When will we ever learn????
In case you have lost track, he is the LAX shooter. Considering there have been a couple more in the news in the last day or so I guess this is old news… How sad is that???
Archives For November 30, 1999
Source: No guns at home, so Japanese shoot ’em up in Guam – Itineraries on NBCNews.com.
Because guns are so hard to find, gun-related crime is extremely rare. They were used in only seven murders in Japan — a nation of about 130 million people — in 2011, the most recent year for official statistics. In the U.S., with 315 million people, there are more than 11,000 gun-related killings annually. The Japanese are proud of their low crime rate and generally support tough gun-control policies.
Given the propensity to violence in this country I can’t even imagine a country of 130 million only having seven murders in a year! I suspect there will be that many in Chicago within the next two days. How does Japan keep violence down to such a miniscule level? Part of it I’m sure is their culture. Even though Japan was one of the countries that started the last world war they basically have a very non-violent society now. They generally show great respect for each other, especially their elders. They are just not the type to have a lot of bravado as we in the U.S. seem to overflow with.
But there is also another major reason for such a low murder rate and that is guns are almost impossible to obtain in their society. The NRA is constantly harping that if the bad guys didn’t have guns they would learn to kill with other weapons but Japan seems to prove them wrong. I don’t think that Japan is devoid of bad guys. Human greed which spurns so much lawlessness is probably just as endemic in their country as it is in most others. When a gun makes killing so painless (at least for the one doing the shooting) it makes murder just too easy and a spur of the moment thing.
Too bad we can’t learn even the simplest lessons from our neighbors in other countries. If we could take the best ideas of each country and incorporate them here…. Instead we stubbornly insist that we alone are the only ones that can get anything right. How naive is that??
(CBS/AP) LILBURN, Ga. – A 69-year-old suburban Atlanta man faces a murder charge after authorities say he shot and killed a 22-year-old man who had mistakenly driven into his driveway.
An arrest warrant states that Rodrigo Abad Diaz of Duluth, Ga., was fatally shot in the head Saturday as he tried to drive away from Phillip Sailors’ home in Lilburn, northeast of Atlanta.
According to Diaz’s friends, who were in the vehicle at the time of the incident, the 22-year-old had received incorrect directions from a GPS device which led him to Sailors’ driveway, the Atlantic Journal-Constitution reports. They were in the area to pick up a friend.
Here is yet another sad story about a man who killed a boy because he turned into the wrong driveway. It is just another example of how our obsession with guns has created the environment for yet another tragedy. A World Trade Center worth of victims happened every month because of guns. When will we ever do something about this? Since the recent idiotic stands of the NRA seem to be destroying their power, I pray that more congressmen grow a backbone and are able to do something soon. Like many other things much of the rest of the world has already addressed this problem.
Source: G.O.P. Pulls Back on Immigration, Not on Guns – NYTimes.com.
Changes to gun laws, he said, have no such support. “They will have a rough row to hoe,” he said. “I have some donors who own gun stores who said they can’t keep stuff in the store.”
According to gun rights people and the NRA that represents them there is no need to change anything. Everything is fine just the way it is. Having a few kids killed in a class room and a few more killed in a movie theaters and shopping malls is just the collateral damage we have to pay so they we can go hunting and target shooting on the weekends. Everything is fine the way it is. Continue Reading…
Source: What We Don’t Know Is Killing Us – NYTimes.com.
That Mr. Obama had to make such a decree at all is a measure of the power of the gun lobby, which has effectively shut down government-financed research on gun violence for 17 years. Research on guns is crucial to any long-term effort to reduce death from guns. In other words, treat gun violence as a public health issue.
But that is precisely what the National Rifle Association and other opponents of firearms regulation do not want. In the absence of reliable data and data-driven policy recommendations, talk about guns inevitably lurches into the unknown, allowing abstractions, propaganda and ideology to fill the void and thwart change.
I find it incredibly hard to understand how we as a people can allow a single organization that is primarily funded by gun manufacturers to tell us that we can’t even study why so many die every year from violence each year. Surely my Republican friends out there are not really against studying gun violence. That is the only way we will ever get at the source of this almost overwhelming problem. Continue Reading…
Source: Just the facts: Gun violence in America – U.S. News.
The big picture:
Every year in the U.S., an average of more than 100,000 people are shot, according to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence.
Every day in the U.S., an average of 289 people are shot. Eighty-six of them die: 30 are murdered, 53 kill themselves, two die accidentally, and one is shot in a police intervention, the Brady Campaign reports.
RJ's Corner - Old Version 