The American way.

Byline: The Register-Guard

After Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gunned down 36 people in April 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide, many Americans thought the nation would not continue to tolerate a level of gun violence that claims 30,000 lives a year. That's roughly the populations of Cottage Grove, Florence, Oakridge Junction City, Creswell and Veneta - combined. Every year.

Eight years later almost to the day, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded many more at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University before committing suicide, making it the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. At that point, many Americans fervently believed the nation would not continue to tolerate a level of gun violence that, after motor vehicle deaths, produces the second-leading cause of death among all teenagers. Every year.

Eight months later, a troubled teenager took an SKS semi-automatic rifle to Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb., shot eight shoppers to death and seriously wounded five others before killing himself. The story didn't even make the front page of The Register-Guard. Neither did the Colorado incident the following Sunday in which four more people were shot dead at two Colorado churches.

It's probably safe to say many people no longer believe there is a limit to the level of tolerable gun violence. It's just the American way.

Firearms are the second-leading cause of traumatic death related to a consumer product in the United States. Since 1960, more than a million Americans have died in firearm suicides, homicides and unintentional injuries.

In 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, 29,569 Americans died by gunfire: 16,750 in firearm suicides, 11,935 in firearm homicides, 649 in unintentional shootings and 235 in firearm deaths of unknown intent, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. At least twice as many people are injured by guns each year, but they survive after being treated in hospital emergency rooms.

The carnage carries a high price tag. Government studies show direct medical costs for gunshot wounds total more than $6 million a day. Nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading source of uninsured hospital stays in the United States, with an estimated half of such costs borne directly by the public, according to the Violence Policy Center.

Take a closer look at those 2004 statistics. The majority of the gun deaths - 57 percent - were suicides. Give depressed people easy access to "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" and the toll becomes staggering in short order.

Even the homicides are not what the gun lobby would have you believe. Most of the dead haven't been killed by criminals who could have been stopped if a properly armed citizen with a steady hand had been on the scene. Less than 8 percent of all gun deaths are felony related. The vast majority are the result of arguments between people who know one another, often when one or both have had too much to drink.

The United States is believed to contain half of all privately owned guns in the world. The owners of those guns and their political operatives in the National Rifle Association appear to have most politicians frightened to death of supporting even the most logical and obvious public safety laws concerning gun ownership. There is no reason to believe that anything is about to change.

What that means is that at current rates of gun injury and death, a Columbine massacre occurs every four days for America's children.

It's the American way.