SO, HAVE WE WON “THEM”—you know, “those guys”—over, or are “our guys” going their way? I just received this statement in my email from Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility: one-third of the Washington state voters who support universal background checks for new purchases of guns ALSO support the gun lobby’s ballot measure that would prevent Washington state from having universal background checks!
Duh . . .
It’s all in how the initiatives are worded and how the pundits are pushing the issues, especially the rightwing talk-show hosts, who should be getting paid for PR.
Cartoon by Ingrid Rice.
Each gun killed four people
The following was lifted from an article titled “The math of mass shootings” b20, 2017.
Mass killings in the United States are most often carried out with guns, usually handguns, most of them obtained legally. There is no universally accepted definition of a mass shooting, and different organizations use different criteria.
In this piece we use a narrow definition and look only at the deadliest mass shootings, beginning Aug. 1, 1966, when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and killed 14 more people before police shot him to death.
The numbers here refer to 146 events in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (or two shooters in three cases). An average of eight people died during each event, often including the shooters.
1,048 victims
Each gun was used to kill an average of four people, not counting shooters. The 1,048 people came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background, and 161 were children or teenagers.
292 guns
Shooters brought an average of four weapons to each shooting; the Las Vegas music festival shooter had 23. We don’t know how all the guns were acquired, but of the ones we know, 168 were obtained legally and 48 were obtained illegally.
40 states and DC
Twenty-five percent of the mass shootings occurred in workplaces, and 1 in 8 took place at schools. Many took place in stores, restaurants and bars, or in religious or military locations. Others occurred in a wide variety of public places. While some locations have simply become shorthand for the tragedies that occurred there, others have added tragic phrases to the national vocabulary.
