By Martha Rosenberg, OpEdNews
December 14th, 2012 6:00pm
Once again a nutter cuts down innocent people and no one asks why he had a “large assault-type rifle” in his possession, as reported by KENS 5 TV. Thanks to rapid news cycles and gun lobby spin, the public accepts the occasional masked, armed shooter in its movie theaters and malls as the price we pay for a “free society” and our “gun rights.” Hey–another day another murder/suicide.
Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shoots his girlfriend in front of his own mother and drives to Arrowhead Stadium to shoot himself in front of team officials? These things happen.
TSA agent mowed down at the Cleveland Hopkins Airport parking lot three days ago by her estranged husband who then kills himself? What are you going to do?
The gun lobby has so convinced people that laws against civilians owning military, rapid fire weapons (and all the ammo they can buy) violate our “rights,” no carnage jolts people out of their NRA trance. 33 dead at Virginia Tech and other school shootings? 70 gunned down at Batman movie? Arizona Congressperson Gabby Giffords and Kirkwood, MO mayor, public works director and council members shot? Hey, collateral damage in the fight to protect our “gun rights.”
The gun violence is becoming so over the top it barely makes the Nightly News or delays the shopping, movie or football game. No one even asks anymore, “The gunman was carrying WHAT?”–or “The firearms dealer sold a weapon to WHO?”
In 2009, an Illinois pastor was shot in church through the Bible he was holding . The same year, a gunman dressed as Santa killed nine on Christmas Eve in Covina, CA. Last year there was another Santa killer. What will happen this year?
And there’s another question people should be asking. Why are these gun nuts, who make sure the EZ gun laws stay on the books, so cowardly and scared? As Ring of Fire talk show host Mike Papantonio says, do these people need a “shot of testosterone” or what?
Every day millions of people, including children, old people and 110 pound women get to their destination without being strapped. Here in Chicago, millions board public transportation to get to their job, unarmed! Surprise. Yet these burly, mustachioed “tough” guys, who always seem to be the ones who are so gun-obsessed, are afraid to go to work, into a national park or near a school yard without heat.
And they are winning. Yesterday, the same day Christmas shopping was interrupted by a gunman at an Oregon mall, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said Illinois’ ban on carrying a concealed weapon in public is unconstitutional. Illinois is the only state to ban conceal and carry. Make that was.
Martha Rosenberg is a health reporter and commentator whose work has appeared in Consumers Digest, the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Los Angeles Times, Providence Journal and Newsday. She serves as editorial cartoonist at the Evanston Roundtable. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, will be published by Prometheus Books in 2012.
Related Posts
January 8, 2013 -- Papantonio: NRA Losers Have No Power In America (VIDEO)
January 29, 2013 -- Papantonio: How The Gun Industry Sells Mass Shootings (VIDEO)
December 17, 2012 -- Papantonio: NRA Is A Toothless Tiger Do Not Fear Them (VIDEO)
July 23, 2012 -- Papantonio: The Gun Industry’s License To Murder You and Me
Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF – NYT
IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars?
The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.
Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.
So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.
American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.
We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?
As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”
Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns?
And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.
Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.
The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading.
We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.
“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.
Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.
The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.
In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.
Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.
For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.”
Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.
Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure.