The More the Gun the More the Violence

Just the last month alone, the reports of gun violence, nationally, regionally and locally, from home to classroom to workplace, indicates gun violence is permeating our way of life.

Here are a few of the incidents:

* A school teacher is shot and killed in Nevada trying to protect students from a gunman. Two students are wounded.

* A coach at Missouri Southern State University is shot and killed coming out of a movie theater, prompting cancellation of the school’s homecoming weekend.  

* Shots were fired at North Carolina A&T State University’s homecoming and one of the bullets wound a 21-year-old man.

* A troubled man goes on a shooting rampage at Los Angeles International Airport and kills a Transportation Security Administration officer. The shooter wounds two others and is also wounded.

* Another troubled man kills his family and then himself in South Carolina, just one of many incidents recently of family murder suicides.

  
As this dispassionate blog on gun facts by The Guardian’s Simon Rogers’ shows, the United States ranks as having the highest rate of gun ownership with the second highest percentage of homicides by guns.

The social and economic impacts of gun violence are enormous, according to Small Arms Survey, another dispassionate collection of data from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

And FactCheck.org keeps a tally on whose providing accurate information and perspective on the issue in its “GunRhetoric vs. Gun Facts.”

As reported in local newspaper and national news media, gun violence is routine in society today. Joe Nocera of the New York Times offers a daily rundown on his blog GunReport, which just provides facts, nothing more.

Perhaps it’s time to decide whether gun violence is an acceptable way of life in a free, wealthy and democratic country. Before letting your knee jerk, either right or left, read the reports, check the facts, and study the data.