Two events, both of which occurred Friday, illustrate our bipolar nature as a society when it comes to keeping people safe and healthy.

While we’re willing to fund research on preventing rare diseases in humans, such as rabies, we have failed to fund similar preventative research on a much more prevalent public safety issue: gun safety. 

We believe both problems should be considered as public health issues, and prevention efforts should take aim from similar points of view.

Wyoming’s first-ever recorded case of rabies was reported on Friday. 

According to the Wyoming Department of Health, the unidentified female patient, from Fremont County, may have been bitten by a bat with the dreaded, deadly disease. 

These days, only one or two human rabies cases occur each year in the United States, thanks to preventative vaccination of pets, and to the availability of vaccinations for humans who are bitten by animals suspected of having the disease. 

Unfortunately for those few who do contract the disease, rabies encephalitis still is 100 percent fatal. 

Also on Friday, nine people were killed in a tragic school shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. 

Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times describes this and similar shootings as a growing public health threat. 

He notes that, between 1973 and 2012, the National Institutes of Health awarded 89 grants for the study of rabies — which, as noted above, claims one or two human lives in the United States each year. During that same time period, the NIH provided 212 grants to study cholera, but only three grants for studying the prevention of firearms injuries. 

That needs to change.

As Kristof put it, “We’ve mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief.”

Friday’s shooter, who killed himself during a gun battle with police, was described in a Los Angeles Times story as a 26-year-old man who had white supremacist leanings, was filled with hate and had struggled with mental health issues since he was a teenager.

It seems impossible to understand why people who are hurting would seek to cure or avenge that hurt by taking out their rage on innocent students and teachers whose only sin is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims who, in this case, ranged from traditional first- or second-year college students to parents who had returned to the classroom as nontraditional students. 

Kristof proposes “an evidence-based public health approach” to reducing these and other shootings — “the same model we use to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from swimming pools to cigarettes.”

“We don’t ban cars,” he added, “but we do require driver’s licenses, seatbelts, airbags, padded dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. And we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate by 95 percent.”

Kristof’s summary of the scope of the gun problem is nothing short of alarming: Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns — in suicides, murders and accidents — than the total number of deaths in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.

There have been fewer than 1.4 million war deaths since 1775, Kristof said, while 1.45 million people have been shot to death in suicides, murders and accidents. Of those, more preschoolers are shot dead every year than the number of police officers shot in the line of duty.  

It is worth noting that in the United States, there are 5.22 homicides per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems. The global average is 9.63 homicides per 100,000. Although we are doing better than most countries in the world on homicide rates, even one is one too many.

A poll this year showed that a majority, including gun owners, favor universal background checks for people purchasing guns; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses, Kristof said. 

He said public health experts advocate “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that can be fired only with a PIN or a fingerprint, and microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun.

While it’s not clear whether these and other steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting, Kristof cites Daniel Webster, a public health expert at John Hopkins University, who says they could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent. 

Kristof argues that suicides — which make up 60 percent of the annual death toll from gunshots — can be reduced by making guns safer as well. He cited a reduction of suicides in Great Britain when ovens were made safer, so it was more difficult for people to kill themselves by breathing in fumes from their ovens.  

In Kristof’s column, Webster pointed to another problem: A lack of willingness in Washington, D.C., to make smart changes that can save lives rather than calling for a ban on guns, which only empowers the gun lobby. 

“The gun lobby argues that the problem isn’t firearms; it’s crazy people,” Kristof wrote. “Yes, America’s mental health system is a disgrace. But to me, it seems that we’re all crazy if we as a country can’t take modest steps to reduce the carnage that leaves America resembling a battlefield.”

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday the arrest of four teenagers who allegedly had planned a mass shooting at their high school in northern California. 

We’re thankful that another possible tragedy was averted. But we agree with Kristof — it’s time that we as a society look for more solutions and take more steps to put a stop to these increasingly familiar, but always tragic, crimes of violence.