I don’t know the answer to our ridiculous mass shootings record here in America, but I don’t think I’m the only one who’s uncomfortable with just how ingrained guns have become in American culture.
It really is a cultural thing for us at this point because if you even mention talking about gun control, people go nuts about their 2nd amendment rights being infringed and how we’ve currently got 75,000 gun control laws already on the books and those ones never seem to work … people who love guns are convinced that anything but guns must be the problem, and yet the rest of us who aren’t gun nuts – and even some who are – still beg to ask the question…
…why do we have to have all of these GUNS lying around the country?!
I mean, I thought the statistic of more guns than people that I read last night was pretty alarming, but then to compound that by considering that only 40% of Americans own guns … that means that here in the United States of America, roughly 140 million people own roughly 350 million guns.
I’d love to dig even deeper into that statistic because I think it would be real telling to pull out how many of those 140 million own only one gun vs. how many of them own lots and lots of guns because just like the extremists that we observe in politics and religion and everywhere else, I’ve got a feeling there are probably a few backwoods militias jacking those numbers up quite a bit to get to the full 350 million guns owned.
And I guess the reason I say that I don’t even know the answer anymore is because although I don’t want to ban guns entirely, it frankly makes me very uncomfortable that we have almost half our population that’s this emphatic about owning these tools whose primary motive is for killing. We don’t see knife enthusiasm to this extent, and cars at least have a primary focus of transportation despite being responsible for a lot of deaths as well.
What is it about guns that so many Americans seem to fetishize to the point where we can’t even talk about them after shootings have become literally a daily headline in our nation???
I read a rather scary notion earlier today where somebody roughly said that “the war on gun control was lost after Sandy Hook” because when we weren’t able to make a dent even after a classroom of school kids got murdered in cold blood, it was already clear that America at large simply wasn’t interested in talking about its gun problem because if you ask the people carrying the guns, they’re all convinced that we don’t have one … or that it would somehow be solved if we were all carrying even more guns.
And that makes me sad because even if it was the right answer, you’ll never pull 350 million guns back off the streets of America – Donald Trump has a better chance of rounding up all of the illegal immigrants and showing them the door … all by himself.
Are the people who are pro-gun simply too in love with their weapons for America to ever shake its mass shooting stats?
It’s one of those questions that I’m not sure if we’ll ever answer until the whole thing just implodes, and yet, just under three years ago you could argue that it already did implode when 20 first graders lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.
Since that tragedy at Sandy Hook, over 1,300 more people have been killed in over 1,000 individual shootings in the United States in the last 3 years.
That’s almost as many American soldiers who died during the war in Afghanistan, except these all happened on U.S. soil.
If another country had been responsible for so many American lives lost within our own borders, we’d have declared war three years ago, but because it’s in our own fault, and it’s about guns, instead we do nothing.