To the best of my ability I write about my experience of the Universe Past, Present and Future
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Since '68: more Americans died from U.S. gun violence than in all U.S. wars
I'm sharing this because likely the facts herein are incontrovertible. However, I still believe that the best course would be to have better background checks for people who buy guns nationwide. There will always be illegal arms dealers in every country on earth for criminals to buy weapons from. So, when we enact gun laws they are only going to affect the people who believe in following the laws anyway. Taking all guns away from people will only bring a world wide dictatorship in the end. History has proven this over and over again. Just look at Hitler and the Jewish people in WWII. People think this type of thing could never happen here. Maybe not to Jewish people but it could happen to the rest of us if we cannot defend ourselves and our democracy from everyone both from within and from outside of the U.S.
Aug 25, 2015 · The slaying of two journalists Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it ...
The slaying of two journalists
Wednesday as they broadcast live to a television audience in Virginia
is still seared on our screens and our minds, but it’s a moment not only
to mourn but also to learn lessons.
The
horror isn’t just one macabre double-murder, but the unrelenting toll
of gun violence that claims one life every 16 minutes on average in the
United States. Three quick data points:
■
More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than
have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
■ More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.
■
American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children
in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard
professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety.
Bryce
Williams, as the Virginia killer was known to viewers when he worked as
a broadcaster, apparently obtained the gun used to murder his former
co-workers Alison Parker and Adam Ward in response to the June massacre
in a South Carolina church — an example of how gun violence begets gun
violence. Williams may have been mentally disturbed, given that he
videotaped Wednesday’s killings and then posted them on Facebook.
“I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!,” Williams reportedly wrote in a lengthy fax sent to ABC News after the killings.
Whether
or not Williams was insane, our policies on guns are demented — not
least in that we don’t even have universal background checks to keep
weapons out of the hands of people waiting to go boom.
The
lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern
prohibition (that would raise constitutional issues and be impossible
politically), but that we should address gun deaths as a public health
crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds,
ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as
we regulate toys?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has seven pages of regulations concerning ladders, which are involved in 300 deaths in
America annually. Yet the federal government doesn’t make what I would
call a serious effort to regulate guns, which are involved in the deaths
of more than 33,000 people in America annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (that includes suicides, murders and accidents).
Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but we don’t try to ban them!
Cars
are actually the best example of the public health approach that we
should apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken
steps to make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited
licenses for teenage drivers, cracked down on drunken driving and
established roundabouts and better crosswalks, auto safety inspections
and rules about texting while driving.
This approach has been stunningly successful. By my calculations,
if we had the same auto fatality rate as in 1921, we would have 715,000
Americans dying annually from cars. We have reduced the fatality rate
by more than 95 percent.
Yet
in the case of firearms, the gun lobby (enabled by craven politicians)
has for years tried to block even research on how to reduce gun deaths.
The gun industry made a childproof gun back in the 19th century but today has ferociously resisted “smart guns.” If someone steals an iPhone, it requires a PIN; guns don’t.
We’re
not going to eliminate gun deaths in America. But a serious effort
might reduce gun deaths by, say, one-third, and that would be 11,000
lives saved a year.
The
United States is an outlier, both in our lack of serious policies
toward guns and in our mortality rates. Professor Hemenway calculates
that the U.S. firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next
country in the rich world on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than
that of South Korea.
We
need universal background checks with more rigorous screening, limits
on gun purchases to one a month to reduce trafficking, safe storage
requirements, serial number markings that are more difficult to
obliterate, waiting periods to buy a handgun — and more research on what
steps would actually save lives. If the federal government won’t act,
states should lead.
Australia
is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united
behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy
notes that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over
the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.
Here
in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to
reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily.
Surely we can regulate guns as seriously as we do cars, ladders and
swimming pools.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 27, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning From 2 Murders. Today's Paper|Subscribe
No comments:
Post a Comment