Congratulations to the National Rifle Association, gun manufacturers and the politicians they keep in line.
Less than two months after 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured in a shooting at a Las Vegas concert, and less than a month after 26 people were shot dead in a church in Texas, the conversation about gun control – about doing anything to slow gun violence, really – is over in Washington.
In fact, the only way those horrible shootings are still reverberating today is at the cash register, as a new single-day record for background checks – the best measure of gun sales – was set on Black Friday, a sign that it is the NRA’s call for more gun ownership, not the desire of a majority of Americans for stricter laws, that is winning out.
Too many people in power, it seems, are just fine with gun violence being part of American life.
On Nov. 24, the FBI received more than 200,000 requests for background checks on firearm sales, a 10 percent increase over last year’s Black Friday, the previous record holder.
That comes after 2016 set an annual record, with more than 27 million background checks, more than three times the number performed in 2000. Another record year is likely in 2017.
And that’s not someone buying their first gun; it’s someone buying more guns.
There are 300 million or so firearms in the United States, twice as many as in 1968, but they are owned by far fewer people; the number of households with a gun has fallen from 45 percent in the 1970s to around 31 percent today. Nearly half of all guns are owned by just 3 percent of the population – 7.7 million people who own an average of 17 guns each.
And it is the guns that set us apart. Other countries struggle with mental illness, violent crime and poverty, too, but they don’t have the guns we do – 42 percent of the world’s privately owned firearms, for just 4.4 percent of the world’s population – and, consequently, other countries have neither the mass shootings nor the everyday gun violence that is endemic in the U.S.
The more guns available, the more likely it is that one will end up in the wrong hands, or come out when an argument escalates, or be found by a distraught person at the wrong time, or go off when it shouldn’t.
As reported in The New York Times, a person in New York City is as likely as someone in London to be robbed, but 54 times more likely to be killed in that robbery. In 2013, we had nearly 34,000 deaths from guns; Japan, with a third of our population, had 13.
We should be asking what we can do about all the guns, or the ease at which they are available. Instead, the NRA, gun manufacturers and the politicians they keep in line wave off gun violence as something inherent in our culture, something to send thoughts and prayers toward, but little else. As if it were a hurricane, an act of God.
This month, or next, or the one after that, we’ll have another mass shooting. In between, there will be domestic-violence murders, random shootings and gun suicides in numbers not seen anywhere else in the free world. And that, apparently, is just part of the cost of being an American.
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