This particular gun story took place, ironically enough, at the 1997 convention of the American Public Health Association in Indianapolis. There, among a group of white-collar professionals and academics, a seemingly minor incident quickly led to mayhem. While eating dinner at the Planet Hollywood restaurant, a patron bent to pick something up from the floor. A small pistol fell from his pocket, hit the floor, and went off. The bullet struck and injured two convention delegates waiting to be seated; both women went to the hospital.

"Why manufacture guns that go off when you drop them?" asks professor of health policy David Hemenway '66, Ph.D. '74. "Kids play with guns. We put childproof safety caps on aspirin bottles because if kids take too many aspirin, they get sick. You could blame the parents for gun accidents but, as with aspirin, manufacturers could help. It's very easy to make childproof guns."

Logic like this pervades Hemenway's new book, Private Guns, Public Health (University of Michigan Press), which takes an original approach to an old problem by applying a scientific perspective to firearms. Hemenway, who directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the School of Public Health (www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc), summarizes and interprets findings from hundreds of surveys and from epidemiological and field studies to deliver on the book's subtitle: A Dramatic New Plan for Ending America's Epidemic of Gun Violence. The empirical groundwork enables Hemenway, whose doctorate is in economics, to sidestep decades of political arm-wrestling over gun control. "The gun-control debate often makes it look like there are only two options: either take away people's guns, or not," he says. "That's not it at all. This is more like a harm-reduction strategy. Recognize that there are a lot of guns out there, and that reasonable gun policies can minimize the harm that comes from them."

Hemenway's work on guns and violence is a natural evolution of his research on injuries of various kinds, which he has pursued for decades. (In fact, it could be traced as far back as the 1960s, when, working for Ralph Nader, LL.B. '58, he investigated product safety as one of "Nader's Raiders.&quot Hemenway says he doesn't have a personal issue with guns; he has shot firearms, but found the experience "loud and dirty—and there's no exercise"—as opposed to the "paintball" survival games he enjoys, which involve not only shooting but "a lot of running." He also happens to live in a state with strong gun laws. "It's nice," he says, "to have raised my son in Massachusetts, where he is so much safer."

http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/09/death-by-the-barrel.html