Ů��С��Ƶ

Since the start of the year, there have been , including a murder-suicide in San Bernardino, California, and the murder video recently posted on Facebook.

Legislators have always struggled to address this problem. But in the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s administration, new gun legislation has only expanded, not restricted gun rights. In short order, lawmakers made it easier for , and pushed to expand the locations where people can carry firearms.

Over the past few years, however, gun owners and sellers have started taking matters into their own hands and have come up with creative solutions to reduce the threat from guns.

From working with public health organisations so gun sellers can recognise the signs of depression in a prospective buyer to developing biometric gun locks, citizen scientists are cobbling together measures they hope will stave off the worst aspects of US gun culture.

The Federation of American Ů��С��Ƶs estimates that in the US – about enough for every man, woman and child. According to the independent policy group , there were 385 mass shootings in 2016, and it looks as if the numbers for 2017 will not differ wildly.

In the absence of regulations against guns, individual gun sellers and owners are trying to help”

Although the number of these incidents is alarming, it is dwarfed by , which account for more than half of all firearms deaths (see graph, right). And last year, a report from the Associated Press and the USA Today Network showed that accidental shootings as is shown in US government data.

In just one week in 2009, New Hampshire gun shop owner Ralph Demicco sold three guns that were ultimately used by their new owners to end their own lives. Demicco’s horror and dismay that he had inadvertently contributed to their deaths led him to start what has become known as .

The project uses insights from the study of suicide to teach gun sellers to recognise signs of suicidal intent in buyers, and know when to avoid selling a gun. To do this, Demicco teamed up with Catherine Barber, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Part of what the project does is challenge myths. With suicide, the biggest is that people plan suicides over a long period. But empirical evidence shows that people usually act in a moment of . One study has found that nearly half of people who attempted suicide contemplated their attempt for less than 10 minutes. In the time it takes to find another method, a suicidal crisis often passes, so even a small delay in obtaining a gun could make a difference.

Another myth that Demicco and Barber are seeking to dispel is that if you take away someone’s gun, they’ll just find another way to hurt themselves. While that’s sometimes true, Barber says, alternatives are less likely to be fatal. Gun attempts result in death more than 80 per cent of the time; only 2 per cent of pill-based suicide attempts are lethal.

Within a year of its launch in 2009, half of all gun sellers in New Hampshire had hung posters about the warning signs of suicide by the cash registers in their stores. The programme has expanded to 21 states, and Barber is now analysing data to see how well it is working.

Another grass-roots project is trying to prevent children from accidentally shooting themselves. , an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been working on a fingerprint lock to prevent anyone other than the owner using a gun. He has founded a start-up called to improve the lock’s reliability and bring it into production.

Shot by a friend

To Kloepfer, the value of the lock is in preventing accidental shootings, especially by young children. Research has found a spike in accidental gun deaths among 3-year-olds, which typically happens when they find loaded guns in their homes and shoot themselves, and then another among 15- to 17-year-olds, who are more likely to shoot, or be shot by a friend.

These deaths aren’t widely reported because their overall number is dwarfed by suicides and homicides, but “any deaths that smart guns prevent are significant, whether it’s five or 5000”, says Margot Hirsch, president of the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation. “We believe it should be a consumer choice, that people should have the option of smart guns if they want them.”

Even mass shootings might be prevented with the right technology. Gun-free zones can be enforced with technology instead of laws. Geofenced Firearms in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, uses satellite technology and other tools to make weapons that fire only when in a location approved by their owner. Founder J. D. Ward built the specially designed gun with a GPS chip that allows, for example, a hunter to program her rifle to stay locked in and around the house. Similarly, someone who wants a handgun for home protection can dictate that the gun is usable only in that home.

If these guns become popular enough, Ward envisions a service in which restaurants, schools, cinemas and other public places can temporarily disable all firearms. “The goal is to limit opportunities for mass shootings,” Ward says.

The Gun Shop Project and many smart lock schemes pride themselves in coming from within the gun community, not being imposed from the outside. But can they really make up for missing legislation?

Smart guns remain prototypes and still face several years of safety and reliability testing before they can be put on the market. There have never been laws against putting smart locks on guns; however, there aren’t laws demanding them either.

Such laws could be needed if these technologies are ever to mature. “Today, the technology is not reliable enough for consumers to want it,” says David Kopel, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute think tank in Washington DC. “Maybe it will be one day, but nobody’s gotten close yet.”

“When Smith & Wesson tried to make a gun lock, a boycott nearly drove the company to bankruptcy”

Many examples of public health interventions demonstrate that laws are often necessary to initiate the widespread adoption of public safety measures – from tobacco to seat belts in cars to drunk driving reductions. The same is true for guns. “We need policy to back this up and help to shift the market,” Ward says.

Without laws, there’s not much chance of manufacturers voluntarily adding extra safety features. And that’s not necessarily just down to manufacturers. In 2000, gun maker Smith & Wesson tried to work with the Clinton administration to improve gun safety by agreeing to add locks and restrict magazine size. When the US National Rifle Association got wind of this, it instituted a boycott that nearly drove the manufacturer out of business.

There can also be problems at the point of sale. A Maryland retailer who tried to offer a smart gun in 2014 and eventually decided not to stock them.

The NRA’s stringent opposition stems from fears of restrictions on the US constitution’s second amendment, which gives people the right to bear arms. The lobby even requiring gun owners to use locks or safes.

Grass-roots schemes like the Gun Shop Project have a better chance of being successful, because gun users are already buying in. But it may take years for the project to become big enough to have a significant effect on national statistics.

Regulatory changes might be needed to make any improvements stick in the long term. At the very least, new regulations shouldn’t block the gun community’s efforts at self-governance.

Change will not come quickly, regardless. Barber sees parallels between the Gun Shop Project and campaigns against drink driving in the 1980s and 90s.

“One commercial didn’t change rates of drunk driving. It was an ad on TV, a scene in a movie, repeated over and over, that ultimately had an impact,” she says.