Yesterday was Halloween, but today we note something much more frightening. Gun violence in the US dwarfs gun violence in what we consider the civilized world and killed about five times as many people in 2001 as terrorists did.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/31/opinion/31HERB.html
An interesting question is "what rate of violence is needed to get people to notice"? Forty per day is insufficient --- would one hundred a day do it? Perhaps a shift in the nature of the violence would change attitudes. The DC random shootings captured the nation's attention (at least the media's attention) for three weeks, but did not impact the overall violence statistics. The same was true from Columbine.
It is curious to watch politicians bow to the NRA who, among other things, have fought plastic handguns (hard to detect), tungsten bullets, various forms of "cop killer" bullets, ballistics testing, and even the use of chemical tracers in fertilizer that might help the forensic analysis of a terrorist explosion.
It is possible that things could get worse. There are glaring loopholes in the ban on assault weapons (which is basically how Bushmaster and companies like it survive) and the ban itself goes away in 2004. At the same time the NRA and gun industry are worried about a decline of their traditional base and are developing new markets.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/11/01/guns/index.html
The Charlton Heston era at the NRA seems to be marked with anti-government paranoia (although they now have the White House and House they were gunning for). Heston's 1997 Free Congress Foundation Speech is classic and should be read by anyone interested in the current NRA.
http://www.vpc.org/nrainfo/heston.html
5:32:07 AM 
|
