Tuesday, September 13, 2011

What's the cure for gun deaths?

This editorial from the Charleston (WV) Gazette caught my eye.

First off, it's from West Virginia--a state I would have assumed to be pretty strongly "RKBA".

Secondly, they say what needs to be said:
Nearly all politicians fear the powerful right-to-bear-arms lobby, so they pretend not to notice that America leads the world in gun killings. U.S. gun murders at home are worse than all of America's casualty tolls in wars.

In January's issue of the Journal of Trauma, researchers compared gun death rates in 23 advanced nations. They found that America's toll was astoundingly worse than the rest of the world's. The report concluded:

"Among these 23 countries, 80 percent of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States, 86 percent of women killed by firearms were U.S. women, and 87 percent of children aged zero to 14 killed by firearms were U.S. children."

Anyway, While trying to find the Journal of Trauma article mentioned in the editorial, I found that Harvard's Injury Control Research Center has an interesting collection of studies about Guns and Death. They find that broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries.

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