This just in. Guns (still) don’t kill people. People (still) kill people – Part 1
As the Brady Law Turns 25, Guns Are Killing More Americans Than Ever. Why? - Real Clear Politics
Excerpt: According to numbers compiled by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence using the most recent five years of complete data (2012-2016) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 124,760 people in the U.S. are shot each year on average, including 17,207 kids and teens.
Breaking that down on a daily basis, 342 people are shot each day with an average of 96 of those shootings resulting in death.
Those numbers don’t look good, nor should they, but without the passage of the Brady Bill, they’d be even worse, according to Brady Campaign co-president Kris Brown.
“The gun homicide rate has dropped precipitously since the enactment of the Brady Law,” Brown told RealClearLife. “While other forms of gun violence like suicide have risen, the Brady Law was enacted in an attempt to ensure dangerous people did not have easy access to guns and it has had a real impact looking at the data on the homicide rate.”
Since the passage of the act in 1993, more than 300 million guns have been sold, but 3 million potential sales to prohibited purchasers have been prevented.
Bottom Line: The moment we stop focusing on guns & start focusing on people we’ll accomplish something. You need look no further than the headline to this story to figure out how far away we are from that reality. When I think about negative conflict I’ve encountered throughout my life, the people who genuinely wanted to hurt me, and in some instances, have hurt me; I’ve never stopped to consider the methodology used to carry out the harm to attempt to blame it. I have attempted to figure out what’s wrong with the people who’d deliberately hurt others and have personally tried to learn to avoid being harmed again if possible.
Maybe it's just that so many people have a fear of guns that they’re inclined to focus on an object rather than the user of the object. Maybe for some people politics matters more than pragmatism. Whatever the case may be the fact remains. A gun has never killed anyone. People have used guns to kill. Guns aren’t able to be violent. People have used guns to carry out violence. I’m not saying this once again to attempt to suggest that certain reforms aren’t sensible, but I’m exhausted by talking about symptoms rather than solutions. Guns are nothing more than symptoms in the context of ill-doers.