Here’s an interesting perspective: The NRA doesn’t concern itself with gun violence. The NRA’s focus is selling more guns. I heard this insight in a conversation about the NRA on the Callie Crosley Show, WGBH, August 9, 2012.
And here’s a powerful description of what happens here in the U.S.: “Another Mass Killing Shocks America. Why?” That from Gary Younge in the August 13/20, 2012 issue of The Nation.
Younge talks about all the gun killing in the U.S., “a wretched yet constant feature of American life.” For example, there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the U.S., the highest concentration in the world. Guns kill 85 people daily in the U.S. However, Younge does note that access to guns “does not, by itself, lead to gun crime.”
But, “what links America’s high concentration of guns and relatively high level of guns deaths are the country’s high levels of inequality, segregation and poverty. For in countries with at least two of those features…you will find higher levels of gun deaths…. America is the only place in the Western world that has both rampant inequality and ample access to guns…. [and] a healthcare system in which large numbers of people are deprived of the mental health facilities they need, and you have laboratory conditions for sustained outbreaks of social violence involving guns.”
Younge ends this sad article with the following: “The shock resides not in the fact that a lrage number of people have been killed by a gunman – that happens every night in America – but that every now and then, the wrong people have died in the wrong place.” The movie theatre in Aurora, for example.
