With my Weekly Blurbs focusing on health and wellness, this week I decided to write about how guns are negatively impacting this.
I want to begin by focusing on The Declaration of Independence which starts out “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
From this we created our Constitution with the intention of meeting these ideals. With the number of guns on the streets and the gun violence occurring almost daily, which I discuss below, we must question whether we are living up to these ideals of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The use of guns and assault rifles is interfering with people living their lives. Can you feel safe today going into a Church, a supermarket, an outdoor concert, a massage parlor, a movie theatre, a doctor’s office, a school? You might not.
Do all these guns allow people who are not gun owners pursue the liberty that they desire to live their lives without fear? They do not.
And needless to say, people who are not gun owners cannot pursue the Happiness that our Founding Fathers specifically wrote into the Declaration of Independence if they live in fear of gun violence.
So, let’s take a look at real statistics on guns and gun violence in this country as these numbers will confirm that guns are impacting the lives of many in our country and affecting people’s feeling of safety.
• The United States is the only country on the entire planet with more guns (at least 400 million and counting) than people (335 million). No other country has even half as many guns per capita as we do.
• The number of guns manufactured in America has nearly tripled over the past two decades, from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020. (And it’s not as if guns wear out like light bulbs, refrigerators, or cars.)
• We endure more mass shootings than all other developed countries combined. It’s not even close.
• The frequency — and body count — of mass shootings has increased as well and keep in mind that if only 3 people died in a shooting, it’s not counted as a mass shooting because it needs to be 4 people who died.
• 13 of the 20 deadliest mass shootings since 1982 happened in just the past decade.
• There were 118 school shootings in 2018, doubling the previous record of 59. Then 119 in 2019. Then 114 in 2020. Then 249 (not a typo) in 2021. And already 137 so far in 2022 (with more than half the year still to go).
• The 3 deadliest years for school shootings in the past half-century are 2018, 2021, and 2022 (which, again, isn’t quite halfway over yet).
• There were over 24,000 gun deaths from suicide in 2021.
• Guns have become the leading cause of death among children in our country. Not disease. Not malnutrition. Not accidents. (Auto accidents had been the leading cause of death among children for decades until overtaken by guns in 2020.)
One of the main things that the Second Amendment supporters forget is that gun rights are not unlimited. Even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia wrote in the majority opinion in District of Columbia vs Heller supporting gun rights that this right was not unlimited. An example is while we have Freedom of Speech, we don’t have the freedom to yell fire in a crowded movie theatre. The key, for me, is having sensible limitations to absolute gun rights.
Finally, I want to end with a link to a song that a friend shared with me about the deaths of the kids and teachers in Uvalde. I think it’s very moving.
Jerry
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