Robert Reich just put out a summary of gun statistics. They’re worth repeating. I start with the number of mass shootings in the United States, by year: 2014: 273. 2015: 336. 2016: 383. 2017: 348. 2018: 336. 2019: 417. 2020: 610. 2021: 690. 2022: 647. And in the first three weeks of 2023: 39.
He goes on to say that guns killed more than 44,000 people in the U.S. last year. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for American children. There are 393 million firearms in America, which has a population of roughly 334 million.
Other nations have passed laws controlling guns. When Australia took action on guns after a mass shooting, gun deaths fell by over 50 percent. Britain tightened gun laws after a mass shooting, and gun deaths dropped by almost 25 percent. New Zealand banned most semi-automatic weapons immediately after a mass shooting, resulting in a massive reduction of gun deaths.
Why can’t we pass gun laws to stop the killings? At the risk of repeating myself: the first step should be abolishing the Second Amendment to the Constitution which we interpret to mean that there will be no limits on gun ownership in the U.S. Next would be laws prohibiting citizens from owning guns and a buy-back program whereby the government would pay citizens to give up their weapons. That’s what other nations have done. Why can’t we?
Such laws would make us like all other advanced nations in the world. Isn’t it time that we rejoined the sensible world?
Tom Glenn, Writer 