I happened by sheer accident yesterday to tune into CNN for the noon report and actually found myself watching a story other than yet another interview with someone in Belarus. The young lady, DeAndra Dycus, is the mother of a kid who was shot and may or may not ever make any kind of decent recovery from his wounds. DeAndra, who lives in Indianapolis, now works with the MOMS group because she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to the violence caused by guns.
The last 4 days, from May 21 through May 24, our friends at the Gun Violence Archive have counted up 429 shootings, resulting in 542 victims, of whom 134 so far are dead. That’s 45 fatal shootings every day, and if this rate of violence were to continue, we would wind up with more than 16,000 men, women and children killed over the course of a year.
We came pretty close to that number in 2017, and we certainly exceeded it last year although we don’t yet have any validated data for the year that we also had to deal with Covid-19. What seems to be most disturbing about the surge of gun violence is that shootings which kill or injure 4 or more victims at the same time keep going up. There were 337 mass shootings in 2018 and 417 the following year. This past weekend alone there were 13 mass shootings with 11 deaths and 70 non-fatal injuries across eight separate states.
What’s going on? Truth is, nobody knows. DeAndra Dycus, who talked about her son’s terrible injuries at the Democratic National Convention last year, delivered another honest, clear and emotionally-wrenching narrative about gun violence yesterday on CNN, but like everyone else, she can only talk about what she thinks and hopes could turn the tide, not what she knows would work.
I’ll tell you what won’t work. What won’t work is to continue to pay the slightest bit of attention to the drumbeat about the importance of gun ‘rights’ from a crowd who wouldn’t know what effective gun control means if it hit them right in the face.
When I post a column on my website, I often receive at least one angry message from someone who accuses me of not understanding how important it is to defend ourselves against the ‘tyranny’ of the national state. They tell me about how Hitler disarmed everyone after 1933, or how Mao disarmed everyone after 1949. And as long as we have guns, it won’t happen here.
There’s only one little problem with this doomsday scenario which somehow gets around the fact that 350 men, women and children are either killed or scarred for life by gunfire every, single day. It’s nonsense. It’s total crap. There’s about as much chance that we would ever need to defend ourselves against a tyrannical government as there’s a chance that I’ll lose five pounds before I go for my annual medical checkup next week.
God forbid one of those geniuses out there who keeps spouting that nonsense about needing a gun to protect himself from ‘tyranny’ would take the trouble to read the gun-control laws passed by governments like Weimar Germany or the 2nd Republic of France, and then compare those laws to the federal laws that we passed to control guns in 1934, 1938, 1968 and 1994.
They would discover that all our gun-control laws state explicitly that the laws exist to help the cops fight crime. But the gun-control laws of every other government were passed because the government felt threatened by organized, armed groups from the Left and/or the Right. Who exactly are the Proud Boys worried about when they march around with their guns? Themselves?
I’m very pleased that DeAndra Dycus continues to add her voice to the debate about guns. I just hope her desire to promote community-based responses to gun violence includes some immediate plans for keeping the streets safe.
May 25, 2021 @ 12:25:53
And in just 2 of those 4 days, May 22 through May 23, our friends in Chicago had 55 people shot and 11 were killed. But like DeAndra Dycus son, DeAndre Knox, those killings were gang related. But no, it’s not gang violence, it’s “gun violence.”
Chicago, a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Chicago even has an “assault-weapon” ban and Illinois is one of the five states that require waiting periods for buying any firearm.
What’s going on? Maybe we need to stop looking at the low hanging fruit “guns” and start looking deeper. In Chicago, a city that is considered the most gang-infested city in the United States, with a population of over 100,000 active members from nearly 60 factions and, at last count, a person is wounded every 2 hours and 33 minutes and a person is murdered every 13 hours and 40 minutes. Is it really a gun problem?
In 2020 DeAndra Dycus said, after a shooting in Indianapolis of an 8-year-old boy who was hit by a stray bullet, “we have idiots trying to solve situations with gun violence.” And, like her son, the shooter has not been found. Dycus has even set up a support group for mothers “Purpose 4 My Pain” and yet no one is talking and/or giving help to law enforcement. It’s not a gun problem, it’s a society problem.
May 25, 2021 @ 21:43:07
“the gun-control laws of every other government were passed because the government felt threatened by organized, armed groups from the Left and/or the Right.”
….And Ironically, many of those Governments went on to Murder their own Citizens.