MARQUETTE – Living with the very real and deadly threat of gun violence against ourselves and those we love has become an American norm.

A study by scholars at the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University shows mass shootings in the U.S. have tripled between 2011 and 2014.

But the growing death toll and its accompanying terror are, evidently, a completely acceptable price to pay for upholding the entrenched belief that all Americans deserve the right to bear arms.

Don’t take my sarcasm the wrong way. I respect gun ownership, hunting, self-determination, safe recreation and so-on. But I also support a middle way.

There are countless myths propagated within gun culture that to anyone outside the U.S. sound crazy. The idea that the solution to gun violence is more guns for instance, no matter who is carrying them, is a spectacular statistical untruth.

Researchers looked at gun ownership and homicide rates from 1981 to 2010 across all 50 states, and found that for each standard increase in gun ownership, states? firearm homicide rate involving shooters known to the victim increased by 21.1 percent.

Statistically, the likeliest person a handgun will kill is its owner – or worse, the owner’s young children. Yet to gun advocates, fear of an unlikely break-in is a compelling reason to keep one in the bedside table.

Not to be glib about the trauma of home invasion, but an encompassing cost-benefit analysis would probably reveal a phone or a security system is your better bet when it comes to protection.

But we don’t know for sure. There are a lot of things about gun violence that remain a mystery, though we don’t have to wonder why research is so lacking: money and politics. What’s new?

Congress’s first act, following the brutal massacre of nine individuals in a church as they worshipped, was to block legislation allowing the Center for Disease Control to do research into the causes of gun violence. Since when is mere information a threat to constitutional rights?

Meanwhile, the fact that revenue from gun sales surge with each new mass shooting while gun lobbyists spend millions annually to keep laws permissive raises no ethical questions among opponents of gun reform. And even though the only ones profiting off these shootings are gun companies, people still conspira-theorize the big, bad government is behind them.

Some people seem to believe that the only thing preventing the government – with its militarized police, unmanned drones, tanks, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the most obscenely expensive military in the world – from turning against them is a personal arsenal of semi-automatic weapons.

Did you know that Australia, despite a powerful gun lobby and strong conservative leadership, passed legislation that completely eliminated mass shootings and slashed firearm homicides and suicides by more than half in 1996? They took the most dangerous guns away, and it worked. Meanwhile, hunting and sportsmanship in Australia is alive and well.

Among developed nations, the gun problem we face is unique to the United States. Here, politicians are bought and sold to the highest bidder, and people are manipulated by a monolithic corporate media that is bought and sold just the same.

Since the writers of the second amendment had muskets in mind in a completely different world than the one in which we are living, I wonder what they would have to say about the current state of affairs. Most mass gunmen bought their guns legally. Is it really fair to assume our founders meant that the right to bear arms should extend to semi-automatic death machines for maniacs? Or that there shouldn’t be measures in place to protect innocent school children and worshippers in a church?

There is one proven way to reduce gun violence and that’s reducing guns. There must be a more reasonable limitation on who can buy them.

The gun lobby will never stop fighting for gun profits, nor will they stop shameless efforts to keep the public uninformed.

So let’s as a populace demand a higher-quality discussion. I’m not saying the solution will be easy or fool-proof. But right now, the only efforts being made are to stop research that might shed light on our options. Are we so averse to compromise that a discussion about what causes gun violence is off the table?

It speaks a great deal about the state of this country that guns can destroy more than 30,000 lives per year, and still, an honest conversation about it is some sort of shocking affront.

Grow up, America. Let’s talk about a compromise. I can’t handle any more innocent blood spilled for no reason, while nothing is done to stop it.

Editor’s note: Mary Wardell can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248.