Gun Control — Enough Already
A friend of mine (Mikal Gilmore) tweeted: That old line that if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns is, in fact, an ideal we should consider aspiring to. I’ve never heard this point made before, and now I’m surprised I haven’t. If only outlaws had guns, would more lives be saved or lost? Here are the figures I found:
- Every time a gun injures or kills in self-defense, it is used:
11 times for completed and attempted suicides (Kellermann, 1998, p. 263).
7 times in criminal assaults and homicides, and
4 times in unintentional shooting deaths or injuries.
- Higher household gun ownership correlates with higher rates of homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings (Harvard Injury Control Center).
- In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States. [The year for those figures is 2008.]
I got these facts from the .
In the upper-right hand corner of the website there’s a live update of shootings in America. Right now it says 54,455 were shot so far this year in America—it went up three as I typed that!! It’s now 54,458! By the time I finished uploading the photographs below it went up to 54,464. Now 54,466. 196 people have been shot so far today in America. Christ.
—
Shots of helicopters from my Audubon cruise last weekend. Between the boat I was on and the helicopters, I couldn’t get anyone to stop moving long enough to get the shots I wanted.
