This Is What USA Gun Crisis Looks Like – commentary
Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian UK
994 mass shootings in 1,004 days: this is what America’s gun crisis looks like
The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence ‘has become routine’, Barack Obama says. The data compiled by the crowd-sourced site Mass Shooting Tracker reveals an even more shocking human toll: there is a mass shooting – defined as four or more people shot in one incident – nearly every day
Barack Obama put words to the desperation of millions of Americans – and the despair of the rest of the world – after another mass shooting at a school in Oregon on Thursday, the latest of nearly 1,000 since his re-election in 2012.
“Somehow,” the president said, “this has become routine.”
“The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it,” Obama trailed off, at once frustrated and spirited at the White House. “We’ve become numb to this … We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg; after Tucson, after Newtown; after Aurora, after Charleston.”
As many as 10 people killed and 7 more injured at Umpqua community college in Roseburg as President Obama gives exasperated appearance at White House
The words mark a long list of tragedy. Since Obama’s re-election to a second term in November 2012 – which itself was followed by the shooting of 26 people including 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, just a few weeks later – there had been 994 mass shooting events in the United States . Thursday’s attack, at Umpqua community college in the town of Roseburg, was No 994. Almost 300 of them have occurred in 2015.
That’s almost one every day.
Obama has spoken or issued statements 15 times in the wake of mass shooting events. “I’ve made statements like this too many times,” he said after the church shooting this June in Charleston, South Carolina.
The numbers go deeper than the statements, as the president said.
Umpqua is the 294th mass shooting event in 2015, as defined by the website Shootingtracker.com, which chronicles them as an event in which four or more people are shot. Since the Newtown shooting, there have now been 994 such events in the US. The death toll of this litany of tragedy stands at approximately 1,236 people since the beginning of 2013.
By the FBI’s definition – four or more killed rather than four or more shot, a “mass murder” event rather than a “mass shooting” – there have been 45 such incidents this year, and 142 since Sandy Hook.
America’s gun problem goes deeper still: on the day of the Newtown shooting, many noted that if that had been the only shooting that day, the day’s death toll from gun violence would have been below the US average.
That was even more true on Thursday. The number of firearm homicides in 2013, the last year for which the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has statistics, was 11,208. The year before Sandy Hook, it was 107 fewer than that.
That’s just intentional homicides. Firearms are the cause of death for more than 33,000 people in America every year, according to the CDC; a number that includes both accidental discharge, murder and suicides, which are on the increase,especially in states with lax gun-control laws, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
That means guns kill more people in America every six hours than terrorist attacks did in the entire year of 2014.
‘Our thoughts and prayers are not enough’ says a visibly upset president in trying to create groundswell for gun control legislation after latest mass shooting
On top of that, in 2010 more than 73,000 Americans were treated in hospitals for firearm-related injuries, according to theLaw Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
This year is on track to break records. So far in 2015 there have been 39,449 total firearm incidents, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and 9,940 people killed. Of those, 550 were children, and 1,962 were teenagers.
Almost half of all guns in civilian ownership on the planet are held by Americans.
And the Guardian’s The Counted project, which tracks killings by police, has thus far tracked 762 people killed by police gunfire this year alone. It is also much more dangerous to be a police officer in a state with lax gun laws, according to theAmerican Journal of Public Health.
As the former attorney general Eric Holder tweeted soon after the news of the killings broke: “We weep again as a nation”
“I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences,” Obama said behind the podium at the White House. “Based on my experiences as president, I can’t guarantee that – and that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Read more:
President Obama challenged the media to put gun violence into context. The media responded.
… this article features the statistics and graphs on gun violence in the United States of America
Comments
If every American of every age is allowed to carry a gun and either civil war or revolution returns……😈
Voilà …..less than 50% of population remains.
Economic “boom time” returns.
💲
At my cynical best🐺
If I carry a gun I intend to use it.
As I don’t carry a gun my intentions are good…kind…caring.🐩
God bless America…⛪..land of the free and brave…..🗽
Michael Huemer – Irrationality of Politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ
Interesting presentation by Michael Huemer. However, I don’t see our gun problem as one or irrationality. Polls show that the majority of Americans want some form of gun control, but the stranglehold of the NRA on our policymakers is much greater.
So, I will try again with this May, 2014 comment by Michael Moore:
With due respect to those who are asking me to comment on last night’s tragic mass shooting at UCSB in Isla Vista, CA — I no longer have anything to say about what is now part of normal American life. Everything I have to say about this, I said it 12 years ago:
We are a people easily manipulated by fear which causes us to arm ourselves with a quarter BILLION guns in our homes that are often easily accessible to young people, burglars, the mentally ill and anyone who momentarily snaps. We are a nation founded in violence, grew our borders through violence, and allow men in power to use violence around the world to further our so-called American (corporate) “interests.” The gun, not the eagle, is our true national symbol.
While other countries have more violent pasts (Germany, Japan), more guns per capita in their homes (Canada [mostly hunting guns]), and the kids in most other countries watch the same violent movies and play the same violent video games that our kids play, no one even comes close to killing as many of its own citizens on a daily basis as we do — and yet we don’t seem to want to ask ourselves this simple question: “Why us? What is it about the USA?”
Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. None of them are committed by the majority gender, women. Hmmm, why is that?
Even when 90% of the American public calls for stronger gun laws, Congress refuses — and then we the people refuse to remove them from office.
So the onus is on us, all of us. We won’t pass the necessary laws, but more importantly we won’t consider why this happens here all the time. When the NRA says, “Guns don’t kill people — people kill people,” they’ve got it half-right. Except I would amend it to this: “Guns don’t kill people — Americans kill people.”
Enjoy the rest of your day, and rest assured this will happen again very soon.