According to GunPolicy.org there were a total of 32,000 gun deaths in the United States in 2011. Of those, 11,101 were homicides, and 19,766 were suicides. This mind-boggling number of gun deaths is happening in a country where there are 270,000,000 guns, or put another way, 88 firearms per 100 people.
These statistics, coupled with the level of discourse about this subject in the U.S. indicates that the country as a whole demonstrates a collective insanity when it comes to an issue that to any normal person in any advanced and modern society should be a no-brainer. As a whole, the moniker Gun-Nut USA applies.
Given this reality, when observing the political class handling of this very important issue, an objective observer could only react in disbelief, disgust, astonishment, and in shame (if that observer is an American).
Throughout the years the way this ongoing massacre has been handled is truly insane. In communities where deprivation caused by the legacy of a sadistic, opportunistic and brutal institutionalized discrimination and racism, the obvious results include crime and despair.
The system having abused, abandoned, and neglected an entire segment of society, emanates scores of individuals who never had a chance, and hence succumb to the brutality of their surrounding.
And the rest of society is just fine with this brutality, as long as it is contained within certain neighborhoods. As long as the carnage, and sheer terror, and fear, and hopelessness is suffered by "those people" in scary-looking neighborhoods, everybody else just looks the other way.
For the year 2010, blacks represented 13 percent of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 49 percent of all homicide victims.
- Violence Policy Center
But as they say, the chickens always come home to roost. That callousness and indifference to the deprivation and suffering of millions of fellow Americans, may be the root cause for the terror to spill over the ghetto walls, into the larger society...
And when the shooting happens in an indiscriminate way at seemingly safe (or affluent) places, then you pay attention, because all of the sudden it crosses your mind that it could happen to you!
“This is something that, you know, that was the worst day of my presidency. And it’s not something that I want to see repeated.”
- NYT: President Obama commenting about the Newtown shooting
And by golly, we can't have that! Are people really that callous, and selfish? We can always ask Bill Maher about the character, intelligence and morality of the American people...
It is at this point that the cowardly and unprincipled hypocrites that are the typical American politicians jump into "meaningless" action to assuage the selfish fears of a debased, depraved, selfish and gluttonous population.
Of course, if we had principled and moral politicians, the discussion would start by stating the fact that not only there are too many guns in the country, but that there is a need to engage in meaningful and honest dialogue about how to change the gun culture.
Obama moved to expand gun rights as though Bush were still in office. He signed laws to allow guns in checked baggage on Amtrak trains and to allow conceal-carry permit holders to pack heat in national parks. In 2009, the Brady Campaign gave Obama a report card with seven F's.
- The NRA vs. America - RollingStone.
They would talk about ways of diminishing the amount of guns in the country, in the basic understanding that if there were less guns there would be less gun deaths.
They would come up with meaningful legislation to curtail gun use, including licensing requirements, regulations, gun manufacturers' liability provisions.
They would advocate community outreach and educational campaigns, focused on freeing the country of guns one neighborhood at a time.
They would expose the nexus between gun manufacturers' influenced peddling and in the name of profit, and the horrific and devastating effects they have in our communities.
Though Barack Obama had campaigned on modest gun-control proposals, he ducked any fights over the issue. "His view was never that we shouldn't move on these things," political strategist David Axelrod says. "His view was that such moves would be largely symbolic because of the power of the gun lobby to stop them."
Bloomberg doesn't buy that excuse. "The first two years of the Obama administration, the Democrats had the White House, the Senate and Congress," says Bloomberg. "And they did nothing." In early 2009, after Attorney General Eric Holder casually mentioned that renewing the Assault Weapons Ban was a priority, Rahm Emanuel, then the president's chief of staff, sent a characteristically profane message to Holder on the gun issue: "Shut the fuck up."
- The NRA vs. America - RollingStone.
The emphasis is mine...
But alas, that would happen in a sane world, where principled and honest public servants have the best interests of the communities they are supposed to be representing, at heart.
Instead they pander with knee-jerk reactions to the fear of the population by coming up with feeble and sometimes meaningless "gun-control" legislation.
Who cares if a specific type of gun is only used in 2 or 3 percent of gun-related deaths, as long as that assuages the fears of the population at large, which once the latest mass shooting episode recedes into the past, returns to their callous disregard and indifference to the carnage in certain communities.
[In 2010] There were 6,469 black homicide victims in the United States. Of these, 5,582 were male, and 887 were female.
- Violence Policy Center
And so once again, we engage in frenzied, hurried, and mainly meaningless debate and actions, in some sort of kabuki theater, which ensures once again that when this latest episode of mass fear dissipates, we will remain the same Gun-Nut America. Which means that the profitability of the increasingly entrenched political power of gun manufacturers will remain, unmolested.
Bush rolled to re-election, and the NRA continued to roll up victories. The Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, reopening the market for the high-capacity magazines favored by mass murderers. And in 2005, the NRA finally secured clean passage of a law immunizing manufacturers, importers, distributors and dealers from any civil liability. After President Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that October, LaPierre called it "the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years." Who did it benefit? LaPierre made no pretenses: "History will show that this law helped save the American firearms industry."
- The NRA vs. America - RollingStone.
What's the genesis of this lunacy? Why do we keep having the wrong debate? The answer is very simple: Corporate America owns our government.
But over the past decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado.
- The NRA vs. America - RollingStone.