Thanks, gocomics.org
Tag: gun manufacturers
Guns don’t kill kids – kids kill kids. Makes sense to the NRA!
Click to enlarge
The cover of the recent Children’s Defense Fund report (pdf) on gun violence in the United States carries a single statistic:
The number of children and teens killed by guns in one year would fill 134 classrooms of 20 students each.
That’s just a more dramatic way of stating an already staggering figure – 2,694 in 2010. Most of the report’s 73 following pages are devoted to restating it…
Other times, the same set of statistics (all from the Centers for Disease Control) is used to drive home the magnitude of the tragedy, relating it to the kinds of violence we think we understand:
Nearly three times more children and teens were injured by guns in 2010 than the number of US soldiers wounded in action that year in the war in Afghanistan; 82 children under five died from guns in 2010, compared to 55 law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.
And then, there’s the shameful comparison to other countries:
US children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from a gun than their peers in 25 other high-income countries combined…
The report wallops us over the head with statistics because its authors can’t reach through the pages and throttle us. The frustration is as understandable as it is evident, for as gruesome as the statistics about violence are, the recounting of what legislation has and has not passed is even more dispiriting. Over and over, the public’s willingness (even eagerness) to tighten gun laws has been outmatched by the cowardice of politicians in mysterious thrall to the National Rifle Association…
The news gets worse as we get closer to home, where state legislatures reacted to Sandy Hook primarily by widening access to firearms and weakening regulation. You read that right: more states passed pro-gun legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook than there were states that passed stricter gun control. Maryland, Connecticut and New York and New Jersey all tightened gun laws; Utah, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kansas all somehow relaxed their gun laws – by extending the number of places one can carry a concealed weapon, by allowing guns in schools, by instituting “stand your ground” laws, or adding the right to own a firearm to the state constitution.
Great article by Ana Marie Cox. Read it and weep for a nation that has progressed steadily from ignorant to stupid.
Politicians haven’t changed. They’re as gutless as ever. The two Colorado politicians defeated in an NRA-sponsored recall this past week received little aid or fightback from their state Democrat Party. Even less from national so-called leaders of that spineless party. While citizens turned out in dismal numbers leaving the decision to the idjit vote.
The transition from ignorant to stupid seems to be a solid part of our nation’s retrograde religion.
Mexico’s President begs the United States — No more weapons!
Sign made from 3 tons of crushed guns
Mexico’s president called on U.S. officials to stop gun trafficking across the border Thursday, saying the move would be the best thing Americans could do to stop brutal drug violence.
“The criminals have become more and more vicious in their eagerness to spark fear and anxiety in society,” President Felipe Calderon said. “One of the main factors that allows criminals to strengthen themselves is the unlimited access to high-powered weapons, which are sold freely, and also indiscriminately, in the United States of America.
Speaking in Ciudad Juarez, the border city across from El Paso, Texas, that has become Mexico’s murder capital, Calderon said a dramatic increase in violence in Mexico was directly connected with the 2004 expiration of the U.S. assault weapons ban…
…Calderon stood in front of a massive new sign, constructed with tons of decommissioned arms. “NO MORE WEAPONS,” the sign said — in English. Americans on the other side of the border are the intended audience, Calderon said…
Out of 140,000 weapons Mexican authorities have seized since Calderon declared a crackdown on cartels at the beginning of his presidency, 84,000 were high-powered assault weapons, Calderon said.
More than 47,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since December 2006, according to government statistics.
Calderon’s plea for Americans to reduce drug consumption is laughable, of course. We have been a society based on mood-altering chemical dependency for decades. It starts with cigarettes and coffee, marches on through beer and hard liquor into prescription goodies all too easily accessible through your friendly family doctor. Symptomatic treatment is the watchword of America’s pharmaceutical industry.
Can we modify such dependencies? Of course. Many advocate a healthier lifestyle – in the face of politicians and flunkies who say pizza is a vegetable and sex education is a sin. We have to get past the profit cronies to even begin to have a voice in this land.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing wrong with symptomatic solutions to drug gangsters across the border, drug gangsters who leak their wars and profiteering across that border every hour of the day. Who stands in the way? Right-wing plutocrats in the arms industry and their flunkies in the NRA and both wings of political hacks – for a start. Even the mildest attempts to police guns trafficked across the border are shut down by sophistry and campaign dollars, lobbying and coercion.
Eideard 