This is my second post about gun murders in America. The first one was about the callous murder of two reporters who were doing their job. This time it’s about another mass shooting. Something that seems to happen so regularly even us in the UK are betting desensitised from the reports of another one.
A few days ago, a young man walked into Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Origon, America and opened fire with multiple weapons. When he had finished 10 people were lying dead and 7 more injured. This is the biggest mass shooting in America since an unknown murderer killed 9 and injured 17 in Wako, Texas in May 2015.
After the event’s in Roseburg, American President Barack Obama asked the press to compare gun deaths in the last decade to Americans killed by terrorists. The press did exactly what he asked for. This one also adds UK gun deaths. One of the countries with the lowest gun death figures as a comparison.
One organisation that you would expect to be quite vocal about this, the NRA, went quiet on social media after the killings. That seems to be their standard procedure after this sort of thing. It tends to show the flaws in their arguments that the only way to stop this sort of thing is their battle cry of “MORE GUNS”
When I am writing this, there has been 294 mass shootings – This definition is “four or more people shot, not necessary killed, in one event“. All data is from the mass shooting tracker website. A website that keeps track of how many people have been shot in this way.
From the data, I can tell you that we are on day 276 of 2015 and in that time America has seen, just a smidgen over 1 mass shooting a day [ It’s actually 1.07 per day ]. In this time we have seen 375 people lose their lives and 1,089 people injured. That’s 1.36 people a day killed and 3.95 injured.
The current data is available on the website. The data I used for the above, you can download from the link on the right.
The data stops on October 1, 2015 but over the rest of the year, the figures will increase.
From someone who lives in the UK where gun deaths are about one a week. In America this figure is one every 37 minutes!
Epilogue:
This appeared on my facebook timeline after I finished the post so I have put it here. I feel it sums up the American fascination with guns over making health care possible for all of its people.
“… Or hey how about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48 hour waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound probe up the ass ( just because ). Let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”
