Wintemute took a particular interest in Saturday-night specials, favorite "starter" guns because of their low price (as little as $25), easy availability and compact size. He found that their chief makers--the companies mentioned in Ring of Fire--did not exist until after 1968, when Congress, reacting to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, banned handgun imports but did not prohibit domestic manufacture. The study showed that the guns were dangerous not just to people who found themselves looking down their barrels but also to their owners. The guns often misfired, were inaccurate and, lacking safety devices, easily went off when dropped. This contradicted the makers' portrayal of them as sturdy weapons of self-defense for law-abiding folks who could not afford high-ticket Colts, Rugers or Smith & Wessons.

Wintemute and his colleagues provided a clear statistical link between Saturday-night specials and youthful crime. Their 1996 study showed that even teenage buyers of these guns with no criminal record were more likely than purchasers of more expensive handguns to commit violent crimes with them.

This was not what gun enthusiasts wanted to hear. "Dr. Feel-Good of the gun-ban crowd," one of them labeled Wintemute. Under pressure from the gun lobby, federal funding for gun studies has been slashed. But Wintemute insists he is not on an antigun vendetta. Rather, he wants to get at the roots of firearms violence: why it has climbed to the highest levels of the century, why so many children are shooting children, whether easy access to guns is in itself a stimulus to violence. If that means putting heat on manufacturers and dealers, so be it.

He also favors tighter controls on who should be allowed to buy guns, holding that selective denial of purchase and possession can reduce the risk of criminal activity by 20% to 30%. Still, he does not want his program to be adversarial. "We consider ourselves researchers, not advocates," he insists, moving away from the more strident position reflected in Ring of Fire. "We want to help policymakers make informed and effective decisions on ways of reducing rates of firearms violence without impinging significantly on the legitimate role of firearms in our society."

Encouraged by his studies so far, he hopes to widen their scope by examining other types of violence, such as child beating and spousal abuse. That, of course, would mean trimming his cherished time in the emergency room. But there would also be a major benefit: it would let Wintemute minister more broadly to the ills of a nation racked by violence of all kinds.