At the risk of repeating myself, I want to hammer home again the horror of gun deaths in the U.S. With 120.5 civilian-owned firearms per 100 people—we have more guns that people—the United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership and the highest number of gun deaths in the world. So far this year, we’ve witnessed 1,040 injuries and 1,433 deaths from gunfire. Last year saw over 40,000 injuries and 20,000 deaths from gunfire in the U.S. More numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
50 percent – That’s the percent of increase of gun deaths of children 14 and younger from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.
15 percent – The amount of increase of gun deaths from 2019 to 2020.
#1 – And in the year 2020, gun violence was the number one leading cause of death for American children.
The argument that the U.S. is a gun culture is meaningless. To save over 20,000 lives annually, let’s change our culture. The way to do that is to reduce drastically the number of guns we have. The ratio between gun deaths and the number of guns in the hands of the citizenry is constant throughout the world. And yet it’s obvious to me that we as a nation are unwilling to change our culture to save lives.
What kind of people are we?
Tom Glenn, Writer 