Today I called Senators Burr and Hagen, Representative McHenry, and Speaker Boehner about gun control in reference to the shooting in California yesterday in which 9 people were shot, 8 of them killed. All this because a guy was unhappy with his love life, or his wife, or girlfriend or something.
This was not an isolated incident. Every month 1,000 Americans are killed by gunfire. (*) They are victims of American Terrorists. Egyptian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans with airplanes on 9-11-01. Because of that act we went to war on the other side of world, spent more than a TRILLION dollars, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet that SAME number of Americans were killed AGAIN before the Christmas Day which followed the attack on 9-11-2001!
AND 3,000 more Americans have been killed by American Terrorists EVERY three months since then. That is 120,000 Americans gunned down and killed by American Terrorists since 9-11-2001. That's so far – we're still counting – and still shooting.
Isn’t this a national problem? What is the solution we are given? Arm everybody? Great - then a loud noise in a restaurant, or department store or mall and a number of people pull their guns out and what next? I hear a noise and pull my gun out, somebody else shoots at something, then I shoot at him, somebody else shoots at me, three or four other people shoot at him and me? Then everybody starts shooting? Huh?
I realize that a lot of Republican Party members of Congress have taken pledges to other organizations, which include Grover Norquist and the NRA, and who knows who or what else, and they place those pledges ABOVE their oath of office, and honor those pledges BEFORE they honor their oath of office, but STILL – doesn’t something need to be done?
All I ask is that we just start a democratic dialog in Congress and begin talking about our problem. Bring it out from under the rug, and talk about it. Will you help me?
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States (!n the year 2000, 84 people died each day by gunshot for suicide and 34 each day were homicide deaths.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state
n 2010 - the latest year for which detailed statistics are available - there were 12,996 murders in the US. Of those, 8,775 were caused by firearms. (excluding Florida and Illinois).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18herbert.html Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. . . more than a million people have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.
Number of murders committed in 1995 in the US: | 20,043 |
Number of murders committed with a firearm: | 13,673 |
Number of murders committed with a handgun: | 11,198 |
(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1995) | |
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