It’s time to revisit firearms deaths in the U.S. As I reported a couple of years ago in this blog, I try to remain politically neutral in all my posts. To me, gun deaths is not a political issue. It’s a sickness that the U.S. uniquely suffers from. The following facts are dated (it takes time to gather the data) but still valid:
Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries. Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. Over a hundred people are killed each day by gunshots in the U.S.
The numbers are going up. The rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people rose from 10.3 per 100,000 in 1999 to 12 per 100,000 in 2017, with 109 people dying per day. The numbers for 2020 are not in yet, but in 2018, the most recent year for which data are available as of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics reports 38,390 deaths by firearm.
Over the years, I have repeatedly heard the argument that American culture is a gun culture. We had to have firearms to protect ourselves and our families as we opened our western frontier. Maybe so, but none of that is true today when the number of guns we as a people own are more than our population. Today our devotion to guns is a sickness that is killing us by the thousands.
It’s time that we joined the rest of advanced civilization and rid ourselves of the weapons that are slaughtering us.
Tom Glenn, Writer 