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
12 comments:
Grettings Notta. I hope you are well. In terms of guns and the problems they cause, I am a firm believer that maybe the use of guns in the US, and maybe even in the world is a sign of a bigger problem. I believe that there are several things that are play. 1) Human morality and the difficulty of pinning down what it should mean for any given society. 2) Free will, which is connected to number 1. If a person has free they chose to live by morals outside of the norm of most descent societies. 3) Cause and effect. This I will explain in terms of part of your comment. You mentioned a time when people would settle their conflicts with fist on the yard. Yet, there were also times thousands of years ago when people settled their problems by picking up a weapon a killing someone. There are been eras in history where there was no such as "legal recourse" in a number of ancient societies so violence as we unfortantely saw this week in Virginia is not new. Only the technology and means of media change. Maybe, the gun totting is simply the evolution of lets duke it out on the yard. As a martial arts teacher once said, "Any time that disagreements end up in fighting or violence both sides have lost. Both sides have failed to communicate and live properly." At the same time I think there is something to be said about the amount of weapons that are in the public sphere in American society. When I was kid my mother had a gun for safety. That is until a theif broke in the house stole all of her moned and the gun hidden under her mattress. She never bought another gun after that. Then when I was a kid I wanted a bee bee gun so bad, until a friend acidentally shot me in the face with said bee bee gun, and I am partially blind in my left eye because of the accident. Cause and Effect or elements of Murphy's Law - Anything that can happen will happen. At the end of the day the guns (alone) aren't the problem, the fact that humans have free will and can choose to go against the morality that is accepted by most rational human being, I feel, is the problem. So maybe the fist fights on the yard were just the prelude to the current reality we live in. Like Michael Jackson said in the song Beat It, "Nobody wants to be defeated."
it may be a choice of "pickin' our poison"...as much as i hate the glut of firearms in our communities (and the businesses that sell guns under the table) i'm not too comfortable having government being the only entity who is armed.
...and i've never owned a gun in my life!
You are soo right especially when it comes to homicides, suicides, and other deaths by guns or other things that are detrimental to our community.
Hey NOTTA'!
Nice to see you back in the blogosphere! I missed you!!!
TTBM
Thanks TTBM, I appreciate that! :) Although I don't know that I'm back full-time; you may just start getting sporadic posts from me! :)
I see that you haven’t posted in while… I hope all is well with you.
I like the way that you think!
ONE
Damian A. Davis
Thanks Damian, I appreciate you thinking about me! All is well, just trying to take care of some things. I hope to start back up sometime in the near future.
-Notta
come back to the blog world!
Thanks, blackstone, I may have to go back to blogging with all this foolishness going down these days!
Look at it this way: Now the Constitution is settled on the matter (for a while). If you want to outlaw guns, work for a Constitutional amendment. That's a clear goal and would be far more effective and immediate than a patchwork of statutes.
However, good luck telling Americans you want to repeal part of the Bill of Rights... lol.
Seems to me that the Founders had guns, carried them around sometimes, and used them frequently. How likely is it that they would sit down and write a measure into the Constitution that would allow the government to take those guns away? These guys just fought tyrrany. So while banning guns may be a noble goal, it seems immutably obvious that the Court got this one right. George Washington knew all about guns firsthand. It's silly, frankly, to imagine he would allow his to be taken away after fighting so hard against an encroaching power.
Nice blog you have here.
I have to disagree with you sista. Not all of who own guns thugs who do drive-bys. Like it or not I have a right to bear arms, and I live in Detroit, so I have to own a gun. God knows the police ain't about shit, and neighborhood watch consists of the neighborhood watching you be robbed blind. So you can be PC all you want, while you wait hours for the police to show up (if they show up at all) AFTER you have been robbed, carjacked or raped and the assailant is long gone. Like it or not, it's my right AND my duty to protect me, my property and my family, and the best way is with my trusty 9mm.
I just stumbled on this website.
This is a good blog and hope that you pick up writing for this joint.
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