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On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:43:59 -0500, "4943 Dead, 76 since 1/20/09" <...@finestplanet.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/opinion/25herbert.html?_r=1
Op-Ed Columnist
A Culture Soaked in Blood
By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 24, 2009
Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic
in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it
in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-
old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.
In Palm Harbor, Fla., a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a
gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had
forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma,
police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.
There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America.
Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than
12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely
violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by
the widespread availability of guns.
When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to
kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun —
one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When
John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing
spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of
their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly
mission.
We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the
same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics
at gun shows.
There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the
shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass
murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic
handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort
Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.
A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with
high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in
Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as
pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in
the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the
public mind.
Homicides are only a part of the story.
While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells
us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical
year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are
killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police.
(In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are
reacting to people armed with guns).
And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000
fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are
criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than
15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun
in possession — who are shot by the police.
The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to
be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a
gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are
the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.
The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking.
According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death
in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit
suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the
police.
Another 17,000 are shot but survive.
I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three
dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of
circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year.
Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the
U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a
kid every two weeks. Think about that.”
Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the
crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish
but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can
be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.
This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the
horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and
more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing
easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.
--
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the
entrails of the last priest.” -Dennis Diderot Pay your taxes so the
rich don't have to. Atheist #2211
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