Gun Control? No Thanks

We all know that the gun laws in the US are ridiculous and why – so the gun manufacturers can keep on selling their products and make huge profits, and that they command so many lobbyists and so much capital that they can control a government on that question. An editorial in the Toronto Star revealed that gun violence in that country claims a life every sixteen minutes; more Americans die from guns in six months than died from terrorism for the last twenty-five years and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; more Americans have died from guns since 1968 than on the battlefields of all the wars in American history; American children are fourteen times more likely to die from guns than children in other developed countries. Incredible figures, unbelievable that a few can control the many and continue the slaughter in the name of profit. Just hours before the San Bernadino massacre, a group of doctors went to Capitol Hill to present a petition of more than 2,000 signatures demanding an end to the two- decade funding freeze that has effectively killed public research into gun violence in the US and with it, any legislation that may have followed.

 In 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress stripped $2.6 million from the budget of The Centre for Disease Control that was earmarked for gun violence research and instead passed a bill that expressly forbid that agency from doing any research that "may be used to advocate or promote gun control." The result of this law and many others over time can be deduced from the figures for gun deaths per million in other developed countries – Japan, 0.1, Norway, 0.9, England, 0.9, Australia, 1.7, France, 2.0, Germany, 2.1, Canada, 5.6, US, 31.2. Only Mexico and Columbia (121.7 and 446.3 respectively) with their own special drug war problems have higher numbers. 

John Ayers.