Unless the Washington Post is wrong, I meant automatic
If so, that's a scary statistic.
Because the gun lobby has prevented detailed fact-gathering on how many of these weapons there are out there, most of the numbers cited by researchers have been best guesses. So, when public health researchers say that there are more guns than people in the US, or that 1.5 million of the guns are semi-automatic- those are inferred statistics based upon gun sales. There's no registry and most of the
retail gun sales records are based on paper files not databases. There are no records of private gun sales, so once it leaves the hands of a federally approved gun retailer, no one knows what happens to the gun.
I don’t feel like looking up the dates of these events. Could you tell me how many days your timeline covers?
I’d like to know, in your timeline, how many days went by without anyone being killed with/by a semi-automatic weapon.
Do you think this makes a difference to the families of the 59 people killed Sunday night? Or to the 500+ people who were wounded?
The shooter had no political agenda, no criminal past, and was a fucking multi-millionaire real estate investor? Man, this gets weirder and weirder. Nothing makes sense.
None of it makes sense.
Ponder for a moment the fact that we are now in a place where we have to find logic in a completely illogical scenario. Is there a reason that would explain how and why someone would shoot at 22,000 people with automatic weapons from 900 yards away in the dark while they were contained in a concert venue surrounded by 4 walls?
A decade ago would we have worried that it wasn't safe to go to a concert on a fall night to listen to country music? Or go to a movie theater? Or to send your kids to school?
Our problem is knifes, apparently it is cool to carry a blade. Not cool when you are the one dealing with the aftermath.
The first time I went to a wedding where the men had on kilts, it was surprising that they also had a knife worn on their leg. Probably the second most common discussion (after "what are you wearing under the kilt?") was a discussion of whether to wear the knife on the left or on the right.
Thankfully, none of us were worried that someone was going to pull out the knife (sgian dubh?) and kill the wedding party and the guests.
The figures that Kara posted made my jaw drop.
Here in Scotland there is on average 2/5 killings by guns annually.
If you want to be shocked more, read through the stats on the
Gun Violence Archive (non-profit organization that compiles statistics on gun violence in the US).
I mentioned earlier that so many of the statistics that we have are based on "guestimates". Part of the reason is that the
CDC was banned from doing research on gun violence in 1996 after lobbying by the gun industry and even though the Sandy Hook shooting resulted in a partial lifting of the research ban, the program hasn't been funded (and the Trump budget targets more cuts for the CDC).
So, all we know if there's a lot of guns and a lot of gun deaths. And that it's getting worse.
Any time we have a fire that kills a lot of people or a hurricane that destroys property, we try to stop and figure what happened and how we can prevent it from happening again. That logical and preventative approach is lacking when it comes to gun violence. At public health conferences where these are discussed, you see a lot of public health people who are speechless because they know that there's a big problem, not much data about the problem and they're afraid that it may be too late to do anything about it.
