They lost their lives in the epidemic of gun deaths. But they did not resemble the gunfire victims usually encountered in the news.
They were not poor. They did not live in the inner city. Their deaths had nothing to do with robbery or drugs.
Walter Layman, 27, a machinist, shot himself in January with a pistol belonging to the Kent County couple for whom he was housesitting. He was depressed over personal problems and was drinking heavily the night of his suicide.
John LaRue, 49, was cleaning his 9 mm handgun at the kitchen table of his Northeast Baltimore home last July when it fired accidentally, killing him. He had taken out the gun's magazine but apparently forgot the single round still in the chamber.
Sandra Peacock, 31, was killed last February after her husband returned to the couple's Parkton home and found her with another man, police say. Kenneth Peacock, a trucker who is awaiting trial on murder charges, is accused of using the .30-.30 caliber rifle he had purchased for his wife's protection.
Their deaths were among the hidden majority of American gun deaths that have no connection with street crime: suicides, which constitute nearly 60 percent of gun deaths; accidental shootings, about 5 percent of gun deaths; and one in every four homicides that are committed by relatives or lovers of the victim.
Such deaths have convinced a diverse group of researchers trained in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology and law that gun violence can best be combatted not narrowly as a crime problem, but more broadly as a public health issue.
Their ambitious goal is, in effect, to wreck America's romance with guns by replacing folklore with hard data showing that a gun in the home generally makes a family less safe, not more safe. Public health advocates are taking on the firearms industry, as their colleagues three decades ago took on another seemingly omnipotent foe, the tobacco industry.
Ultimately, the public health experts hope to have the kind of impact on gun injury that similar public health campaigns have had not only on cigarette smoking, but on auto safety and environmental pollution as well.
Such publications as the American Journal of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine have staked out gun injury as their territory. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention routinely collect data on gun deaths. The Clinton administration has highlighted the medical costs of gun injuries during its health-reform drive. The Joyce Foundation of Chicago has launched a major project explicitly aimed at redefining guns as a public health issue.
This turning point, Mr. Teret says, reflects a shift in public opinion about guns. "There comes a moment when people just say, 'I've had enough. Something has to be done,' " he says. "I think we've reached that point with guns."
Cigarettes and guns
For Mr. Teret himself, that point came long ago. In 1983, a friend's 22-month-old son was shot to death by his baby sitter's 4-year-old son using a handgun kept in the house for protection. The tragedy dramatized the problem for him.
Mr. Teret, 47, who holds degrees in law and public health, says his goal is in part to redirect public attention from the user of the gun to the maker of the gun.
"Our public policies focus only on the person who pulls the trigger and not the person who makes the trigger," he says. "If you really want to have an impact on gun injuries, you have to look at the manufacturing and marketing of guns. You need to regulate guns as consumer products."
That may seem not such a radical idea -- except that guns were explicitly exempted from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission when it was created in 1972. The commission has the right to regulate the safety of toy guns, but not real ones.
As Mr. Teret focuses on gun manufacturers, Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann, director of the Center for Injury Control at Emory University and another key figure in the movement, follows guns into the home.
"For years, people have been bombarded with the idea that if you have a gun, you're safer," Dr. Kellermann says. "Our research shows that's not the case."
In landmark studies of gun deaths in Washington state, British Columbia, Tennessee and Ohio, he and his colleagues conclude that guns kept at home are used far more often to commit suicide or to kill a family member in a fit of rage than to fend off a potentially fatal criminal attack.
With Americans buying handguns in record numbers, Dr. Kellermann urges that they base their decision on real evidence. "Let it be an informed decision, rather than one driven by bumper stickers and cocktail conversation," he says.
Dr. Kellermann, 39, says the gun issue is today where the tobacco issue was three decades ago, when the U.S. surgeon general first linked smoking and disease.
In a country with nearly as many guns as people, preaching the hazards of guns may seem fruitless. But, Dr. Kellermann says, "Cigarettes have demonstrated that Americans will change their behavior if they're given good information."
One measure of the public health experts' progress may be the reaction from the gun industry and its boosters in the National Rifle Association. NRA members, including physicians, regularly attack research on gun hazards by Dr. Kellermann and others. They often cite the work of Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, who says that Americans use guns 2.4 million times a year to defend themselves against crime. (Other reseachers put the figure at closer to 80,000 times a year.)
"My idea of guns as a public health issue is if more of the good guys had guns, fewer of the bad guys would be shooting people," says Massad Ayoob, a prominent gun writer who heads the Lethal Force Institute in Concord, N.H.
'Twitch your finger'
To get a full picture of gunshot deaths, one must look not at police reports -- the source of nearly all media coverage of guns -- but at the records of the Maryland medical examiner. They show that gun suicides far outnumber gun homicides in every Maryland jurisdiction except Baltimore City and Prince George's County, as they do in the United States as a whole. And, while seven of 10 Maryland homicide victims are black, eight of 10 suicide victims are white.
As long ago as 1949 and 1950, the medical examiner's annual report complained of "the easy availability of guns to homicidally inclined individuals," called gun suicide "the most common of all types" and called for "legislative or other means of decreasing the promiscuous use of firearms."
But the gun supply grew. If more armed good citizens means a safer society, as the NRA argues, it is not apparent from Maryland's experience. The number of gun homicides in Maryland more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1990, and the proportion of all homicides that were committed with firearms rose from 55 percent to 76 percent. Gun suicides nearly tripled over the same period -- far outpacing population growth -- and increased from 42 percent to 59 percent of all suicides.
Gun enthusiasts often note that a furious husband can strangle or stab his wife if he has no gun, so gun availability has little influence on domestic homicide.
Mr. Teret disagrees. "What distinguishes a gun is the disparity between the action and the consequences," he says. "We say to someone who's suffering rage, suffering all kinds of social ills, 'You twitch your finger and someone's dead.' "
Similarly, Dr. John E. Smialek, the state medical examiner, says guns do increase the number of suicides, especially because many people considering suicide become intoxicated on alcohol drugs.
"The availability of a handgun can make the difference between whether a person recovers from an intoxicated state and looks for another way out of his problems, or whether he reaches for a gun and shoots himself," Dr. Smialek says. "In many cases, suicide is an impulsive act."
Especially with teen-agers and preteens, suicide can result from trivial disappointments or fears. John Tolzman was 12 in 1985, when his best friend, a sixth-grade classmate at Ruxton Country School, became angry with him for telling a girl the friend liked her. John dwelt on the quarrel over a weekend; on Monday, he used his father's .38-caliber revolver to shoot himself.
"We didn't think our son knew about the gun," says Lee Tolzman, John's mother. It was stored unloaded, with the ammunition elsewhere. "But I think children have a natural snooping ability," she says.
That their sixth-grader could be suicidal never occurred to the Tolzmans. "He was a kid who seemed he could handle anything," says Mrs. Tolzman, who has heard many such stories at meetings of Seasons, a support group for survivors of suicide victims.
She has heard a gun enthusiast argue that for safety's sake, he taught his son to use and respect guns at an early age. She was skeptical: "All I could think of to tell that father was, 'I hope your son never gets depressed.' "
Years later, Mrs. Tolzman can speak about her son's suicide. Similar cases abound, but many parents feel unable to talk about their tragedy.
That is the case with the parents of a 17-year-old Harford County youth who, on an icy February day, borrowed his parents' car without their permission. Despite being grounded, he drove to visit a girlfriend, confident he could get the car back before his parents came home from work. But on his return, the car got stuck on the icy driveway.
Knowing his parents would learn he had disobeyed, he took the family's .22-caliber rifle into the bathroom and shot himself. He left no note, the medical examiner's report noted. "It appeared as if the incident were a spur of the moment thing," it said.
'The long term'
If a parent's gun could be fired only by the parent, many teen age suicides might be prevented. Nor could a "personalized" or "proprietary" gun be used by a child to shoot a sibling, or by a burglar to turn against its owner, or by a thief who stole it to commit subsequent violent crimes. On police guns, such a device might prevent 20 percent of all murders of law enforcement officers -- the proportion the FBI says are committed with the officer's own gun.
It is the kind of technical fix that public health experts such as Mr. Teret would like to see the gun industry spurred to make. But it is one that also interests many shooters, including Massad Ayoob, the gun writer and opponent of gun control.
Under no regulatory pressure to make guns safer, manufacturers have not bothered to work on the problem. Yet a Southern California inventor named Joe Smith came up with such a design in the early 1970s, after hearing of two state troopers murdered by a criminal who grabbed one of the trooper's guns.
He patented the Magna-Trigger, a converted Smith & Wesson revolver that could be fired only when the user wore a special finger-ring fitted with a powerful magnet.
Mr. Ayoob carried a Magna-Trigger revolver as a New Hampshire police officer from 1980 to 1985. "That was when my two daughters were rug rats," he says, and he feared for their safety.
In 1987, a suitcase containing two of his guns was stolen from the Delta terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. One, a Magna-Trigger, was recovered last year in a crack raid in Manhattan. "I didn't worry about that one, because I knew it couldn't be fired," he says.
With meager resources, Joe Smith made about 1,000 Magna-Trigger revolvers and took out two advertisements for his invention in police journals. The Medina, Ohio, department adopted it as their service revolver, and a few other departments permitted officers to buy it. Mr. Smith died a few years ago without persuading any manufacturer to produce his device, Mr. Ayoob says.
It is a sign of the primitive state of gun-safety research and the gap between public health experts and the gun industry that Johns Hopkins researchers, who are very interested in the idea of a "proprietary" gun, were unaware of Mr. Smith's device. But last year they proposed the problem to the design course taken by all senior engineering majors at Hopkins.
Three students took on the challenge. They managed to produce a working model of a proprietary gun, using their own, microchip-based ring technology.
"When we began we honestly didn't know what we'd discover," says Andrew F. Conn, a consulting engineer who teaches the Hopkins senior design course. "We were very pleased."
Mr. Teret says the example of auto safety, on which he worked for years, suggests that the government could successfully force gun manufacturers to produce proprietary guns.
"People used to think I was a Communist when I talked about air bags in cars 10 years ago," he says. At that time, a prototype air bag cost $20,000. Carmakers did not want to make them.
Today the production cost has dropped to about $200, and manufacturers spend millions on ads boasting of their air bags.
In public health, Mr. Teret says, researchers learn not to count on remedying human weakness. To discourage drunken driving, he says, you can and should put up billboards warning of the dangers. But median barriers can prevent many head-on collisions, and air bags can save many of those who end up in crashes anyway.
"I wish we could prevent rage and anger, the decay of the family, racism, unemployment, alcoholism and drug use," Mr. Teret says. "But those are all tough nuts to crack. Even though we can't prevent all of that, we can make it less possible to injure someone with a gun."
Unlike most advocates on both sides of the gun issue, public health specialists are accustomed to measuring progress in decades, not months.
"In public health, we're used to thinking about the long term," Mr. Teret says. "I don't think the line on the graph of gun injury is going to drop precipitously overnight. But if the line turns down 50 years from now because of something we do now, we will have been successful."