Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor inchief of Current Affairs Magazine. My guest today is Professor

David Heminway. He is Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School for Public Health,

and he's the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He is also the author

of the classic study, Private Guns, Public Health,

a dramatic new plan for ending America's epidemic of gun violence.

Professor Hemingway, thank you so much for joining us on Kurd Affairs.

Sure. Thank you for asking me.

Well, let's start by laying out the scope of America's gun violence

epidemic. We see obviously the major publicized mass shootings. These are the very, very dramatic

events, but of course there's the sort of less dramatic everyday gun violence

in the United States.

So perhaps we can start with when we're talking about the crisis of gun violence in America,

what exactly are we talking about?

How many murders, how many suicides?

What is the nature of the problem here?

So nobody knows exactly how many people are shot every

day in the United States but it's something probably on the order of well over 300 people

citizens are shot now probably 110 120 are dying most of the people who are shot are shot in

assaults each day but in terms of deaths about 60% or so are suicides.

At least compared to the other high-income countries, we are a complete outlier in terms of violent death by guns.

And has this, how much has this changed over time? I mean, has this been pretty constant?

We've always been a really outlier among the developed countries.

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