Alright ya'll, I know it's been a minute, but there's so much going on right now, that I just had to say SOMETHING.
First, let me express my sincere condolences to the families of the victims, those who are injured, and to the Va. Tech family as a whole, words cannot express the devastation and complete helplessness that you all must be feeling.
Second, please excuse my language in the title of this post, but I'm really frustrated with the NRA'ers and their cronies always talking about "guns don't kill people, people kill people." As true as this may be, the fact is that if guns were not readily available for people to use, mass executions like this wouldn't go down.
Its no coincidence that out of the 26 industrialized nations in the World, the U.S. has the most liberal gun laws, and consequently, we have a problem with gun violence that eclipses that of the other 25 industrialized nations COMBINED. Yes, COMBINED, folks. Check out this statistic, the overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children under age 15 is nearly 12 times higher than that among children in the 25 other industrialized nations COMBINED. (Centers for Disease Control Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearm-Related Death Among Children--26 Industrialized Countries, February 7, 1997, Vol. 46, No.5. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm.)
Does anyone besides me see this as a problem? Moreover, addressing the black community directly, we have a problem that is even bigger than the gun violence problems facing White America. African Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, but in 2001, we suffered almost 25% of all firearm deaths – and 52% of all firearm homicides. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) Injury Mortality Reports, 2000 – 2001. http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html.) Folks, we have a problem in our community. Long gone are the days when we could duke it out in the yard, maybe using a trash can upside the head as our major means of force. No, today, with the rampant availability of guns, we are killing ourselves in record numbers.
So yes, although it takes a person to pull a trigger, perhaps we'd be better off if there were no trigger to pull in the first place.
--Notta
