Gun violence by the numbers

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. We are dealing with the ability of people who are sympathetic with the grievances of terrorists to easily acquire weapons more suited to war than hunting or self-defense. And that requires people to feel – not just feel deeply – because I get a lot of letters after this happens. There is little doubt that the nation has fallen far short of allocating resources to address that aspect of gun violence. She then repeated a previous claim that states with stricter gun laws had higher rates of mass shootings, a statement that has been debunked by an analysis of the actual numbers by organizations like the Centers for Disease Control, 24/7 Wall Street, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (per FactCheck.org), all of which showed a correlation between higher numbers of firearms-related deaths and less stringent gun laws. But he says only Congress has the capacity to impose meaningful reform. The committee concluded that “significant progress” could be made in reducing gun violence in as few as three to five years of research.

“The National Rifle Association has a stranglehold on Congress, and particularly Republicans in Congress, and so even the most common-sense law faces just a steep uphill climb”, he said. A total of 53 Republicans and one Democrat said the status quo should be left in place.

Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. If we had somehow gotten the research going, he said, we could have somehow found a solution to the gun violence without there being any restrictions on the Second Amendment.

It was “really chilling” for gun violence researchers to see the studies dry up, Rivara said. President Barack Obama has unsuccessfully asked for $10 million for gun violence research in the past two budgets. Conservatives respond by ensuring citizens maintain the ability to defend themselves with firearms; liberals respond by trying to make gun ownership as excruciating as possible.

Outsiders who try to make sense of America’s obsessive attachment to guns often look to the frontier mentality at the heart of the culture, a longstanding devotion to the right to bear arms, or deep-seated traditions of resisting potential tyranny.

Their mission: Deliver more than 2,000 signatures from physicians to members of Congress, urging them to reverse a almost 20-year congressional ban on federally funded gun violence research that was extended earlier this year. That ban has been continually renewed ever since. Mass shootings of strangers are, quite naturally, scarier and more attention-grabbing than ordinary homicides involving people known to the shooter. Gun laws are so restrictive that even firearm transfers between adult siblings in the same family aren’t exempt. For instance, a gun purchased over the Internet or from a private individual at a gun show is not subject to a background check because neither instance involves licensed gun sellers. Carried to such an extreme that Congressional leadership voted down measures to prevent suspected terrorists (“no-fly list”), felons and the mentally ill from obtaining guns – a day after the California shooting – because such measures may threaten to strip some innocent people of their rights to own guns.

There is public sentiment to support the effort. According to the Quinnipiac results, 90% of GOP voters support mandatory background checks for all gun buyers, 92% of independents agree, as do 98% of Democrats. Due to expedited legislative procedures on the bill, it only needed 51 votes to pass the Senate, taking all of its approved amendments with it. Representative Mike Thompson (D-California), chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said of Dickey’s new position: “He was never in opposition of doing research, he was in opposition to using that to harm the Second Amendment”.