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"Those are the key findings of a new study by researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Duke University. "Anger," in this study, doesn't simply mean garden-variety irritation. It is "impulsive, out of control, destructive, harmful," lead author Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University said in an interview.

"You and I might shout. These individuals break and smash things and get into physical fights, punch someone in the nose."

"To have gun violence you need two things: a gun and a dangerous person," Swanson says. "We can't broadly limit legal access to guns, so we have to focus on the dangerous people."

Startling statistics

Taken at face value this isn't a controversial claim. After all, guns don't kill people, people kill people, as gun rights advocates are fond of saying. But in practice we haven't done a great job of identifying these dangerous people.

In addition to the startling findings about the share of the overall population with both gun access and serious anger issues, the researchers also found that people with lots of guns - six or more - are more likely to carry their guns in public and to have a history of anger issues. And people with more than 11 were significantly more likely to say that they lose their temper and get into fights than members of any other gun ownership group.

One step further

Federal law already limits gun access for individuals convicted of a felony, and for people with misdemeanor domestic violence convictions.

Swanson and his colleagues suggest taking that one step further and placing additional misdemeanors on the restriction list: assault, brandishing a weapon or making open threats, and especially DUI, given the well-documented nexus between problematic alcohol use and gun violence.

Swanson's research suggests it's time to move the conversation past the low-hanging fruit of serious mental illness, and start asking which other types of behavior might reasonably disqualify a person from owning a gun"