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Sunday, May 14th, 2023

There’s no mystery about why the U.S. has so many gun deaths

Author:     Fareed Zakaria
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     May 12, 2023 / 11:07 a.m. EDT
 Link: There’s no mystery about why the U.S. has so many gun deaths
Stephan:  

Here is the hard truth about guns in this country, “Every day in America, more than 200 people are wounded by guns; 120 are killed by them. Of these 120, 11 are children and teens. The leading cause of mortality among children in America is now death by a gun. The same number of deaths — 120 — will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, every day, until we come to our senses and do something about it.” The problem is I’m not sure we are going to come to our senses.

Guns for sale are seen at a pawn shop in Ash Flat, Ark., in April 2020.
Credit:Terra Fondriest / The Washington Post

The tragic mass shooting last weekend in a Dallas suburb took place as I was leaving the country to visit Britain. I might as well have taken one of Elon Musk’s rockets and landed on a different planet. The Allen, Tex., massacre means that, so far in 2023, more than 15,000 Americans have died from gun violence. In 2021, the last year for which we have complete data, there were 48,830 gun-related deaths, of which 20,958 were gun homicides. In England and Wales, there were 31 gun homicides. Even accounting for its larger population, calculating deaths per 100,000 people, the United States in 2019 had roughly 100 times as many gun homicides as the United Kingdom.

A comparison of suicides is equally depressing. In 2021, 26,328 Americans took their own lives using guns. About half of the people who kill themselves […]

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