The numbers are staggering.
Every year, more than 33,000 Americans are killed by guns — an average of 92 a day.
Since the massacre in Sandy Hook, Conn., when 26 people were gunned down by a madman with a high-powered semi-automatic weapons — including 20 children ages 6 and 7 — 87,000 Americans have died.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has reported that since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going to the American Revolution. Less than 1.4 million people have died in wars since 1775 compared to more 1.45 million gun deaths since 1970 including suicides, homicides and accidents.
Since 2013, according to Everytown for Guns Safety, there have been at least 149 school shootings — 52 this year alone.
Sending your children to school should not be considering the same as sending them into harms way.
But after shootings on three college campuses in the past two weeks — including a spree at Umpqua Community in Oregon that left 10 dead — on top of all the other shootings and one has to wonder.
Do students and their parents now need to evaluate the gun laws of the state in which they plan to attend college as well as a college’s public safety measures.
Sadly, the answer is probably yes.
No other developed nation in the world comes close to the United States in these numbers.
But the N.R.A and the many elected officials who cower at its election might say nothing needs to be done. It’s just a matter of mental health care.
The death rates of other countries and areas in those country with tougher gun laws, including New York State, says otherwise.
But let’s for a moment accept as genuine the belief by N.R.A. supporters including many Republicans running for president that mental health care is behind much of the gun violence. There is no question that this country’s mental health system is badly in need of fixing.
So what is their plan for fixing the country’s mental health system and preventing the daily slaughter? This is a question that voters ought to be asking.
As President Obama recently pointed out in the wake of the Oregon shootings, there is no other cause of death in this country — let alone one that kills more than 33,000 people a year — in which there is so little action.
A good start would be for Congress to remove limits that, defying all logic, it has imposed on government research and funding for studying the causes of gun violence.
In refuting a critic, Kristof also suggested we apply the same public health approach to guns as we did to cars.
“We don’t ban cars, he said, “but we do require driver’s licenses, seatbelts, airbags, padded dashboards, safety glass and collapsible steering columns. And we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate by 95 percent.”
The N.R.A. succeeds because its members will base their entire decision in how elected officials vote on gun regulation.
Perhaps, it’s time for all other voters to do the same. An awful lot of lives are on the line.
