It seems to me that people who say that all we need to do is tighten the regulations so that the mentally ill don't get hold of a gun, end of story, are ignoring the real problem.
Wiki:
In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[4] There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.[5] The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[6] with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.[7]
Add up the accidental, the intentional, fatal and non-fatal and there are roughly 100,000 shootings in the US every year: 270 shootings every day, 80 of them are fatal, 30 of them are murders. High-profile mass-murders make for big headlines, but even this latest atrocity just bumped the yearly number by less than a day's standard allotment of gun murders. But the one-at-a-time killings that account for the vast majority of shootings? They're just things you hear about on local news, maybe. They're every-day background noise. If that. But there are a lot of them. And they aren't all the work of the mentally ill.
So, when I hear a gun supporter going on about how all we need to do is find a way to keep guns in the hands of sane people, I know I'm hearing someone who either doesn't know the statistics or who doesn't want anyone else to know about the statistics. Because it's not the crazy people, it's everyone; everyone and his gun. Too many guns. Too many overly-lethal guns. Too easy to get and too easy to use.
