There is an interesting statistical illustration on the lives -- and deaths -- of the 11,419 gun fatalities in the United States in the year 2013. The premise is based on the estimated life span of a human in the U.S., so let's assume the possible life span at that time was 75 years, and a little three-year-old kid is offed by a gun. That's 72 "ghost years". A lot of little kids are offed by guns in the United States because we are so damned stupid about guns. That's a lot of "ghost years". The United States is the world leader in mounting up these huge numbers of "ghost years". We should be real proud, real proud.
Meanwhile, Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President and chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and various other NRA executives, have gone all hysterical on us because the nominee for the office of Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, sent out a single, seemingly innocuous, little tweet:
Guns are a health care issue.
This six-word message,
NRA executive director Chris Cox argued, is proof Murthy would “work to further a gun control agenda.”
Stuff about suicides by gun below the fold.
There seems to be a little tussle on gun fatality stats at this point. I don't think the opening stat illustration I used is dealing with gun suicides because:
According to the CDC, 19,392 people committed suicide with a gun in 2010, the latest year for which data are available. That same year, meanwhile, the FBI recorded only 230 justifiable homicides (the legal term) in which a private citizen used a firearm to kill a felon during the commission of a felony.
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people under 35, and the Harvard School of Public Health has found that "suicide rates among children, women and men of all ages are higher in states where more households have guns." More than six in 10 of the firearm deaths in the past decade were suicides, not homicides.
If there were over 19,000 suicides by gun in 2010, it just stands to reason that the number would be approximately the same or, most likely, larger in the year 2013.
I guess because I live in the stupid U.S. of A. we gotta create a whole new bunch of categories in relation to gun fatalities:
I. Dead because death was intended.
A. Death was intended for person B by the intended actions of person A.
(1) Person A had determined that person B was a bastard and deserved to die.
(2) Person B was trying to off person A and person A had to off person B to save
person A's life or to prevent the maiming of person A.
(3) Person A is an officer of the law and offed person B in the furtherance of law
and order.
(4) Bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of.
B. Death was intended because the dead individual wanted to die.
2. Dead because of stupidity, carelessness, negligence, etc.
To be quite honest, we have a sizeable number of people in the U.S. with murderous intentions, probably the same number statistically as in other nations but we have more, many, many more guns available to make murder real easy. Having many, many, many guns available also makes it very easy to be a gun fatality because of stupidity, carelessness, negligence, etc. -- also, as Sarah Palin would be apt to say.