Another Day, Another Shooting

Another day, another mass shooting in America.

I always check the news headlines shortly after I get up each morning. The recent headline announcing the murder of 12 people at a bar in southern California wasn't really a surprise. In fact, it was the 307th mass shooting (defined as a shooting with four or more victims) of 2018 in the US. As a result, 328 people have so far lost their lives, according to NBC News.

And as is typical of the Republican Party, one of its newly elected representatives announced that what’s most important is to protect the Second Amendment. Not to try to get a handle on gun violence. Not to make it possible for people to appear in public without fear of being slaughtered. Apparently the ability of college students and other regular Americans to go out and enjoy themselves without fear of being murdered by some idiot with a gun is only of secondary importance.

It wasn't long before the NRA chimed in with an inane attack on physicians who routinely treat victims of gun violence, calling them 'anti gun.' Such is the NRA's stranglehold on Congress that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are prohibited from even studying gun violence as a public health issue. If the deaths of thousands of Americans from guns isn't a public health issue, I don't know what is.

Excluding most suicides, at least 15,549 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2017, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks news media and law enforcement reports of shootings. More than 15,000 lives lost in just one year to gun violence -- and that isn't a public health issue worth studying?

I am certain that the framers of the Constitution, when they wrote the holy Second Amendment, never dreamed of a day when semi-automatic and assault rifles would be so readily available. After all, the weapon of choice then was the musket loader. 

Nobody is suggesting taking guns away from law-abiding citizens. Aside from the legal issues, that isn't even remotely physically possible. But so far, the NRA and its puppets in Congress have rejected even moderate, common sense proposals to keep guns out of the hands of those who should never have them. "Gun laws don't work," they cry. Apparently they don't want to even attempt to tackle this problem since the laws we have aren't preventing mass shootings. So why bother having laws at all? Driving under the influence is illegal, yet people still do it, so we should simply get rid of laws that prohibit DUI, right? 

An article in Time magazine from earlier this year (http://time.com/5209901/gun-violence-america-reduction/) suggests some common-sense ways to tackle the gun violence problem in America. What do we have to lose by at least exploring these and similar proposals? 

Someone asked me recently which policy changes I propose. I replied that I don't propose any policy changes, as I'm not an expert in that area. What I do know, however, is that we need to do something to at least start to understand and address this problem.




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