- 04 Dec 14, 13:36#428748No other developed country on earth has as lax gun laws or more weapons than the United States. The easy access to weapons and the ineffective methods of tracking weapons to make sure that they don’t fall into the wrong hands facilitate violent and unstable people in the United States getting weapons with which to kill people.
Currently, there are 88 guns for every 100 people living in the United States (not even counting the illegal weapons which our government couldn’t account for). With so many weapons and so few controls on who can own the weapons, there is simply no realistic way to keep these guns from falling into the hands of violent criminals and disturbed people. According to FBI statistics, 46,313 Americans were murdered with firearms during the time period of 2007 to 2011. To put this death-toll into perspective, this translates to an average of 9,263 murders per year, or 25 murders per day. When we look at this average death toll in relation to the Sandy Hook Shooting—a nationally shocking tragedy—we see that a Sandy Hook sized tragedy happens every day, yet nobody covers it.
Guns give people a quick, easy, cheap, and relatively detached (compared to stabbings/beatings) method of killing people—even large numbers of people. By making killing easy, guns directly contribute to the thought process that must go into a killing and facilitate even higher body counts. Without guns, people would still kill others, but it would be far more difficult to accrue high body counts. A tool may simply be a shortcut to a desired result, but it isn’t fair to say that the tool has no part in achieving a result. A man with a hammer and a man with a gun could kill an identical number of people, but the gun certainly makes it more likely that the person will succeed, faster in their killing spree, and more likely to kill their specific targets.
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. However, people with guns can easily and quickly kill a lot of people, while those who don’t have guns, cannot. In a country flooded with guns, the mass murderer (or simply the person who wishes to kill one person) is able to obtain their weapon easily and without much risk.
Anyone can come online and make a bumper sticker comment that sounds right but is ignorant or myopic and just plain out of synch with society. It's no coincidence that states with laxed gun laws see four to five times more murders committed with guns than states with highly regulated gun laws.
Just to illustrate how insidious the NRA lobby is in the US, they have lobbied for and it is illegal in this country for the CDC to study data from violent crimes that used a gun, they are also legally prevented from keeping a database to track violent crimes. That's the reality boys and girls, If only people were less ignorant before forming an opinion, eh?
EDIT. Sorry for using lots of words.
"I don't want to be part of a forum where everyone has differing opinions." Boom...
After the agony of defeat, success will be sweet!
I read up on things before coming an opinion that's why I'm so frequently right on things. Try it sometimes.
