Guns Do Kill People

Although this is not a subject about which I usually write, it is a subject with which I have become increasingly concerned. After the second college campus mass shooting in this country, last week at Northern Illinois University, I feel a desperate need to stop simply ranting with family and friends about the constant ramping up of our national gun violence epidemic, and join forces with those who are trying to do something about it. One of the human beings dearest to my heart, my seventeen year old niece, will soon be heading off to college. I have been holding my breath through her high school years, as she lives and attends school in Dallas, Texas, a place where gun ownership is seen as simply a god-given absolute. We don't yet know what college she will attend, but it really doesn't seem to matter, does it? With a statistic like this: Firearms are... the second most frequent cause of death overall for Americans ages 15 to 24, a college like Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia or Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, is no less likely to experience firearms tragedy than is Southern Methodist University (a place she is considering) in urban Dallas, Texas. In fact, as you of course know, those first two are the schools where we have recently seen gun violence erupt, with a timeline including yet others here.

We are all too familiar with the gun lobby's infamous dictum: "Guns don't kill people, people do," but it's time to quit letting the NRA and its friends get away with such crap. As Eddie Izzard says: "Guns don't kill people, people do, but I think the gun helps, you know?" And those guns are just way too easily attainable for people who want to use them.

Public health research has shown that firearms violence is directly related to firearms availability and density. What separates America from other Western, industrialized nations is not our overall rate of violence, but our rates of lethal violence—which can be directly traced to gun availability. (Violence Policy Center, Gun Violence page)

Consider this for a moment:

10 days before the attack, Kazmierczak (The Northern Illinois shooter) ordered the Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm pistol from a gun dealer in Champaign, Ill., picking up the weapons on Feb. 9 after a five-day waiting period.

On the same day he bought those firearms, Kazmierczak went online and purchased two Glock 33-round magazines that would allow his pistol to carry many more than the standard number of bullets. He bought the magazines from the same Internet company that had sold Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, a .22-caliber handgun. (Washington Post, 2/15/08.)

Of course our children don't have to be at school to find themselves in the way of a burst of random gunfire. They could be shopping at an upscale mall in Omaha, Nebraska, buying plus-size clothing at a Lane Bryant in Chicago, attending a town council meeting in Missouri. It seems to me that these incidents are becoming more and more frequent, and there is no way to predict where or when the next one will happen.

Some time ago I joined The Violence Policy Center, an amazing site where you can spend hours researching the facts on gun: violence, laws, industry, lobby, even a chilling set of facts about guns and terrorism. If you join, you will get updates on VPC actions and alerts. I had one this morning alerting me to a joint statement that the VPC has issued with The Brady Center and The Coalition to End Gun Violence in response to the most recent campus shootings. The text of that statement is here, and the action it urges us to take is

to call on the presidential candidates to make gun violence prevention a priority issue... demand that Congress hold hearings on gun violence prevention... and urge federal and state policymakers to act immediately to implement policies such as those outlined below (in the statement) that will work to reduce the carnage.

These organizations are entreating us to contact our Members of Congress and demand that they hold hearings" in the wake of these shootings--and in preparation for the inevitable shootings to come."

So, please, contact your Representative and Senators through the main U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 or look up the contact information for your elected officials at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/basics.

As the joint statement puts it: Mass shootings are not a force of nature unstoppable by man. They are the predictable result of our nation’s weak gun policies, and much can be done to prevent them.

Technorati Tags: campus shootings, gun control, gun violence prevention, Violence Policy Center,

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