from just some of my reading today.
From Sen. Chris Murphy's op ed in today’s Washington Post:
In my states of Connecticut, which has expanded background checks and requires issued handgun permits, gun crimes have dropped by 40 percent.
and also this:
In 2016, four states had gun-law referendums on their ballot, three passed. The winners of three top U.S. Senate races — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Nevada — all won with the support of advocates in the anti-gun-violence movement. (Two Democrats and one Republican, by the way). The gun lobby is certainly politically powerful, but it loses as many races as it wins.
(to which I add from memory that we have had a year where the NRA lost all or just about all of the Congressional/Senate races it entered — that might have been 2006 when the Dems ran the table to take control of both chambers of Congress).
And from a New York Times column by NicK Kristof:
first this:
When Australia suffered a mass shooting in 1996, the country united behind tougher laws on firearms. As a result, the gun homicide rate was almost halved, and the gun suicide rate dropped by half, according to the Journal of Public Health Policy.
then this:
. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway of Harvard.
and finally this:
But in every other sphere, we at least use safety regulations to try — however imperfectly — to reduce death and injury.
For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has seven pages of rules about ladders, which kill 300 people a year. Yet the federal government doesn’t make a serious effort to reduce gun deaths, with a toll more than 100 times as high.
The best example of intelligent regulation is auto safety. By my calculations,we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by more than 95 percent since 1921. There was no single solution but rather many incremental efforts: seatbelts, air bags, padded dashboards, better bumpers, lighted roads, highway guardrails, graduated licenses for young people, crackdowns on drunken driving, limits on left turns, and so on. We haven’t banned automobiles, and we haven’t eliminated auto deaths, but we have learned to make them safer — and we should do the same with guns.
But statistics are not enough, at least apparently not enough to convince members of Congress to do the right thing.
After the Hobart shooting in 1996, Australia bought back over 650,000 weapons, and their gun violence rate has plummeted.
I have seen figures that put the cost of gun deaths at as high as $200,000 each. Obviously I offered different statistics in the image for this posting. For Las Vegas, that figure may be low, given the loss of review with the Strip shut down, the massive overtime for dealing with the crime scene, and of course beyond that is this- how much economic contribution to the economy has been lost by those 59 deaths and perhaps many among the more than 500 injured whose earning capacities have been limited?
Why is it that for some politicians they are morally blind when it comes to guns?
I have to wonder if the intent of the NRA with legislation after legislation that would control gun violence is opposed while legislation that spreads more and more dangerous weapons to mentally ill, people on watch and no-fly lists, silencers, etc.is pushed through: is this a set-up for an armed takeover of the nation, or of significant parts thereof? Will we see people with assault weapons intimidating those on line to vote in minority precincts next Fall?
Am I being paranoid, or am I just worn out by too much gun violence? More Americans killed in a few minutes by a single gunman than Marines were killed in the taking of Fallujah.
Our society is sick.
It is time to address the sickness.
Sadly, I doubt that we will.
I hope and pray I am wrong.
But the statistics tell me that I am not.