Finalist: The New York Times, by Editorial Board

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

In America’s endless debate about gun rights versus public safety, there should be no disputing the hard facts in a new report on gunshot fatalities showing that at least 722 nonself-defense deaths since 2007 were attributable to individuals with legal permits to carry concealed weapons. Concealed carry by citizens has been a soaring phenomenon as states liberalize laws in the name of lowering crime that allow more permits and easier gun access in public places, even schools, churches and restaurants.

There is no central tally of the effects, with states often barring release of concealed-carry data and Congress hewing to the gun lobby’s opposition to research on guns’ effects on public health. But a methodical gleaning of eight years of news accounts by the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group, found that in research involving 722 deaths in 544 concealed-carry shootings in 36 states and the District of Columbia, only 16 cases were eventually ruled lawful self-defense — even though this has been a major gun rights selling point for the new laws.

More gravely, the study found that the fatalities included 17 law enforcement officers shot by people with legal permits along with 705 slain civilians. There were 28 mass shootings (involving three or more victims) in which 136 people were killed — even though concealed carry has also been sold as a defense against massacres like the one in Newtown, Conn.

In studying the 544 shootings, the center found 177 cases where people with gun licenses were ultimately convicted of crimes, including homicides, and 218 cases where the permit holder used the gun to commit suicide. There were 44 total lives taken by licensed individuals who first murdered others, then committed suicide.

The full death toll attributable to concealed carry is undoubtedly larger because the center’s study did not cover all 50 states. Lawmakers dare not allow a national tally, so badly needed, to be kept by the government. No one is sure how many citizens now legally carry guns, but estimates run beyond 11 million nationally with many statehouse agendas pursuing even more permits.

Whatever the full toll, the policy center’s gathering of just some of the hard facts of gun deaths at the hands of licensed shooters is more than valuable. It should be received as an alarming check on all the swagger about the woeful phenomenon of more citizens packing more guns.
 

The grisly carnage from mass shootings regularly attracts the nation’s focus as a public safety issue, if only fleetingly. But the highest death toll from guns by far continues to be the far less noticed wave of suicides — nearly 20,000 a year — by Americans whose easy access to guns presents an irresistible temptation in a critical moment of despair.

Suicide accounts for two-thirds of the 30,000-plus gun deaths each year, as more than half of all suicides are carried out by firearms, according to the latest federal data.

If it takes a sensational statistic to spur national concern about such self-destruction, consider the latest research showing that 82 percent of teenage suicides by firearms involve guns left poorly secured or foolishly unprotected by members of their families. These young lives are impulsively lost in supposedly safe home environments, where just the presence of a gun has been found to increase the risk of suicide three times, according to a new report by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun safety organization.

The report also notes that 85 percent of people attempting suicide by gun succeed, while drug overdose, the main method chosen for suicide attempts, is fatal only 2 percent of the time. Ninety percent of those who fail in a suicide attempt embrace their second chance at life and do not eventually die by suicide.

There is stark evidence that easy access to guns compounds the crisis. The states with the five highest rates of gun suicides have gun ownership rates notably higher than the national average, according to the Brady study. Meanwhile, the gun lobby and firearm industry are engaged in a reckless campaign to have more Americans own and carry guns.

The suicide problem is enormously complicated without irresponsible access to guns. At a minimum, people who own guns should be required to keep them firmly under lock for the safety of society, let alone their own families.
 

Since no amount of dead bodies seems enough to spur lawmakers to rein in access to guns, let’s focus on the living — the children gun violence leaves behind.

Start with the little boy and girl belonging to Jennifer Markovsky, a 35-year-old mother who was one of three people murdered last Friday during the latest mass shooting of 2015 — this time, a lone gunman’s hourslong siege of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. For the crime of accompanying her friend to an appointment at the clinic, Ms. Markovsky lost her life in the most brutal and pointless, yet entirely American, manner.

Here’s a thought for lawmakers who refuse to consider any meaningful legislation to reduce the daily carnage of gun violence across America: Thanks to your single-minded defense of unfettered gun rights at the expense of all reason and respect for life, there is an endless supply of children to be consoled. The other two victims of Friday’s assault — Garrett Swasey, a police officer, and Ke’Arre Stewart, an Iraq war veteran — also each had two children.

Of course, children aren’t the only ones who endure this unnecessary suffering. So do parents and grandparents. Grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Husbands and wives and brothers and aunts. Lifelong friends and beloved colleagues. Every life unique and irreplaceable, yet all equally defenseless in the face of a bullet.

But rather than taking action to address the full measure of destruction America’s gun violence inflicts, many politicians appear more comfortable offering rote words of shallow sympathy to the victims’ families, then jumping quickly behind distractions like the state of mental-health care in America. Was Robert L. Dear Jr., the suspect in last week’s shooting, mentally ill? Did he oppose abortion? Or was he just extremely angry?

The truth is, the characteristics of killers may vary, but the result is always the same — a massacre of the innocent, made possible by virtually unimpeded access to guns. Mr. Dear had several run-ins with the law and still had plenty of weapons at hand.

Many who oppose sensible gun-safety measures point to the 350 million or so guns already in circulation and say it’s too late to turn back now. Their chilling solution is for everyone to be armed, and ready to shoot, at all times.

Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado was right to call mass shootings “a form of terrorism.” Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can.

This is not an intractable problem. Countries from Australia to Britain have dealt with mass shootings quickly and effectively with better laws. As a result, more of their residents are alive today, and none of those laws have created the tyrannies that fuel the paranoid fantasies of some activists.

Even in America, where the Second Amendment provides robust protection of gun rights, there are reforms that modestly brave politicians could pass if they wanted to, including universal background checks; expanding the categories of people deemed too dangerous to have guns; funding research into gun violence; and gun buyback programs.

Instead, the rhetoric on this issue swerves between the irrational and the deranged. Consider a recent sampling from the leading Republican presidential candidates. Ben Carson said, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” Donald Trump, who once supported expanding background checks, said the murders in the terrorist attacks in Paris were connected to France’s strict gun controls. Senator Ted Cruz suggested Mr. Dear could be a “transgendered leftist activist.” Days earlier he proudly announced the endorsement of Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, who has advocated the execution of doctors who perform abortions.

Meanwhile, the killings go on. More than once a day on average this year, mass shootings have destroyed lives and families. President Obama on Saturday said this endless ritual of murder is “not normal,” but that is precisely the problem: In America, it has become all too normal.

To listen to the insistent harangues of many gun-rights advocates, one might imagine that the Second Amendment prohibits almost any regulation of firearms.

Fortunately, a majority of the Supreme Court disagrees. On Monday, the court declined to hear a challenge to a Chicago suburb’s law banning semiautomatic assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

The town of Highland Park, Ill., passed the 2013 ordinance, which bans categories of weapons as well as specific guns by name, including the AR-15 and the AK-47, in the wake of the massacre of 26 children and educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. The shooter in that attack, like those in many mass shootings, used a semiautomatic assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine.

It was the 70th time since 2008 that the Supreme Court has declined to consider a lawsuit challenging a federal, state or local gun regulation. This creates a big opportunity for Americans to put pressure on their state and local leaders, especially since Congress refuses to approve even uncontroversial measures like universal background checks for gun sales, which are supported by nearly nine in 10 Americans. Until that changes, states and cities have the constitutional authority and moral obligation to protect the public from the scourge of gun violence.

Such efforts, while piecemeal, are critically important steps toward a safer country. States and cities have passed laws restricting or banning certain types of weapons, magazines and ammunition, and prohibiting certain classes of people, like those convicted of stalking or multiple instances of drunken driving, from possessing guns. Some have also imposed universal background checks and safe-storage requirements on gun owners.

In 2008, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment grants individuals the right to keep handguns in their homes for self-defense. In 2010 the court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as to the federal government. But since then, states and cities have passed hundreds of gun-safety laws, and those new laws, as well as older gun laws, have faced more than a thousand challenges under the Second Amendment. So far, lower courts have upheld the laws 93 percent of the time.

The Heller decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia for a 5-4 majority, upended the long-accepted meaning of the Second Amendment, and came in for heavy criticism across the political spectrum. But it stated clearly that gun regulations are constitutional.

“Like most rights,” Justice Scalia wrote, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” He continued, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms” — “prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”

Of course, the gun lobby refuses to accept this part of that decision. And sensible local laws remain under constant assault by the lobby and its legislative followers. In Illinois, state lawmakers banned cities and towns from outlawing assault weapons, but left a 10-day window before the ban took effect. Highland Park was one of 20 towns that raced to pass a measure in that time.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, dissented from the court’s refusal to consider the Highland Park law, arguing that the law should have been struck down for violating what he called a central premise of the Heller decision: that the Constitution permits ownership of any weapon in “common use” by law-abiding citizens. Since roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles, Justice Thomas wrote, that amounts to common use.

Seven justices — including three of the court’s conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. — did not sign on to that reasoning, which, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that government could not regulate any weapons so long as manufacturers succeeded in selling enough of them to the public.

By not taking the Illinois case and dozens of others like it, the court makes it clear that states and cities have wide latitude to pass tough, effective gun laws to protect their citizens.
 

After months of grief and depression, parents who lost children in the 2012 schoolhouse gun slaughter in Newtown, Conn., turned to the courts last year for a modicum of justice and only then discovered the full power of gun manufacturers: The industry marketing the weapons that killed 20 children and six adults at the school enjoys an extraordinary immunity from civil damage suits — a customized shield from Congress that the makers of autos, drugs and other American industries are not given.

The law, enacted in 2005, has been notoriously successful at protecting gun makers and dealers and keeping victimized families from being heard in court on wrongful-death and damages claims. If there are ever to be effective answers to the gun deaths now plaguing the nation, repeal of this egregious law — a denial of basic American fairness — should be near the top of the agenda if only to force the gun industry to worry about billions in damages for its abuse of public safety.

Whether that happens, of course, depends on whether Congress is ever going to break from the gun lobby. Could there be anything less controversial than denying gun purchases to people on the terrorist watch list? Yet Republicans prefer to express concern about “due process” for gun purchasers even as they propose blanket bans on Islamic refugees.

There is a raft of needed measures that could and should be enacted as national shock flows then ebbs with each new headline about a massacre. Some of the most common sense protections involve less-noticed gun deaths in the home and illegal gun dealers arming the underworld, but all deserve the attention of voters, who have the power to throw out lawmakers hiding in the pocket of the gun lobby.

The Brady Law: Most needed is an expansion of this law so that dealers and others now buying firearms on the Internet and at gun shows are subjected to background checks. The law has barred 2.5 million risky applicants in the last 20 years from buying guns, but it does not apply to 40 percent of total gun sales. Despite the national anguish over the Newtown shooting, Congress failed to close this huge loophole. Lawmakers, particularly wavering Democrats, must be relentless in pushing for universal background checks, which are favored by 85 percent of the public, including 79 percent of Republicans.

Battlefield Guns and Ammunition: A responsible Congress would restore the assault weapons ban and enact limits on gross ammunition clips that let shooters spray crowds of victims with up to 100-round bursts. High capacity magazines developed for warfare have been used in at least 45 mass shootings since 1984, killing 403 people and wounding 406, according to the Violence Policy Center, a public safety research group. There are periodic proposals to control or tax ammunition. But the gun lobby showed its clout this year when federal officials backed down from a plan to block the sale of an armor-piercing handgun bullet rated a clear danger to the police. “You spoke, we listened,” officials tweeted after gun zealots complained that their rights were abridged.

Mental Illness: Services undoubtedly need to be improved for Americans with mental illnesses as a public health issue, but recalcitrant Republicans are invoking this to duck gun safety measures. They should be the first to embrace a practical law pioneered last year in California that allows concerned family members to alert a judge to issue a gun restraining order on a potentially violent individual.

Insurance and Smart Guns: Anyone who opposes limits on gun ownership is obliged to come up with practical steps to keep the public safe. Why not require a gun owner to have liability insurance, as is required for owning a car? Where is the industry, so clever in marketing war weapons, when it comes to advancing safer “smart gun” technology?

Home Safety: The home is an even riskier place than the venues attacked by mass shooters. Gun safety studies have found that a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a family homicide, suicide or accident than to be used in self-defense. More than 1.5 million children under the age of 18 live in homes with loaded, unsecured guns, leaving them 16 times more likely to be killed than in safer homes, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a research group. It is hard to imagine how any politician who kisses babies on the campaign trail can fail to demand mandates and penalties to keep guns unloaded and locked up at home.

State Laws: Gun safety laws work in states where they are applied, even if other states are lax. Those with weak gun laws and high rates of gun ownership suffer the highest gun death rates, according to research. Alaska, where 60 percent of households have guns, had 19.5 gun deaths per 100,000 in 2013. The rate was 2.7 in Hawaii where 9.7 percent of households have arms.

The lethal “iron pipeline” of traffic in guns from states with weak laws to those with stronger laws should be stopped by federal law. Researchers found that 90 percent of guns used in crimes were supplied by just 5 percent of gun shops specializing in such underworld traffic — a lethal flaw crying out for not just government but industry controls. Appallingly, statehouses have been advancing the concealed carrying of pistols as the industry’s latest craze — selling citizens on the fantasy of self-defense in public places. Research shows these licensed shooters have been killing themselves or others rather than taking down perpetrators, with at least 29 mass shootings since 2007 found to involve concealed-carry licensees.

Basic Research: This is crucial for fathoming the 33,000-plus annual gun deaths (and more than twice that number wounded), far greater than in any other major nation. But Congress has caved in to the gun lobby and hobbled federal research on this major public health challenge. Gun deaths have already overtaken car crashes for mortalities in more than a dozen states. Yet it wasn’t until last year that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, prompted by the White House, issued the first clear evidence of what the public already sensed — gun sprees by shooters with military-style assault weapons were on the rise. Far more research is needed. Congress’s budget hawks should be delving into the causes of gun violence, which exacts an estimated economic cost of more than $225 billion year.

These proposals are some of the steps citizens should be discussing to reduce the intolerable bloodshed from guns. Public despair that nothing can be done is not an option. The parents of Newtown are providing a model of determination — attempting a difficult lawsuit that is barely underway in state court because Congress shielded the gun industry. Its success is far from certain, but the parents are persisting.

As Americans debate how the country should respond to gun violence, they should not lose sight of the biggest category of firearm deaths: suicides. About two-thirds of people killed by guns, or 20,000 a year, kill themselves.

The rate at which Americans commit suicide with guns has been increasing for several years, even as the rate of gun homicides has declined. Research shows that the increase is correlated with higher gun ownership. Public health experts say ready access to firearms makes it easier for people to act on suicidal thoughts. And about 85 percent of suicide attempts that involve guns are successful, compared with less than 3 percent of those involving drug overdoses. Over all, guns were used in about half of the 41,000 suicides in 2013, the latest year for which there is data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These numbers are all the more tragic because suicide is a leading cause of death among young people. And contrary to the conventional wisdom that people who are determined to end their lives will find a way to do so, 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts do not eventually die by suicide.

The country could reduce the death toll by enacting better safety policies and investing in education campaigns. A good place to start would be to encourage gun owners to properly secure their firearms, by placing them in safes and storing them separately from ammunition. This would make it harder for teenagers, who are more impulsive, to commit suicide and help reduce the toll of unintentional gun deaths, estimated at about 500 in 2013.

Some health experts have been working to build awareness about suicide risks among gun owners through education campaigns. The Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health has worked with gun dealers in New Hampshire to display brochures and posters that describe warning signs for suicide and tell people how they can keep guns from at-risk family members and friends. Similar programs have been started in other states.

State licensing laws for gun ownership can help by delaying access to guns. Even a short delay can be effective, experts say, because most people attempt suicide within an hour of their decision to end their lives. A study published this year by four professors at Johns Hopkins University found that suicide rates fell in Connecticut after that state passed a law in 1995 requiring licensing. The study also found that the suicide rate increased in Missouri after it repealed a similar law in 2007.

Other strategies have proved very effective in countries that have the will to act. In Israel, the military cut the suicide rate among young soldiers by 40 percent by forbidding them to take their service weapons home on weekends, according to a study published in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior in 2010. And in Australia, the rate at which people killed themselves with guns fell nearly 80 percent after a national gun buyback in 1997, according to a study published in The American Law and Economics Review in 2010. Australia bought back about 650,000 guns, or about 20 percent of the total.

No policy or education campaign is going to prevent every suicide. But that is no excuse for failing to save as many people as we can by improving gun safety and by protecting people who are a danger to themselves.

Those who oppose expanded gun-control legislation frequently argue that instead of limiting access to guns, the country should focus on mental health problems.

“People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings,” said Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, after the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., early this month. And Republicans in the Senate backed mental-health legislation even as they rejected bills to require universal background checks and bar people on the terrorism watch list from buying guns.

But mass shootings represent a small percentage of all gun violence, and mental illness is not a factor in most violent acts. According to one epidemiological estimate, entirely eliminating the effects of mental illness would reduce all violence by only 4 percent. Over all, less than 5 percent of gun homicides between 2001 and 2010 were committed by people with diagnoses of mental illness, according to a public health study published this year.

Blaming mental health problems for gun violence in America gives the public the false impression that most people with mental illness are dangerous, when in fact a vast majority will never commit violence. Still, some legal changes should be made to reduce access to firearms among the small percentage of people with mental illness who are dangerous to themselves or others.

Estimates of the percentage of mass shooters who are mentally ill vary widely, as both “mass shooting” and “mental illness” can be difficult to define. One recent analysis of murderers who killed or intended to kill four or more people found that 22 percent of male killers exhibited evidence of mental illness (the share was higher among women, but the sample was much smaller). Another analysis, by the group Everytown For Gun Safety, found that in about 11 percent of shootings between January 2009 and July 2015 in which four or more people were killed, concerns about the killer’s mental health had been reported to a doctor or other authority before the crime took place.

Under federal law, people who have been involuntarily committed because of mental illness are prohibited from buying guns. The federal government relies on the states to submit records of such commitments to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, so that would-be gun buyers who have been committed will fail a background check.

In recent years, many more states have made an effort to submit such records to the federal system; the number in the databank has more than doubled since the 2012 mass shooting at a school in Newtown, Conn. After Connecticut began submitting its records in 2007, violent crime among people with disqualifying hospitalizations declined. However, getting state records is still a problem; six states have submitted fewer than 100 records.

A few states have additional prohibitions for those who have been hospitalized but not committed. California, for instance, bars those who have been involuntarily hospitalized for a short time from owning guns for five years, even if they were not committed. For people with severe mental illness who are never hospitalized, tighter gun permitting rules could help. Requiring an in-person application (like getting a driver’s license) would make it harder for them to qualify for gun ownership. In the 10 years after Connecticut passed a “permit to purchase” law requiring would-be gun buyers to pass a background check and complete a gun safety course with a certified instructor, gun homicides in the state fell by 40 percent.

In some states, the police may confiscate guns from people at risk of harming themselves or others, some of whom may be mentally ill. Between 1999 and 2009, 11 percent of confiscation warrants in Connecticut, for example, were requested as a result of “mental instability” on the part of the gun owner; by far the largest share, 46 percent, were requested because the owner showed signs of being suicidal.

All of these approaches are worth considering at the state and federal levels as part of a broader effort to reduce gun violence. And, of course, effectively diagnosing and treating mental illness is a worthy goal in itself. But addressing mental health, on its own, will not solve the country’s gun violence problem.

It was remarkable that the Republican presidential candidates’ debate this week, supposedly focused on keeping Americans safe, was devoid of questions and comments about the public health issue of gun violence.

Instead, the nine Republican rivals spent much of their time dwelling darkly on potential threats from Islamic State terrorists. And when they brought up the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., this month, carried out by a couple found to be inspired by Islamic State violence, the discussion never veered to the easy gun access that enabled those killers — and many others — to commit swift and horrific slaughter of innocent people.

That would have complicated their pitch, and more important, would mean thinking about gun violence in ways that would displease the gun industry and its political lobby. Those forces demand unquestioning allegiance from politicians fearful for their careers — outspoken candidates who retreat into shameful timidity when serious ideas on gun safety are needed. Strangely, the debate moderators didn’t care to touch the gun issue either, thereby burying a public health challenge that is a lethal, daily threat.

It’s easier for these candidates to engage in eerie discussions of whether the next president should be free to bomb civilians in Syria or shoot down Russian bombers in a no-fly zone. They are experts at stoking fears about terrorism and great at wringing their hands about the unfounded bomb scare that shut down the Los Angeles school district on Tuesday, but actually facing up to gun violence — which kills more than 33,000 Americans a year — is beyond their capacity or courage. Far from offering any ideas, their statements on the campaign trail are a national embarrassment.

“I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away,” Dr. Ben Carson declared in October.

“You get rid of the bad guys by using our guns,” Senator Ted Cruz passionately declared early this month. He likes to make light of the issue, too: “We define gun control real simple — that’s hitting what you aim at.”

“Gun laws fail everywhere they’re tried,” Senator Marco Rubio flatly insisted last month. That claim is plain wrong, contradicted by major studies as well as experience in other countries where politicians have enacted sensible controls that helped to reduce rates of gun deaths.

Donald Trump favored an assault weapons ban in 2000, but this year he pledged to veto gun controls, making the death toll from firearms sound like the inescapable result of fate: “You’re going to have these things happen and it’s a horrible thing to behold.”

Jeb Bush may be trying to run as a moderate against Mr. Trump, but he concedes nothing when it comes to pure fatalism about guns. “Look, stuff happens,” Mr. Bush said in October, bizarrely trying to make the case that the impulse to do something constructive may not be the right course after mass shootings. He could have been speaking for any of his current rivals when he addressed the National Rifle Association convention in 2003 and exuberantly declared, “The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom!” This week, the sound of the guns from San Bernardino, Colorado Springs and a dozen earlier scenes of American carnage never penetrated the debate.

The three rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination showed enough sense of responsibility in their debate on Saturday to freely discuss the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Unfortunately, this was only half the debate voters deserve. The Republican candidates are callously ducking the issue. Among the recent casualties of such silence was a bill in Congress that would have lifted a ban on basic federal research into gun violence and its toll on public health.

For nearly two decades, Congress has banned needed research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, Congress, doing the bidding of the gun industry, quietly killed a provision in the omnibus spending bill that would have reversed that ban.

In so doing, it left intact an anti-science smoke screen that has helped the industry and its lobbyists deny and dispute the facts of the gun violence that takes more than 30,000 lives a year.

Imagine if the tobacco industry had been similarly favored by Congress with a ban on federal research about cigarette deaths. Imagine, too, if the auto industry had such a shield during the years when the government successfully fought unsafe cars in the cause of public health.

Perversely, the gun industry claims that research by private and academic interests — which it can’t block — is untrustworthy. Expect that argument to be invoked in reaction to alarming research about the Missouri General Assembly’s repeal eight years ago of background checks for gun buyers that required people to appear in person at the local sheriff’s office.

A study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the repeal, gun homicides rose within the state by 16 percent, while the national rate declined 11 percent. By contrast, it also found that Connecticut, which has maintained its 1995 background check law, registered a 40 percent drop in gun homicides across a decade.

The work of independent researchers suggests that there are many avenues of inquiry the government should be investigating more deeply.

One study estimated that gun violence annually costs $8.6 billion in direct expenses for emergency and medical care. Wyoming, the state with the highest rate of gun deaths, also has the highest per capita costs for gun violence — about $1,400 per resident per year, which is twice the national average. A new area for investigation is the fact that gun deaths have begun surpassing motor vehicle deaths in some states.

Private research is valuable, but in-depth federal studies are crucial for discovering the full patterns of crime and death fed by the relentless weakening of gun laws in recent decades. Even the original sponsor of Congress’s gag order on research now agrees. “I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time,” former Representative Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican, told The Huffington Post in October.

“I have regrets,” said Mr. Dickey, who now asks whether the advances made in auto safety could have been achieved on guns if political positions had not been so hardened. That’s an interesting question; it deserves to be asked of the Republicans running for president.