This is the longest I have ever gone without updating this blog. In my defense, I have been very busy with my law practice, finishing up details on my latest book, working on my next, and very depressed about politics in general. Plus the huge storm that hit the east coast left me without power for five days.
I’ll try to get back into it tomorrow.
While this fact has been known to anyone doing the slightest bit of research, a recent chart done up by one group shows the relationship between stricter gun laws and gun deaths. And lo and behold, once again we learn that gun control works.
What they did is take the state with the least amount of gun deaths per capita (Massachusetts) and assign it a zero on the scale and the state with the most (Arizona) and assign it 100, and then compared the strictness of the gun laws in each state.
No matter what the gun lovers say, gun laws work. We see this in states that have strong gun laws and in countries that do.
You’d think this would be common sense, right?
(Here’s a link with more detail about how this chart was made.) Please stop messaging me about “my chart.” I didn’t make it.
What is it about America that causes us to have so many mass shootings? What makes us different? Why don’t other countries have this problem?
“Clearly, it’s a mental health issue,” claim the Republicans, while slashing the budget for mental health and taking away the mental health background check requirements for gun purchases.
“Other countries have mental health issues,” we reply, “yet they don’t have this problem.”
“Look! A squirrel!” they reply while stuffing wads of money into their pockets from the NRA.
The fact is that while we have 4.4% of the world’s population, we own 42% of the world’s guns. And those guns aren’t evenly spread out among Americans. Only about 23% of all Americans own guns, but 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns. And I’d be willing to bet that 99% of all the mass shootings come from that 3%.
So we Americans are allowing ourselves to be the deadliest advanced country in the world for the sake of 3% of the population that probably has mental problems we are not addressing. (For the record, the only countries with more gun violence per capita are poorer, less-developed places: Uruguay, Panama, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica, Guatamala, Swaziland, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras.)
But the Republican solution to gun violence here in America? “Let’s do nothing! Maybe that will work.”
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