Guns are hazardous to health. The NRA, too.
Heavy lobbying from the NRA caused the funding of the research of gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control to be cut in 1996 . Because, the NRA didn’t like the result.
Read more in this article here.
For instance, the risk of a member of family being killed in a household with firearms is three times as much as in those without. This is just homicides. The risk of suicides is even higher, five times as much.
Just ask Oscar Pistorius. If his version of the events leading to the death of Reeva Steenkamp is true, he – and she of course, too – would have been better off if it wasn’t for the gun he had in his home.
But it is not just that alone. Almost every day you hear about shooting incidents killing young people out on the streets. In Chicago that is more than one death a day. But we are so numb nowadays, that we only wake up when incidents like the on in Newtown are happening.
I will also include the so-called “police involved shootings”. Quite too often there are cases of “Shoot first, ask questions later”, especially when un-armed victims are involved. The sanctioning of police procedures that an officer is allowed to defend himself (i.e. kill) if he just feels slightly threatened, aggravates and escalates the gun violence on both sides.
You don’t have this kind of thing anywhere else in the world, except where you have civil unrest or the drug mafia rules the land.
The lobbying of the NRA to cut the research funding would make communists countries blush. I thought only in those countries the science research was manipulated and directed such that it would produce results – and only those results – desired by the controlling party. But it looks like, we have something like this right here in the United Status of America.
Instead the NRA spends money in campaigns to spread fear so that you’re urged to by more guns. They say you’re better off with them. Well, again just ask Pistorius.
I’m more scared for the NRA and the bullish behaviors of some of the supporters – some of them I think would not pass a mental check.
I just had to laugh when I heard the report last month about a California school district buying “14 military-grade weapons to defend against shootings”. What are they are going to do with them? Well, “Officials said the rifles will be stored in a safe on their respective campuses and will only be used to respond to attacks like the one on Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut last month.”
So that means the guns won’t help at all in the event of an attack, because they need to be retrieved from the safe first. Sorry, too late, folks. The kids are already dead, when you got them and you’re ready to respond.
I’m just waiting for the breaking news report, that the safe has been broken into, and the guns have been stolen.