"A teenage girl was shot in the neck in a Dorchester park overnight and was hospitalized at Boston Medical Center. "
In case the last one wasn't enough.
There are so many issues that go into this kind of violence on the streets. And I will grant that guns aren't the reason these kids are going out and killing each other. But they are making it easier and they are increasing the body count at an alarming rate. Unless you are really well trained you can't pull up to a park open the door of a van and knife someone in a park from the street. It takes a whole lot of planning and skill to perform a driveby clubbing with a blackjack. You can't strafe a crowd of kids on the corner in hopes you will get the one you meant to get among all the collateral damage with your fists.
A lot of kids these days don't value life, that's true. And there are many societal reasons for that. But by manufacturing and selling so MANY guns, the gun makers are enabling this devestating symptom of the problem to escalate and effect a much larger segment of the population. There are an average of 4-6 MILLION guns sold in America every YEAR! Think about that. That means that in my lifetime, based on the low number, 144 MILLION guns have entered circulation in the United States. And those are just the legal guns. That doesn't count any that have been brought into the country illegally. There are approximately 300 million people in this country. So that is one legal gun for every 2.08 people in the country just since I was born.
"The 1996 study Guns in America found that only 6.6 percent of adult American women owned a handgun—less than one out of every 10 women. But of these women, nearly 85 percent owned their handguns for self-defense—a figure that offers gunmakers continual hope in their marketing endeavors. Yet how often are handguns actually used by women to kill in self-defense? The answer, as revealed by unpublished Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, is hardly ever. Women were murdered with handguns more than 1,200 times in 1998 alone. As these numbers reveal, handguns don't offer protection for women, but instead guarantee peril.
For all of the promises made on behalf of the self-defense handgun, using a handgun to kill in self-defense is a rare event. Looking at both men and women, over the past 20 years, on average only two percent of the homicides committed with handguns in the United States were deemed justifiable or self-defense homicides by civilians. To put it in perspective, more people are struck by lightning each year than use handguns to kill in self-defense."
""A home without a gun is safer for children than a home with a gun," declares panelist Bill Vogler, expressing the panel's consensus and the conclusion of several studies.
"It's adding a level of lethality, a lethal weapon, into a situation where there currently isn't one." Indeed, having a gun at home has some specific risks you might not have considered, panelists say. One is that a gun is less likely to be used successfully against an intruder than turned on someone else, including you, one or more of your children, another adult or even another child.
The risk, panelists say, isn't just theoretical. Statistics show the majority of gun-related injuries and deaths to children -- and there were 5,285 kids killed with guns in the United States in 1997 alone -- are the result of accidents or impulsive actions."
It's time to admit that gun manufacturers want to make money and they are willing to sacrifice our children to get it. And the same goes for gun dealers. I will never understand the motivation of gun owners.
at 10:57 AM :: ~#~
