A dozen years ago, public health professor Stephen P. Teret was called a communist for saying that cars should have air bags.
Now, cars have air bags - and auto makers, who once battled the safety feature as too costly, brag about them in advertising.
These days Teret and others are pushing another radical idea: Instead of concentrating on gun control, try regulating firearms, just like teddy bears, or aspirin, or any other consumer product.
As researchers predict that, by the year 2003, the gun will overtake the car as America's most deadly consumer product, the proposal - part of a movement to treat violence as a public health issue - is gaining attention. If the gun were treated as a consumer product, that is, as a plain tool - instead of as a symbol of crime or an inalienable right - then the country could break free of what has become an ineffectual, emotional debate over gun control, Teret and others argue.
"Why have we been fooled so long by looking at the person who pulls the trigger and not the person who makes the trigger?" asked Teret, who heads the public health division in the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore.
If gun makers were treated like car makers, or like the makers of pesticides or teddy bears, they might be required to:
* Childproof the product.
* Install safety features, such as an indicator that would show at a glance whether the weapon was loaded.
* "Personalize" the product, so it could be fired only by the authorized user. A combination lock would be a low-tech way. At the high-tech end, a palm-print activation design has been suggested.
* Stop making a particular firearm if its risks were found to outweigh its benefits.
* Adhere to truth-in-advertising rules.
Furthermore, if a gun were seen as a dangerous machine, its user could be required to:
* Pass a safety course.
* Be licensed to use it.
* Register it.
* Store it out of children's reach.
Also, firearms merchants - as dealers in a dangerous consumer product - would face tougher regulation than they now do. And buyers likely would have to undergo more rigorous background checks and waiting periods, as well as face a limit on the number of guns they could buy in, say, a month.
