USA - One person shot every 5.2 minutes

Discussion in 'World Events' started by James R, Nov 10, 2009.

  1. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,397
    That's 276 people every day. The following article is well worth a read:

    Emphasis in bold is mine. You may want to read the whole article (link below).

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    America's gun outrage: 276 people killed or wounded a day
    by BERNARD LAGAN (Australian journalist living in NY)
    November 9, 2009

    Link to full article in The Age

    By now you will have heard of Major Nidal Malak Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot 13 of his colleagues dead and wounded 31 inside the army's largest base, Fort Hood in Texas, last Thursday.

    Taryale Petter, John Herman, Jason Rodriques and Marcus Gonzalez are names you may not know.

    Taryale was only 15 years old. Early on Friday morning, aboard his Philadelphia school bus, he pulled a handgun from his bag and shot another child.

    Hermann, a Minnesota cop, on Tuesday shot dead a man who ran over a plastic traffic cone in a car park.

    On Friday morning, Rodriquez, 40, walked into the Florida engineering consultancy from which he had been sacked and opened fire, killing a young father and wounding five others.

    Gonzalez, 29, who was jilted in love, shot dead four people on Wednesday in the North Carolina town that inspired fictitious Mayberry – the almost crime-free, one-traffic-light town, inspired by the 1960s Andy Griffith Show.

    There are more, a lot more, from the past week. Such as Robert Appointee who, on Sunday, the opening day of the Maine deer-hunting season, attached a rope to his rifle and tried to haul it up to his treetop hideaway. He shot himself.

    Or poor Michelle Valentine of Rhode Island who, this week, distraught over a broken love affair, held a gun to her head. When she wouldn't put it down, the police shot her.

    Or New York policeman James Pileggi, who, on Thursday night, was showing his new laser-guided pistol to his best friend. It went off. His best friend died.

    I could go on, of course. Another week of guns and blood across America and before a public and polity so astonishingly impervious to the carnage that it is treated almost as if it were measles.

    After 15-year-old Alex Bolar was shot and killed while playing in a park near his Memphis school on Wednesday, the Reverend Joe Hunter, who helps teens in the neighbourhood, railed against the deafness.

    “Give me a break,” Hunter said. “If we can't get in an uproar about that, what can we get in an uproar about?"

    On average, guns kill or wound 276 people every day in America. Of those shot, about 75 adults and nine children die.

    That adds up to just over 100,000 victims of gun violence a year. The rate of firearm murders in the United States is about 16 times that in Australia and 26 times that in Britain.


    In 2000, Britain's Home Office published a study that compared murder rates in the world's capital cities. Canberra had 0.64 homicides per 100,000 people. London had three times that rate. Washington, DC's, murder rate was 93 times that of Canberra's.

    Martin Bryant was the Tasmanian misfit who, on an April afternoon in 1996, used two military-style assault rifles to take the lives of 35 people in eight, dreadful minutes.

    To his lasting credit, the then newly elected prime minister, John Howard, seized the moment and stared down the gun lobby to give Australia one of the tightest sets of gun ownership laws in the world. He declared at the time: ''I hate guns. One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns ... We do not want the American disease imported into Australia."

    Australia endured 11 mass shootings in the decade leading to the day Bryant ran amok. There have been none since.

    It is, of course, wishful thinking to expect that an American president could, or would want, to intervene in the way Howard did to curtail gun ownership.

    Emboldened by the Second Amendment which, they contend, still protects their right to bear arms, many Americans, in the words of one of their greater jurists, Joseph Story, consider gun ownership to be the palladium of the liberties of the republic.

    ...

    New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the very few leading politicians who has stood up to the National Rifle Association. He may be hated for it, but Bloomberg has made it very hard to own a handgun legally in New York.

    New York police frisk hundreds of thousands of people annually to enforce his law. In September, Bloomberg sent out undercover investigators with hidden cameras, to prove how easy it was for people who would fail a background check for gun ownership to simply roll up to weekend gun shows in other states and buy whatever weapon they wanted.

    When the undercover agents warned they wouldn't pass a background check, 19 out of 30 gun sellers took their money anyway and handed over the guns. One thing the National Rifle Association can't explain is why New York's murder rate is on track this year to dip below 500 - the lowest since 1963, when reliable figures became available. In 1990, the bloodiest year in the city's history, there were 2245 murders.

    However Bloomberg can't change America's relationship with guns by himself. Will President Barack Obama help?

    ...

    It doesn't help that Hasan simply walked into the Guns Galore shop in Killeen, Texas, and bought the gun he used, an FN Herstal Five-seveN, quite legally. According to the website, they sell for about $US1000 and are about the most murderous handgun it is possible to buy, designed to shred body armour and favoured by the Mexican drug cartels.

    ...
     
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  3. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    72,825
    Thats crazy.
     
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  5. deicider got omnicidead Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    443
    james r,what is the point of ur thread?
    What is ur question or ur statement.
    just askin.
     
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  7. Echo3Romeo One man wolfpack Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,196
    I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

    The Five Seven is not "designed to shred body armor". Its round carries slightly less energy than a .22 Hornet. The 5.7x28mm cartridge is unique because, as a bottlenecked cartridge, it has an exceptionally high velocity for a pistol round. Initially designed for the FN P90 submachine gun, there is one variant of the 5.7x28 that has beyond armor ability - the FN SS190 steel-cored AP load - and it is restricted for sale to only law enforcement and military under US law, just like AP loads that are made in any other common handgun caliber.

    As usual, anytime a shooting happens in the US it doesn't take very long for the media abroad to work the "crazy Americans with their easily available COPKILLER/ARMORPIERCING/EXTREMELY POWERFUL guns their government refused to restrict" angle. This is just another one of them. Which happens to be exceptionally bad, even by those standards.
     
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    54,036
    That's hardly enough. We could do better with full auto.
     
  9. CutsieMarie89 Zen Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,485
    I used to be neutral about civilians and their beloved guns, but after I was shot, there just isn't any sympathy left. I'd blindly support any measure that insured stricter gun control.
     
  10. Gustav Banned Banned

    Messages:
    12,575
    it would be nice if mr lagan, a freedom hater, is deported from our great shores.
    these anti american tirades are vindictive and bigoted towards this sacred nation and her peoples. in fact, this entire thread can only serve to provide more cause for animus against this beacon of freedom we call america.

    i mean......

    no
    you are crazy

    :shrug:

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    Senator Accuses Anti-Gun Group of Exploiting Fort Hood Massacre

    Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina is lashing out against the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, accusing the group of exploiting the deadly rampage to oppose his gun lobby backed bill -- which seeks to protect veterans' rights to gun ownership.



    i call for an investigation of possible foreign funding and support for these anti gun groups. i suggest we start in australia. perhaps orgs in universities.
     
  11. John99 Banned Banned

    Messages:
    22,046
    as someone has already mentioned, there are technical errors in the article but to point them out is not my job.

    on a much larger scale, the author should learn that things dont begin or end with the u.s. also, people dont realize that the u.s is NOT europe, austrslia or canada.
     
  12. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,391
    Well, that's patently offensive. I can only imagine the uproar that would ensue if a US President were to speak of Australia as slaves, or a contagious disease.

    At least you were savvy enough not to quote the material about "red-necked rage," anyway.

    Still, one has to wonder at your motivations for recommending a puff piece like this article, riven as it is with cheap rhetoric and abuse of statistics. Surely there's something else out there with more genuine policy content, and less condescension?

    But hey, why bother looking at, say, overall violent crime rates in the countries in question, when you can look down your nose at the gun-crazy rednecks.

    I suppose that's the most one can expect from a penal colony full of alcoholic bumpkins. You're the bastards who gave us Rupert Murdoch, after all.
     
  13. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,049
    james though i agree with you this comparision is slightly unfair. Canberra isnt a real city in the sense that london is and i assume washington is. From what i rember it has even less people than adelaide and the vast majority are public servants, pollies, diplomats ect because its a created city strictly for the purpose of housing parliment house and the goverment. The comparision would have been better with melbourne or sydney because they are TRUE cities in the sense that they exist for people to live there rather than having been created to stop an argument between melbourne and sydney as to where the goverment should be located

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  14. superstring01 Moderator

    Messages:
    12,110
    Yes. . . yes. It's terrible here in the USA. Don't ever come. Avoid the heart-ache. You'll be terribly missed.

    ~String
     
  15. mike47 Banned Banned

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    2,117
    276 a day is a lot but the US has more than 300 million people .
    I am more worried about roads accidents than fire arms shootings .
    Some people drink or take drugs and drive and others are complete monkeys behind the wheels .
     
  16. superstring01 Moderator

    Messages:
    12,110
    Good point.

    About 15,000 people are murdered every year in the USA. Remove yourself from the really blighted areas, and homicide becomes vanishingly inconsequential. Deaths in cars number something like 60,000 and don't taper off in the suburbs.

    ~String
     
  17. draqon Banned Banned

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    35,006
    it's normal for a multi-cultural industrial country.
     
  18. Anti-Flag Pun intended Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,714
    And is he still alive?
     
  19. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,391
    For comparison: 7,945 people are injured in auto accidents in the US per day, and another 115 people die every day in auto accidents.

    There are almost 3 million victims of auto accidents in the US each year, compared to 100k victims of gun violence.
     
  20. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    20,855
  21. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,397
    Yeah, sorry. I ought to have posted a question.

    My question to Americans is: how long will it take before the penny drops and you all make the connection between gun deaths and gun ownership?

    Now, I'm expecting all the gun owners here to say "But I'm a responsible gun owner! It's only idiots who don't know how to handle guns properly who get themselves shot."

    So, I'd also like to ask: Sure, you may be a responsible gun owner, but think about it. Is everybody you know who owns a gun as responsible and sensible with guns as you are? Have you come across people being stupid with guns? What's your personal experience in this area?

    Lastly, I'd like to ask: do you all think that it's a good thing that people can roll up to a gun fair and purchase high-powered weapons when they wouldn't pass any kind of police background check?
     
  22. superstring01 Moderator

    Messages:
    12,110
    See, the problem is, if you ban guns, the only people who will be without them are the ones who have them legally. There is no correlation between stricter gun laws, in the US, and lower gun violence. It's not like criminals are going to hand in their guns if bans go into effect.

    I've had a Kimber Custom Chrome for a little while and a riffle that my dad gave me years ago. Were a ban to go into effect, I'd have to relinquish my guns, but the local drug lords in Cleveland wouldn't even be phased.

    ~String
     
  23. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    9,391
    That you imagine we haven't indicates that you're even more bigoted than I'd realized.

    There are other considerations in gun policy than controlling gun deaths - as you've had explained to you before, repeatedly and at length.

    Let's take a moment to note how assiduously both you and your smear article avoid the issue of violent crime in general, for example.

    If you want to converse with strawmen, you hardly need to post here to do so.

    Do you imagine that only gun owners are in favor of the Second Amendment?

    Of course not. And polls consistently show that overwhelming majorities of Americans - and also of gun owners specifically - oppose such loopholes.

    Now some questions for you:

    Do you know how many states already prohibit such sales, and what percentage of the US population lives in them?

    Do you understand the Constitutional issues that bear on the question of the federal government restricting intra-state trade?

    Are you aware of the federal legislation on this issue currently in the legislative process?

    Do you have any grip on this issue at all, or is it just scare statistics and aspersions about American intelligence?
     

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