On July 30 and Aug. 3 this year I read news items reporting gun killings and injuries, two on each of these days.
On July 30, in an Indianapolis home, a 4-year-old boy picked up a revolver from a table in his home and shot and killed a 3-year-old girl. On the same day, one or more passengers in a car on a Fort Wayne street shot and critically injured two passengers in another car. On Aug. 3, in Indianapolis, a man opened fire on a birthday group, with an assault-type weapon, killing two and injuring six more. Also on the second date, in Connecticut, a man who was asked to resign his job because he was caught stealing from his employer, pulled hand guns from his lunch box and shot and killed eight of his fellow workers and then killed himself.
I am not going into the details of these four incidents. My point is that in these two days, in one newspaper, there were reports of 12 deaths - perhaps more (I don't know if the two critically injured Fort Wayne men survived), and eight injuries - all because of the presence of guns. The child shooting was a tragedy because the mother of the 4-year-old had a gun and was very careless in making it easily accessible. In the other three incidents, even if the victims has been carrying guns, hopefully for their protection, it is very unlikely the results would have been different.
The National Rifle Association and its followers seem to believe that if all "law-abiding" people have guns for self protection, they would be more safe than those of us without guns. I do not believe this is true. The United States is flooded with guns now and we have more death and injury by guns, per unit of population, than any other industrialized nation, where guns are much more difficult to obtain.
If these four gun related tragedies were reported in one newspaper within a four-day period, how many other tragedies were reported in the rest of the United States during that same period, that are unknown to me?
As it is now, almost anyone in the U.S., "law-abiding" or not, can easily obtain the gun of his or her choice. Some cities and states have attempted to control gun sales, but at private gun shows, there is no control. There is no doubt in my mind, the more guns in the hands of we Americans, the more injury and death we can expect.
