The United States has the highest rate of death from firearms in the world. The only way to stop young Black men from shooting each other and young White men from shooting up schools and stores and churches and everyplace else is to take away their guns. In fact, the only way to stop all gun crazy Americans from shooting people is to take away their guns.
“The U.S. (newpittsburghcourier.com) has the highest overall rate of death from firearms, nearly five times that of France, the nation with the second-highest rate. The U.S. (newpittsburghcourier.com) is the only high-income country where the number of civilian-owned guns exceeds the total number of people. The U.S. (newpittsburghcourier.com) has 67 million more firearms than it does people, a difference greater than the entire population of the U.K. The U.S. (newpittsburghcourier.com) has the highest death rate … [from] self-harm by firearm, more than three times higher than rates on France and Switzerland,” according to The Commonwealth Fund.
The U.S. is setting a record pace for mass killings in 2023. Mass killings are those that the FBI defines as having at least four victims. The “bloodshed represents just a fraction of the fatal violence that occurs in the U.S. annually” and “mass killings are happening with staggering frequency this year: An average of once every 6.53 days, according to an analysis of The AP/USA Today data,” says PBS.
About 20,200 persons in America were homicide victims in 2022 and 38,550 were injured. And as of May 2 this year, at least 13,959 persons have died from gun violence in the U.S., reports abcnews.go.com.
During the pandemic between 2020 and 2022, Americans bought nearly 60 million guns. Last year, the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court issued one of the worst gun crazy Second Amendment rulings in American history. In the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case, the court callously declared that Americans have a legal right to carry firearms in public without showing any justifiable need to do so regardless of the mass shootings occurring weekly throughout the country.
The Second Amendment doesn’t mean what many bloodthirsty Americans think it means. It’s the fault of the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court that in 2008 issued the worst gun crazy Second Amendment ruling in American history in the District of Columbia v. Heller case by erroneously concluding that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms.
Most scholars—including Michael Waldman, an attorney and professor as well as the author of “The Second Amendment: A Biography”—adamantly disagree with the Heller ruling by making it clear, based on historical records, “that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership [only] for purposes of military duty and collective security. It was drafted, after all, in the first years of post-colonial America, an era of scrappy citizen militias where the idea of a standing army—like that of the just-expelled British—evoked deep mistrust.”
The Second Amendment was never about crazy John Rambos running around willy-nilly blasting Bambi’s mom and other living creatures with AK-47s. It was only about militias—structured and organized military forces consisting of civilians to serve as or to supplement a regular army in an emergency. Period.
The only way to stop gun violence in America is to take away guns. People who possess guns should be required to jump through all types of hoops because that’s the only way America will stop being the gun murder capital of the world. If anyone thinks this proposal is too harsh, let’s agree at least to universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods, red flag laws, banning purchases by certain categories of mentally ill persons, making private sales subject to background checks and outlawing high-capacity magazines as well as assault-style weapons.
