The gun homicide rate in Missouri was 16 percent higher in the six years since 2007, when the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, than it had been in the six years before. In the same period, the national rate fell 11 percent.

Federal death data released this month for 2014 showed a continuation of the trend, he said. Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher. (The new data also showed that the national death rate from guns was equal to that from motor vehicle crashes for the first time since the government began systematically tracking it.)

Let's play a word game, and substitute smoking in the article for every reference to guns. So that, we pretend, in Missouri, smoking was severely restricted until the legislature loosened those restrictions, and, since then, deaths caused by smoking have increased.

In fact, we know that when states enacted tough new restrictions on smoking (such as no smoking in public places, etc.) deaths from smoking declined because fewer people smoked and some who did quit.

Guns are like tobacco products in that they constitute a public health hazard. Your smoking is dangerous to my health. Your guns are dangerous to my life. We can control both, while still allowing some fools to persist in smoking and also allowing some fools to purchase AK-47s, as long as they pass a background check with teeth.

Until we recognize that an armed nation represents a public health threat, just as smoking was, this issue will never fade away.

Mr. Herring made the decision, his office said in a statement, after “months of research and evaluation,” including an audit of 30 states whose concealed-handgun permits have been considered valid in Virginia. All but five of them, he said, grant permits to people who would be barred from carrying concealed weapons in Virginia.

In Roanoke, Va., in August, a television journalist and a cameraman were killed while reporting on air. And the state bears the scars of the worst massacre by a single gunman in American history, the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech.

in Virginia, home to the National Rifle Association’s headquarters, the Republican-controlled legislature opposes restrictions on gun ownership. Virginia is an “open-carry” state; anyone who is 18 or older and legally permitted to carry a firearm may carry it in public, except where prohibited by other laws.