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On Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:24:08 -0700 (PDT), Phil Smythe <...@upnaway.com
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/opinion/25herbert.html?ref=opinion
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