This coming Saturday will be the 18-month anniversary of that awful day at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. where we lost 20 children and six staff members to gun violence.
I wish I could report that things have gotten better since then but, unfortunately, guns continue to cause immeasurable pain and suffering in our nation.
Indeed, if today is typical, based on average numbers, some 277 Americans will be shot by a gun. And 84 of those shot will die (source: www.bradycampaign.org).
That means, since Sandy Hook, over 150,000 of us were shot by a gun and about 46,000 of those shot have died.
Perhaps it’s time to look at those terrible numbers in another way. Consider this: An average gunshot victim at a hospital gets about 50 pints of blood -- that’s 7.5 million pints of blood needed since Sandy Hook. If we were to fill an average bathtub with that blood, we would need more than 23,000 tubs. And if we were to line up all those bathtubs end-to-end, they would stretch more than 22 miles.
Were we to start the bathtub line-up at the U.S. Capitol building, it would be long enough to reach the headquarters of the National Rifle Association (N.R.A.) about ten miles away in Fairfax, Va. -- and back to D.C.
While most Americans would be horrified by such a sight, members of Congress who worship the N.R.A. would likely find such a tub line-up particularly useful. When in need of a quick transfusion of cash, they would simply follow to Fairfax the trail of bloodbaths.
Please help reduce this carnage. Call, write, email, or FAX the representatives at your state capital and in Washington, D.C. and tell them to support common sense gun control. Do it today. And do it again next week. And do it again every week after that until they get the message.
You’ll find contact information for your Washington representatives here:
www.http://contactingthecongress.org/
