A week ago today we saw the slaughter of 19 children and 2 teachers in another American classroom. 17 children were wounded, facing a lifetime of physical and emotional struggle. Anyone who has been shot knows that pain and trauma.
Since that horrific event, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, 29 more children have died at the end of a gun barrel. Congress went on vacation for Memorial Day.
I decided yesterday to compile gun violence data in America over the 8 years that the Gun Violence Archive has existed and compare those casualties to the dead and wounded American soldiers throughout the 247 years since the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Here is what I found:
Total violent casualties
In America, just part of daily life, 564,515 people have been killed or wounded by gun violence. Throughout our military history, 2,368,474 soldiers have been killed or wounded in combat. 564,515 casualties due to violence would rank as the third-highest casualty rate of the 78 conflicts in American history. Only World War II and the civil war were bloodier (and the civil war only so if you count the southern rebels)
The last 8 years on our streets would account for 24% of all combat casualties of Americans in our 247-year history of war.
Total killed
314,238 people have died of gun violence in daily life over the past 8 years in America. Throughout our 247-year military history, 664,679 died due to combat. Those 314,238 dead just in daily life in America would be the deadliest war due to combat in our history. World War II would be second with 291,557 combat dead.
The last 8 years on our streets would account for 47% of all combat deaths in our 247-year history of war.
Children
33,309 children have been victimized by gun violence. The gun violence archive did not break out dead versus injured so that is total casualties. As a total casualty count, more kids over the last 8 years have been victims of gun violence is more than American casualties in the 20 years of combat in Afghanistan. Nearly as many combat casualties in Iraq.
What can we do?
We’ve voted (Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate after Columbne and did not act), we’ve marched, we’ve called our Senators, we’ve bitched about ted cruz and his ilk, we have excoriated the NRA, we’ve had straight up protests, we’ve buried people and mourned, we’ve ignored the problem, we’ve “moved on” and congress still went on vacation 2 days after the last slaughter.
Voting is not enough
if your plan is to vote our way out of this madness just know that means at least another year of the slaughter, but in reality, Democrats aren’t gonna win the 70 or 80 Senate they seem to require to take action, so we are looking at continuing the carnage for 3 more years and probably more than 7.
General Strike IS the next option, the only option.
If you want action on this issue, meaningful and urgently taking as the situation requires, the only choice left to us is a general strike. We need a critical mass of people to just walk off the job until Congress comes back from vacation and passes meaningful gun violence reduction legislation.
What sort of demands should be made?
These are just off the top of my head, it can be tweaked, but this is the sort of thing we must do if we want to end the carnage in our streets.
- Assault weapons ban
- Minimum age for gun ownership set at 25.
- Gun storage and security laws
- Criminal liability for gun owners for any injury caused by their firearm.
- A massive buyback program.
- Carefully structured red flag law.
- zero loophole background checks for any transfer of possession of any firearm.
This is a crisis of massive scale, and voting our way out of it means another 300,000 or more dead in the coming decade.
No one is going to save us, we must demand action now.
#GeneralStrike to #EndtheSlaughter