Posted on 10/11/2015 5:23:59 PM PDT by smokingfrog
If a disease killed 30,000 a year in one country, you'd expect a travel warning. Not in America.
** snip **
The recent shootings in Roseburg, Oregon, were, in President Obama's words, "routine" -- just another disturbed young man taking his troubles out on his English teacher and classmates. (Having taught English in a community college for 40 years, I took this event more personally than most.) Obama expressed his frustration at the impossibility of controlling hundreds of millions of firearms, and the commentariat wrung its collective hands about it.
Others, including the ineffable Donald Trump, have blamed Roseburg on the lack of guns. If only the teacher and his students had been packing, he argued, they would have made short work of the shooter. Knowing what I do about teachers and soldiers, I doubt that arming them would have done anything but raise the body count through friendly fire.
Public-health experts have added up the "butcher's bill" of gun violence, but the message has not yet sunk in. If anything, the Americans seem increasingly deaf to it.
Ebola took almost two years to kill as many West Africans as gunshots have killed Americans so far this year. Since 2012, when it was first identified, MERS has killed just 568 people. Gunshots kill that many Americans every 19 days.
Admittedly, we have bigger public health problems than American gunshot deaths. According to Worldometers, by early October about 750,000 people worldwide had died of malaria this year, 1.2 million of HIV/AIDS, and 3.8 million from smoking.
(Excerpt) Read more at thetyee.ca ...
I'm not sure about that. I think Gary Kleck estimated something like 10% to 15% - not counting any police shootings.
We’re #111!
Vaccines work.
They work by training the body to provide its own defense.
On occasion it backfires, scarring the he11 out of “anti vaxxers”, but we know their fears of rare high profile events is outweighed by the unseen prevention occurring orders of magnitude more often.
Medical malpractice kills almost 200,000 every year. Where are the medical warnings? Where is the outrage. And then, there is abortion....
Except for the suicides, these people are victims of unconstitutional denial of their 2nd amendment right to self-defense. They have a right to have someone else pay for their birth control pills though.
A Public Health Disaster = Gun Free Zones.
Social Darwinism at work.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.