Mental Health, Culture, Guns

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.

3 thoughts on “Mental Health, Culture, Guns

  1. Jewish Steel

    Happily, mental illness is easy to identify and treat. And separating the mentally ill from from firearms in a country of 300 million souls is so easy I’ll just go ahead and do it on my day off.

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