Want to reduce gun violence? It’s simple. Take the strategy employed by public health to reduce fatalities from car accidents and apply the same strategy to guns. Here’s a summary of the results: “This public health approach has saved millions of lives. We can learn from public health successes – like car safety – and apply these lessons to preventing gun violence.”
The above quote is from a Washington, D.C. outfit called the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, one of many groups founded after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.
And here’s what a pediatrician writing an op-ed for The New York Times had to say about gun violence in 2016: “Please, can we stop framing this as an issue of rights — and see it as the public health crisis it is? We’ve organized to prevent deaths from cars and tobacco. It’s time we did this for guns, too.”
So, we seem to have total and complete agreement within the groups that want to reduce gun violence that a ‘public health approach’ is the best strategy by far, and the proof of the value of this strategy can be found in how deaths from auto accidents has dropped year after year.
There’s only one little problem, however. And the problem is that not only have fatal car accidents stopped dropping, but they have begun to show an increase at the same time that the number of cars on the road and the number of miles being driven by those cars is way down.
The National Safety Council estimates that total vehicle deaths for 2020 will be at least 42,060, which is an 8% increase over 2019. The mileage death rate for 2020 will probably increase by 24% over 2019, largely because the total number of miles driven last year has decreased by 13% from the previous year.
In case you’ve forgotten, 2020 was when the economy almost came to a complete halt because of Covid-19. Which is why the number of cars on the road and the number of miles driven by those cars went down from the year before. That being the case, how come we experienced such an increase in vehicle deaths when, if anything, the fatalities from car accidents in 2020 should have been way down? Duhhh…
Last year when gun fatalities spiked everyone immediately knew the reason. It was because so many people were going into gun shops and buying guns, a buying surge which is still going on. Now the fact that the reporter who covered this issue for The New York Times derived her evidence by using the number for all calls received by the FBI-NICS call center which basically is twice as many calls as the center receives for gun transfers, oh well, oh well.
It turns out that if you look at the trend of fatal car accidents from 1999 until now, deaths stayed above 40,000 from 1999 until 2006, and then began dropping to 35,000 until they levelled off in 2010 and stayed roughly the same until they increased again in 2016 and then went way up this past year.
This trend, believe it or not, happens to be more or less the same trend for gun deaths over the past 20 years: increased numbers until 2005, then a decline until 2014, then an upward trend again with really bad numbers in 2019 and even worse last year.
So, we have more guns and gun deaths go up. We have less cars on the road but car deaths also go up. Is there a chance that maybe the reasons for gun violence has nothing to do with how many Americans own guns?
Jun 23, 2021 @ 21:02:27
The question is: who owns the guns and what nguns do they own????