Thursday, March 12, 2009

Guns Amok

Run Amok - 'a murderous frenzy or rage'

Three more murderous rampages recently occurred in March in which firearms were used, one in Alabama, another in Germany and the killing of a pastor during a religious sermon in Illinois.

Yet there can be no debate on the gun issue as the common man is brow beaten into submission by slogans, "Guns don't kill people, people do!", "If owning a gun is made a crime, Only Criminals will have Guns!"

When someone in Java or Malaysia went Amuco centuries past, there was only so much murder they could accomplish with a war club and keris before being overpowered.

Is the threat of death by Amuco just another weight, another burden we must accept? The Dread of Damocles, of being gunned down, whether it be at a High School, a University, a Metal Concert, Church services, out shopping or while merely sitting on our front porch?

This past year Chicago experienced a sad spike in murders due to gun violence. The University of Chicago produced a study Gun Violence among School-Age youth in Chicago:
A total of 510 people were murdered in chicago during 2008. eighty percent of these victims were killed by gunfire. nearly half were between the ages of 10 and 25, and the vast majority were male. The dramatic overrepresentation of both young males and firearms in homicide is not unique to chicago, nor are these patterns new. Yet over the past 50 years, our society has made far less progress in understanding how to protect our citizens from gun violence (and violence more broadly) than we have learned about how to protect citizens from other serious threats to life and health.

I could list dates and numbers of persons killed in the recent murderous shootings rampages but I'm not going to use the sorrows of others to ply my argument. I don't have the answer. I don't know the magic fix to this problem. But, isn't it worth discussing? Isn't it worth attempting to disrupt the cycle? Couldn't the Laissez-faire market take a break from giving billions for Banker Bonuses and Bailouts and the never ending Black Hole of the Military Industrial Complex? Or is that just more government socialism?

1 comment:

Grung_e_Gene said...

I'm adding this into the comment window because of it's sarcastic tone; Even uber sex pot Angelina Jolie is unsafe from the gun debate. From the link:

Britain's advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority said the ad for the DVD version of Universal Pictures' 2008 action flick "Wanted" breached ad codes and should not be broadcast.

There were 59 firearm-related homicides in England and Wales in 2006-2007, compared to the more than 10,000 gun-related killings reported by the FBI in the United States in 2007.