FED MINUTES CONFIRM: OFFICIALS STARTING TO DOUBT $85B PER MONTH PROGRAM

From TheBlaze.com

Feb. 21, 2013 11:16am Becket Adams

Chairman Ben Bernanke. (Getty Images).

WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — Several Federal Reserve policymakers suggested last month that the Fed might have to scale back its efforts to keep borrowing costs low for the foreseeable future.

Minutes of the Fed’s Jan. 29-30 policy meeting released Wednesday showed that some officials worried about the Fed’s plan to keep buying $85 billion in bonds each month until the job market has improved substantially. They expressed concern that the continued purchases could eventually escalate inflation, unsettle financial markets or cause the Fed to absorb losses once it begins selling its investments.

According to the minutes, some Fed officials thought an ongoing review of the bond purchases might lead the policy committee to slow or end its purchases “before it judged that a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market has occurred.”

In the end, the Fed voted 11-1 last month to keep its bond-buying program open-ended and at the same size.

So although policymakers expressed concern, it still wasn’t enough to sway votes.

The Fed said in a statement that the purchases would continue until the job market improved substantially. The bond purchases are intended to keep interest rates down to encourage borrowing and spending.

Still, the January minutes suggested that the discussion over the risks from the bond buying was more extensive than at the Fed’s December meeting. Minutes of the December meeting had also pointed to divisions among Fed officials over how long the purchases should continue. The debate within the Fed has fueled speculation that the bond purchases might be scaled back or ended altogether this year.

Stock prices fell after the release of the minutes. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down more than 100 points. Before the release of the minutes, the Dow had been down only about 25 points. The prospect of higher interest rates could hurt corporate profits and stock prices over time.

The minutes showed that “several participants” thought the Fed should be ready to vary the pace of its purchases as it adjusts its view of the economy or the benefits and costs of the purchases. The policymakers asked Fed staffers to provide a deeper analysis at upcoming meetings of the issues raised in the discussion.

Private economists seemed divided Wednesday over how to interpret the debate described in the Fed’s minutes.

Some pointed to the Fed’s lopsided 11-1 vote last month for the current level of bond purchases as a sign that Chairman Ben Bernanke commands a large majority for keeping the monthly purchases at $85 billion until the job market strengthens significantly.

Other analysts said the extensive discussion of the purchases at last month’s policy meeting signaled rising concern about the risks of continuing the bond-buying program.

Bernanke may provide more guidance when he gives the Fed’s twice-a-year economic report to Congress next week.

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Bob Woodward: Sequester Was Obama's Idea

From Real Clear Politics

Bob Woodward: Sequester Was Obama's Idea

CHRIS WALLACE, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY" HOST: Bob, as the man who literally wrote the book about the budget battle, put this to rest. Whose idea was the sequester, and did you ever think that we'd actually get to this point?

BOB WOODWARD: First, it was the White House. It was Obama and Jack Lew and Rob Nabors who went to the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and said, 'this is the solution.' But everyone has their fingerprints on this. (FOX News Sunday, February 17, 2013)

And From Politico From September 7, 2012

Bob Woodward book could bolster Republican attack on W.H.

 Bob Woodward's book delves into across-the-board cuts to the defense budget. | AP Photo

By AUSTIN WRIGHT | 9/7/12 5:00 AM EDT

A forthcoming book could give new ammunition to Republican hawks eager to blame the Obama administration for looming, across-the-board cuts to the defense budget.

The book “The Price of Politics,” by Washington Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward, makes it clear the idea for the draconian spending cuts originated in the White House – and not in Congress.

According to the book, excerpts of which were obtained by POLITICO ahead of the Sept. 11 release, President Barack Obama’s top deputies believed the prospect of massive defense cuts would compel Republicans to agree to a deficit-cutting grand bargain.

Then-OMB Director Jack Lew, now the White House chief of staff, and White House Legislative Affairs Director Rob Nabors pitched the idea to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Woodward writes. Under the deal, which Republicans accepted after several rounds of bargaining, the federal debt ceiling was raised — staving off a potential financial crisis.

Called sequestration, the automatic budget cuts would reduce federal spending by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, with half the savings taken from national security programs. Despite agreeing that sequestration is bad policy, since all accounts are reduced by an equal amount with no strategy, Republicans and Democrats have been unable to reach a deal to avert the cuts, which take effect Jan. 2.

Instead, the two sides have been locked in a vicious blame game.

“This book makes clear that the president put his own political interests ahead of our national security,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

“House Republicans have passed a plan to protect our troops by replacing the sequester with common-sense spending cuts and reforms,” Smith told POLITICO. “It’s long past time for the president to show some leadership and present a concrete plan to do the same.”

Democrats have also accused Republicans of being responsible for the looming cuts to military spending, which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said would have a “catastrophic” effect on national security. “It’d be like shooting ourselves in the head,” he has said.

The White House on Thursday declined a request for comment. But administration officials have acknowledged all along that sequestration was meant to be so terrible to prompt lawmakers to compromise and avoid it. Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the House Armed Services Committee last month it was intended as a “forcing function.”

And the excerpts from Woodward’s book may give only a portion of the story. At a House Budget Committee hearing in February, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the committee’s top Democrat, said Republicans could have opted for revenue increases instead of Pentagon cuts.

“In designing the sequester, the offer was made to our Republican colleagues to say, instead of having these particular defense cuts as part of sequester, we can get rid of a lot of special interest tax loopholes,” Van Hollen said. “They chose to put the defense cuts on the table.”

In his book, Woodward describes the behind-the-scenes haggling last year that laid the groundwork for sequestration.

Administration officials “had finally decided to propose using language from the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction law as the model for the trigger,” Woodward explains. “It would require a sequester with half the cuts from defense, and the other half from domestic programs. There would be no chance Republicans would want to pull the trigger and allow the sequester to force massive cuts to defense.”

More than a year later, Congress finds itself in almost exactly the same position: gridlocked, unable to work out a sensible solution to a looming crisis.

For his part, the president has placed the blame squarely on Congress.

“Sequestration is basically a bargain that Congress made with itself,” Obama said in an interview last month with an NBC TV affiliate in San Diego. “There is no reason why these additional military cuts should go through, as long as Congress does its job.”

Kate Brannen contributed to this report.

And From The Washington Post

Obama’s sequester deal-changer

By Bob Woodward, Friday, February 22, 4:59 PM

Bob Woodward (woodwardb@washpost.com) is an associate editor of The Post. His latest book is “The Price of Politics.” Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this column.

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?
The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”
A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.
At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”
In other words, yes.

But then Burr asked about the president’s statement during the presidential debate, that the Republicans originated it.

Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”

That statement was not accurate.

On Tuesday, Obama appeared at the White House with a group of police officers and firefighters to denounce the sequester as a “meat-cleaver approach” that would jeopardize military readiness and investments in education, energy and readiness. He also said it would cost jobs. But, the president said, the substitute would have to include new revenue through tax reform.

At noon that same day, White House press secretary Jay Carney shifted position and accepted sequester paternity.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”
This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

Read more from PostOpinions: Bob Woodward: Time for our leaders to delegate on the budget Robert J. Samuelson: The lowdown on Lew Jennifer Rubin: Jack Lew’s truth problem Eugene Robinson: The sequester madness

The Deadly Opposition to Genetically Modified Food

From Slate.com

Vitamin A deficiency has killed 8 million kids in the last 12 years. Help is finally on the way.

By Bjørn Lomborg|Posted Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013, at 7:30 AM

Plant biotechnologist Dr. Swapan Datta inspects a genetically modified "golden rice" plant at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines in 2003. After a long delay, the rice, rich in Vitamin A, will finally be grown in that country.

Photo by David Greedy/Getty Images.

Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?

Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10 percent at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of 5 each year.

Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”

The New York Times Magazine reported in 2001 that one would need to “eat 15 pounds of cooked golden rice a day” to get enough vitamin A. What was an exaggeration then is demonstrably wrong now. Two recent studies in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition show that just 50 grams (roughly two ounces) of golden rice can provide 60 percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A. They show that golden rice is even better than spinach in providing vitamin A to children.

Opponents maintain that there are better ways to deal with vitamin A deficiency. In its latest statement, Greenpeace says that golden rice is “neither needed nor necessary,” and calls instead for supplementation and fortification, which are described as “cost-effective.”

To be sure, handing out vitamin pills or adding vitamin A to staple products can make a difference. But it is not a sustainable solution to vitamin A deficiency. And, while it is cost-effective, recent published estimates indicate that golden rice is much more so.

Supplementation programs costs $4,300 for every life they save in India, whereas fortification programs cost about $2,700 for each life saved. Both are great deals. But golden rice would cost just $100 for every life saved from vitamin A deficiency.

Similarly, it is argued that golden rice will not be adopted, because most Asians eschew brown rice. But brown rice is substantially different in taste and spoils easily in hot climates. Moreover, many Asian dishes are already colored yellow with saffron, annatto, achiote, and turmeric. The people, not Greenpeace, should decide whether they will adopt vitamin A-rich rice for themselves and their children.

Most ironic is the self-fulfilling critique that many activists now use. Greenpeace calls golden rice a “failure,” because it “has been in development for almost 20 years and has still not made any impact on the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency.” But, as Ingo Potrykus, the scientist who developed golden rice, has made clear, that failure is due almost entirely to relentless opposition to GM foods—often by rich, well-meaning Westerners far removed from the risks of actual vitamin A deficiency.

Regulation of goods and services for public health clearly is a good idea; but it must always be balanced against potential costs—in this case, the cost of not providing more vitamin A to 8 million children during the past 12 years.

As an illustration, current regulations for GM foods, if applied to non-GM products, would ban the sale of potatoes and tomatoes, which can contain poisonous glycoalkaloids; celery, which contains carcinogenic psoralens; rhubarb and spinach (oxalic acid); and cassava, which feeds about 500 million people but contains toxic cyanogenic alkaloids. Foodstuffs like soy, wheat, milk, eggs, mollusks, crustaceans, fish, sesame, nuts, peanuts, and kiwi would likewise be banned, because they can cause food allergies.

Here it is worth noting that there have been no documented human health effects from GM foods. But many campaigners have claimed other effects. A common story, still repeated by Shiva, is that GM corn with Bt toxin kills Monarch butterflies. Several peer-reviewed studies, however, have effectively established that “the impact of Bt corn pollen from current commercial hybrids on monarch butterfly populations is negligible.”

Greenpeace and many others claim that GM foods merely enable big companies like Monsanto to wield near-monopoly power. But that puts the cart before the horse: The predominance of big companies partly reflects anti-GM activism, which has made the approval process so long and costly that only rich companies catering to First World farmers can afford to see it through.

Finally, it is often claimed that GM crops simply mean costlier seeds and less money for farmers. But farmers have a choice. More than 5 million cotton farmers in India have flocked to GM cotton, because it yields higher net incomes. Yes, the seeds are more expensive, but the rise in production offsets the additional cost.

Of course, no technology is without flaws, so regulatory oversight is useful. But it is worth maintaining some perspective. In 2010, the European Commission, after considering 25 years of GMO research, concluded that “there is, as of today, no scientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.”

Now, finally, golden rice will come to the Philippines; after that, it is expected in Bangladesh and Indonesia. But, for 8 million kids, the wait was too long.

True to form, Greenpeace is already protesting that “the next ‘golden rice’ guinea pigs might be Filipino children.” The 4.4 million Filipino kids with vitamin A deficiency might not mind so much.

This article was originally published by Project Syndicate. For more from Project Syndicate, visit their Web site and follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

From Politifact.com

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

"The sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed."

Barack Obama on Monday, October 22nd, 2012 in a presidential debate

Barack Obama says Congress owns sequestration cuts

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In their final debate before the election, President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney each said they would be the staunchest supporter of the military.

Said Romney: "I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making ... our future less certain and less secure."

Obama responded by saying Romney was assigning blame in the wrong place.

"First of all, the sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen," Obama said. "The budget that we are talking about is not reducing our military spending. It is maintaining it."

Was Obama right that he didn’t propose sequestration and that Congress did?

The story goes back to the debt limit debate of 2011, so let’s start there.
  
Looking for a budget deal in 2011
  
Last year, the United States government was reaching its legal debt limit, which meant Congress had to authorize a higher level for borrowing. Raising the debt limit (also called the debt ceiling) was in some ways symbolic: Congress has the power of the purse, and the decisions to spend the money had already been made.
  
In prior administrations, Congress approved higher debt limits with some partisan sniping (including from then-Sen. Obama against President George W. Bush) but without too much fuss.

But in the summer of 2011, House Republicans insisted that actual spending cuts go along with an increase to the debt limit. House Speaker John Boehner led negotiations with the Obama White House, and at first the two sides seemed to be moving toward a wide-ranging overhaul of the federal budget, referred to in the media as a "grand bargain."
  
The closed-door negotiations fell apart, though, and since then journalists have been sorting througha lot of finger-pointing. Some blame Boehner for being unable to deliver his own Republicans on a deal, thanks to tea party opposition to any new taxes. Others blame Obama for his inexperience, for not cultivating relationships with congressional Republicans and for tactical mistakes at negotiating. Some blame both sides.

At any rate, Republicans and Democrats came to a less ambitious agreement to raise the debt limit through the Budget Control Act of 2011. The law found approximately $1.2 trillion in budget cuts spread over 10 years. But it also directed Congress to find another $1.2 trillion through a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which came to be known as "the super-committee."
  
The super-committee was supposed to meet and agree on a deficit reduction package by Nov. 23, 2011. Their proposal -- which could include tax increases, spending reductions or both -- would then get a filibuster-proof, up-or-down vote in Congress.
  
As an incentive to the super-committee, the law included an unusual kind of budget threat: If the super-committee couldn’t agree on a package, or if Congress voted it down, then automatic, across-the-board cuts would go into effect, with half of those cuts hitting defense. These automatic cuts are referred to as "sequestration."

A story in USA Today referred to sequestration as "the trigger mechanism on a budget bomb."
  
Lo and behold, the super-committee didn’t agree on a deficit reduction package, so Congress never voted on it. Sequestration is now set to take effect with the 2013 budget.
  
Whose sequester?
  
In the debate, Obama said he didn’t propose sequestration, Congress did. (We asked the White House for comment, but didn't hear back.)

To determine the question of ownership, we turned to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book The Price of Politics.

Woodward’s reporting shows clearly that defense sequestration was an idea that came out of Obama’s White House. But the intention was to force Republicans to negotiate, not to actually put the cuts into effect.

Woodward summarizes the thoughts of the Obama team: "There would be no chance the Republicans would want to pull the trigger and allow the sequester to force massive cuts to Defense." Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t want to see their favorite domestic programs cut.
  
As the negotiations proceeded, Republicans seemed to think the same thing.
  
"Boehner told the House Republican leadership and other key members not to worry about the sequester … ‘Guys, this would be devastating to Defense,’ he said. ‘This would be devastating, from their perspective, on their domestic priorities. This is never going to happen,’" Woodward wrote.
  
Nonetheless, sequestration is now looming.

We recently  looked at a Romney campaign ad that blamed Obama for the sequester and talked to several experts about who is more responsible for the looming cuts -- Congress or the president. Some say that the Obama White House proposed sequestration, so that means Obama owns it.
  
"While both parties are culpable for sequestration because the Budget Control Act passed Congress, the president proposed it originally and ultimately owns its outcome," said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the Romney campaign. "That is because he alone can lead by calling the party leaders together for a resolution today if he wanted as president."
  
Other see the two parties as co-owners of sequestration, especially since Republicans in Congress voted for the law that set up its possibility. In the House, 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted for the law, while 66 Republicans and 95 Democrats opposed it. (Final tally: Passed 269-161.) In the Senate, 28 Republicans and 45 Democrats voted for it, while 19 Republicans and 6 Democrats opposed it. (Final tally: Passed 74-26)
  
"The logic that lays the blame for sequestration at Obama's feet, because he negotiated the BCA with GOP leaders in Congress, could just as easily apply to those other negotiators, or, indeed, any member of Congress who voted for the BCA in August 2011," said Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. Preble favors reductions to the defense budget.
  
"I do not believe it accurate to refer to the cuts that will occur in both defense and non-defense discretionary spending under sequestration as ‘Obama's cuts,’" he said.
  
Woodward, after Monday’s debate, reiterated what he said in his book -- and that Obama was off the mark in the debate.

"What the president said is not correct," Woodward told POLITICO. "He’s mistaken. And it’s refuted by the people who work for him."


Our ruling
  
Obama said that the sequester -- and the defense cuts that would result from it -- was not his proposition. "It is something that Congress has proposed," he said in the debate.

But it was Obama’s negotiating team that came up with the idea for defense cuts in 2011, though they were intended to prod Congress to come up with a better deal for reining in the deficit, not as an effort to make those cuts reality.
  
Meanwhile, members of both parties in Congress voted for the legislation that set up the possibility of sequestration. Obama’s position is that Congress should now act to avoid those across-the-board cuts.
  
Obama can’t rightly say the sequester isn’t his, but he did need cooperation from Congress to get to this point. We rate the statement Mostly False.

The gun toll we’re ignoring: suicide

Boston Globe

You wouldn’t know it from the national debate, but most American firearm deaths aren’t murder

By Leon Neyfakh

GUN VIOLENCE, when most Americans imagine it, is what happens when one person shoots another. We picture turf wars between gangs, abusive husbands turning on their wives, armed robbers punishing their victims, mass murderers opening fire on defenseless people. When we talk about how to reduce gun violence in America, what we overwhelmingly think about is preventing murder.

But murder is not the kind of gun violence that kills the most Americans.

SOURCE: CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION

Each gun represents 100 deaths by firearm in 2010.

In 2010, the last year for which complete numbers are available, the number of gun deaths by suicide in the United States outnumbered homicides 19,392 to 11,078. If you add up all American gun deaths that year, including accidents, 3 out of 5 people who died from gunshot wounds took their own lives. Those figures are not an anomaly: With just a few exceptions, the majority of gun deaths in the United States have been self-inflicted every year since at least 1920. This is a startling fact, and one that forces us to realize that, no matter what we may believe about the Second Amendment, the debate over how to reduce the death toll from guns is, to a great extent, a debate about suicide prevention.

“A lot of people, when they think about guns and violence—suicide is just kind of off the radar screen,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. Webster added: “People think about the gun problem as something that someone else is going to do to them.”

With President Obama’s call for tighter gun laws working its way through Washington, and a national debate over gun rights underway, public health researchers around the country are making the argument that the issue of suicide should be a much larger part of the discussion. To reduce gun deaths as they really happen, they say, will mean not just fighting crime or keeping firearms out of the hands of potential killers, but trying to minimize the number of people who have access to guns during their darkest hours.

At the heart of this argument is the idea that the vast majority of people who have committed suicide by shooting themselves would have stayed alive if they had not been easily able to pick up a gun. This can be a difficult premise to process. First, it goes against a common intuition about suicide: that someone who wants to end his or her life will find a way to do it by any means necessary. Second, it presents a destabilizing challenge to both sides of the gun control debate, which have traditionally drawn their emotional power from people’s fear of murder.

But if the reckoning our country has been engaged in since the Newtown tragedy is driven primarily by a desire to save lives, experts say, it’s time to recognize that in the majority of cases, the people doing the shooting are also the ones who are dying.

***

FOR CATHY BARBER, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, suicide became a priority in 1999, while she was engaged in a dark, emotionally draining task related to a research project on violent death. The project centered on a massive database tracking the circumstances under which people are killed, and Barber was reading through thumbnail summaries of violent deaths—thousands of them—that had taken place around the country.

At the time, her work focused on homicide and domestic abuse. But as she looked at the stories she and her team had collected, she realized that when it came to gun deaths, she was reading mostly about people who had taken their own lives. “The stories were so filled with despair and misery, but the seeds of hope were in them, too,” Barber said. “I kept thinking, ‘So many of these seem preventable.’”

Today Barber directs a suicide-prevention campaign at Harvard called Means Matter, intended to promote the notion that how people commit suicide is just as important as why—and that making it harder for suicidal people to get access to guns is a relatively simple way to save their lives.

The figures are stark. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, more people kill themselves with guns than with all other methods combined. One study found that in a group of adolescents in Pittsburgh who died by committing suicide, 72 percent lived in households with guns; among adolescents who attempted suicide but survived, that number was 37 percent. Another found that across the United States, people who committed suicide in a given year were 17 times as likely to have lived in homes with guns as people who did not. Another found that the 238,292 people in California who bought a gun in 1991 committed suicide at more than four times the rate of the general population.

At a summit on gun violence held at Johns Hopkins this past week, Harvard professor Matthew Miller presented a comparison of people living in “high-gun states,” where there are firearms in approximately 50 percent of homes, with those living in “low-gun states,” where that number is around 15 percent. Looking at these two groups of people side by side, Miller showed that they had similar rates of depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as similar rates of suicide that did not involve firearms, like hanging and poisoning. But the number of people who died by shooting themselves was almost four times greater in the high-gun states. In total, there were almost twice as many suicides among people living in high-gun states as there were in low-gun states.

Based on these and other similar studies, public health researchers have rallied around a striking conclusion: Merely having a gun in one’s home increases the likelihood that someone living there will commit suicide by a factor of two to ten, depending on age and how the gun is stored.

This is, on its face, a perplexing idea. It also has a few detractors, such as criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University, who has questioned the methods of public health researchers, and argued that they are not taking into account the possibility that gun-owners are more likely to commit suicide for reasons that have nothing to do with their access to guns. (“He’s just plain wrong about this,” said Miller in an e-mail. “In fact, we do know that gun owners and their families are not more suicidal, in general, than are non-gun-owners and their families.”)

In the public-health community, researchers have widely come to regard it as a basic truth that access to a gun makes it more likely that someone who wants to commit suicide actually manages to do so. A big part of the reason is simply the lethality of guns: Studies show that between 85 and 90 percent of people who shoot themselves die as a result, while the percentage of people who die using other means is vastly lower. Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, points out that guns, unlike other methods, leave people no time to change their minds. They also require less preparation and planning, provided they’re accessible.

“To some people, it’s just totally counterintuitive, because it’s so obvious that if you want to kill yourself, you can always find something else to kill yourself with,” said Barber. “What they assume is that once you’re suicidal, you remain suicidal.” But a preponderance of evidence, including interviews with suicide survivors, indicates that most suicidal acts come during a surprisingly short period during which the person is suffering an acute crisis.

“When you ask people who’ve made attempts and survived,” Miller said, “even attempts that are life threatening and would have proved lethal [without emergency medical care], what they say is, ‘It was an impulsive act, and I’m glad that I’m alive.’”

The central insight for public health researchers is that a lot of lives could be saved simply by making sure that people don’t have access to an extremely lethal weapon during that high-risk period. One striking illustration of this principle can be seen in the experience of the Israeli Defense Forces, which saw a 40 percent drop in suicides after a new rule was introduced forbidding soldiers from taking their guns home with them over the weekend. Though some soldiers may have tried to kill themselves using some less lethal method instead, it appears that scores of lives were saved.

***

IN THE MONTHS since the shootings in Newtown and Aurora, Colo., the debate over how to reduce gun violence in the United States has centered on improving background checks and imposing restrictions against assault weapons. But public health researchers focused on suicide prevention tend to take a different tack. “I don’t work on gun control issues,” said Cathy Barber. “It’s fine with me that other people do....But a third or more of people in the United States have a gun at home, and they’re valuable to them, and it doesn’t seem useful to me to ostracize them for their decisions....It just seems more useful to say, ‘OK, that’s what we’re dealing with.’”

One thing that reduces the likelihood that people will impulsively shoot themselves, public health researchers have found, is mandatory gun locks and proper gun storage, which increase the amount of time that passes after a person decides to commit suicide and actually has a loaded gun in hand. “Every minute you can delay them increases the chance that they might survive,” said David Litts, the executive secretary of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention.

Another avenue that’s been identified is what’s known among public health researchers as the social norms approach. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and author of “Private Guns, Public Health,” sees a parallel in the successful antidrunk-driving campaigns of the 1980s and ’90s (“Friends don’t let friends drive drunk”). Lives could be saved, he believes, if it was considered socially acceptable, when a friend or family member is dealing with some serious stress in life—like job loss or divorce—to ask them to get rid of their guns temporarily.

Working with a group called the New Hampshire Firearm Safety Coalition, researchers at Harvard have started trying to promote this kind of thinking by convincing owners of gun shops in New Hampshire to distribute materials asking customers to be attentive to signs of emotional distress among their fellow gun owners, and to consider taking their guns away when they’re having a particularly hard time. “It’s a caring message—it’s not an antigun message,” said Barber. “What I’m hoping is it lights a spark—what I’d love to see is five years from now...the 11th commandment of firearm safety is, ‘If a loved one is at risk for suicide, keep firearms away from them.’”

Does such a campaign have a place in the current debate over how to stop gun violence? According to Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a group that promotes stricter gun control laws, it should, but doesn’t—and that on more than one occasion he has heard people say that when it comes to tallying gun deaths, “suicides don’t count.”

“It’s remarkable how many people discount suicide, as if there’s nothing that can be done about it,” said John Rosenthal, the Boston developer behind the group Stop Handgun Violence, which funds the antigun billboard on the Mass. Pike. He cited one study suggesting that the vast majority of firearm suicides among youth are committed with guns owned by a family member. “Talk about low-hanging fruit.”

But for most people, the possibility that someone they love or they themselves will die by suicide feels much more remote, and less urgent, than the risk of getting shot by an armed robber or a mass murderer like Adam Lanza. As Garen Wintemute, a public health researcher specializing in firearm violence at University of California-Davis, said, “The debate is focused around the threats that people see to themselves, and that only makes sense.”

Yet it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, even though large-scale atrocities like Newtown are the ones that force us to confront gun violence as a nation, the opportunity to save lives may be greatest in the steady drip of private tragedies that take place every day—one by one, and out of the public eye.

“The whole point is you’ve got innocent people getting killed either way,” said Berman. “These are people who could be helped.”