Private Guns, Public Health

David Hemenway



The first complete picture of the public-health approach to gun violence, and a commonsense plan for ending this American epidemic

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About the Book

On an average day in the United States, guns are used to kill almost eighty people, and to wound nearly three hundred more. If any other consumer product had this sort of disastrous effect, the public outcry would be deafening; yet when it comes to guns such facts are accepted as a natural consequence of supposedly high American rates of violence.

Private Guns, Public Health explodes that myth and many more, revealing the advantages of treating gun violence as a consumer safety and public health problem. David Hemenway fair-mindedly and authoritatively demonstrates how a public-health approach-which emphasizes prevention over punishment, and which has been so successful in reducing the rates of injury and death from infectious disease, car accidents, and tobacco consumption-can be applied to gun violence.

Hemenway uncovers the complex connections between guns and self-defense, gun violence and schools, gun prevalence and homicide, and more. Finally, he outlines a policy course that would significantly reduce gun-related injury and death.

With its bold new public-health approach to guns, Private Guns, Public Health marks a shift in our understanding of guns that will-finally-point us toward a solution.

David Hemenway is Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and Director of Harvard's Injury Control Research Center and Youth Violence Prevention Center. A former Pew Fellow on Injury Control, he has been a Senior Soros Justice Fellow and held a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.