Again, perception vs. reality. Only about 30% of Americans even own a gun, so that means the vast majority do not. And the occurrences of mass gun violence, are actually quite rare, statistically. I am not saying it isn't an issue, but it is not the faux-firestorm that it is made out to be. Mostly used now as a deliberate political distraction. Politicians figured out long ago that thinking is linear, and if we are upset over the latest uproar, we are not tracking what is happening longer term. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote :
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <olliesedwuz@...> wrote : We have about 11,000 people born in the US each day, and about 6,800 deaths per day, or about 6,770, if we subtract the ~30 deaths daily by firearms. I am not excusing the deaths as a result of guns, however it is clearly not the risk, nor the social evil that we are led to believe it is. With nearly one gun for every man, woman and child in the USA, 270 million guns, total, I am astonished that the number of deaths as a result, is not far higher. I think this "gun issue" is another fake-out by the politicians, run by those above them to keep our eyes off the real game, subverting economic justice in the US. Continuing to starve wages while raising prices and taxes causes social stress, resulting predictably in some firearm violence. Why call for gun control, when there is no economic control? We are going after symptoms, vs the illness. But, such high profile mass shootings are bound to create media hyper ventilation and the resulting outrage and lamenting is continuously ignited by these relatively common occurrences in schools, movie theaters and elsewhere. It is a subject that deserves attention because it also indicates something deeper - is a barometer for other social disease rampant in (in this case) the US. Guns seem to accompany fear and rage and mental illness but not necessarily in all cases when their use is against a neighbor, a classroom, an employer. The need to own guns, to have them handy at all times, is an indicator or a society in rough shape. When you can't feel safe unless you have a gun in your possession it points to economic reasons as well. Drug addiction, poverty, lack of resources can lead citizens to assume they can take what they need at the point of a gun, for example. Whole city blocks and blocks of substandard living conditions or millions of people scraping by all over America are testimony to the sorry state of our society. Even the vehemence with which gun lovers defend their (and by default everyone's) right to own and carry a gun is based in fear and a distorted idea that to change the Constitution with regard to gun ownership rights would somehow be un-American or even sacrilegious. This whole gun issue reveals far more than just how people feel about arms. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote : More than 10,000 Americans are killed every year by gun violence. By contrast, so few Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks since 9/11 that when you chart the two together, the terrorism death count approximates zero for every year except 2001. This comparison, if anything, understates the gap: Far more Americans die every year from (easily preventable http://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/9126891/gun-suicide-rate) gun suicides than gun homicides. The point Obama is making is clear: We spend huge amounts of money every year fighting terrorism, yet are unwilling, at the national level, to take even minor steps (like requiring background checks on all gun sales nationally) to stop gun violence.
