2nd Amendment Doesn't Protect Children

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Gun rights advocates, the NRA, and Republican Party have never been serious when calling for the enforcement of the 2^nd Amendment, because they have never called for the enforcement of a child’s right of self-defense, the most vulnerable affected by gun violence, only adults’.

Otherwise, they would support U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s first-of-its-kind advisory declaring gun violence a national public health crisis and recommending it be treated as such.

SFGate

The 40-page publication from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released this week outlines the scope of firearm violence, its impact on victims and communities and a slew of policy suggestions for lawmakers, community leaders and health systems.

Dr. Murthy’s advisory said that firearm-related injury has been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents since 2020 — when it surpassed car accidents — and that ever-common instances of gun violence are taking not only a physical but also a mental toll on survivors, families and community members at large.

A recent national survey found that 54% of U.S. adults or their family members have experienced a firearm-related incident. And, linking gun violence to mental health, the advisory also notes that nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults say they worry either sometimes, almost every day or daily about a loved one becoming a victim.

Some of the advisory's recommendations — which, despite being strongly worded, are not enforceable — include increasing federal funding for gun violence prevention research, more community investment in educational programs and mental health resources and nationwide policy changes like an assault weapons ban and universal background checks.

AMA President Bruce A. Scott, M.D,, immediately responded to Dr. Murthy’s advisory: “Across the country, physicians everywhere treat patients and families afflicted by firearm violence. We see the physical and emotional harm firsthand, and we dread the too-often conversations with parents, spouses, and even children in which we tell them their loved one did not make it.

“Firearm violence is indeed a public health crisis in the United States, and the data now show it touches the majority of Americans. We applaud the Office of the Surgeon General for issuing this advisory and for outlining an evidence-based public health approach to addressing firearm violence,” said Dr. Scott.

I wrote a 2016 Huffington Post piece when the American Medical Association first adopted a policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution," at their annual convention.

That was when the tide began turning in some states and a powerful new gun control group emerged called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom's Demand Action. It was when former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but because it lacked foot soldiers merged with the women’s groups and now totals 3.5 million supporters.

Maybe that is why an eight-member Supreme Court at the time allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in the massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates at the time.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were in fact enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia banned semiautomatic rifles.

Among the stark statistics: 48,204 people have died from firearm-related injuries (including suicides, homicides and unintentional deaths) in 2022, after that number reached a near three-decade high the previous year, reports NPR.

The rate of firearm-related suicide grew by 20% between 2012 and 2022, with the highest increases among young people between 10 and 34 years old—our children!

And Nicholas Kristof wrote an earlier NYTimes Op-ed that said more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States -- a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

A public health approach, Murthy said in the report, can guide the nation’s strategy and actions “as it has done in the past with successful efforts to address tobacco-related disease and motor vehicle crashes.”

Our Surgeon General has now begun a national discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics--eradication of the carriers of that violence, which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons in all states.

Can we hope as much, given the Republican Party has opposed almost any form of gun regulation, given the upcoming Presidential election?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"Australians Not Like U.S."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Huffington Post

We happened to be in Australia in 2015 when this Sydney journalist voiced his reaction to another mass killing in America. "The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns."

And as I update this column today, there were four more mass shootings on the first weekend of summer, 2024—27 injured or killed this last weekend.

We are two countries with almost identical demographics, but where the Australian minimum wage for full-time, working adults is more than $16Aus per hour and Australian's have created a health care system that pays for all normal health care costs (as opposed to catastrophic events), though hospital care is free for every Australian citizen.

Yet we cannot control the gun violence that Australians have been able to. It is a startling contrast that I first wrote about during the Obama administration.

"Australia is not like the U.S." said commentator Michael Pascoe in the Sydney Morning Herald in response to President Obama's remarks on the Umpqua Community College killings by a deranged killer, whose mother kept at least 8 guns at home, in addition to the 6 guns plus ammunition carried by the shooter in the slaughter of college students and a teacher.

"We know that other countries in response to one mass shooting have managed to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings," said President Obama. "Friends of ours, allies of ours, Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours."

In fact, the US now has a gun homicide rate 370 times that of Australia's. "Unlike the US," said Pascoe, "we collectively decided to have a decent social safety net, the concept of a living wage and make good education freely available. Most of us are wary of those with extreme views of any kind."

Our gun problem of course extends beyond mass violence, says the LA Times. In 2014 alone, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 11,208 people shot to death, 33,636 injured by gunfire and 21,175 who killed themselves with a gun. That's a total of 66,019 people who were killed or injured by a gun, which comes out to 1,269 per week, 180 a day or 7.5 per hour.

Current Australian gun laws were passed after 35 were killed and 23 wounded in 1996. There hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since. At the heart of the new laws was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country's new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a "genuine reason" for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase, as well as a 28-day waiting period while backgrounds were checked. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

"The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns," said Pasco. "It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way."

It has been known for years by those who research gun violence that more gun killings occur in households owning guns. A new survey in the Annals of Internal Medicine narrows down some of the causal relationship between guns and death by finding conclusively that having a gun in your home makes you more likely to successfully attempt suicide. The authors of the survey also found with a lesser degree of certainty that people with guns in their home are more likely to be the victims of a homicide.

According to data gleaned from State and Justice departments for the period between 2001-2011, there have, in fact, been many, many more Americans killed by gun violence than by terrorism. During that 10-year period, some 130,347 have lost their lives to gun violence, compared to the approximately 3,000 Americans killed in acts of terrorism.

"It's all fodder for the deranged fanatics of the American gun lobby, with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. It's fuel for the paranoid interpretation of a line in the constitution that is a blatant anachronism," said the study

We have to be a very sick society to have allowed this to happen. We are so good at preventing foreign terrorists from attacking us, but not protecting Americans from domestic terrorists. We should understand that gun violence itself is an act of terror. And those that support unrestricted use and purchase of guns are the sponsors of domestic terrorism.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

A Greater Lawlessness Causes Greater Gun Violence

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

I wrote this Huffington Post piece in 2017 after the October 1 killing of 58 people with bump stock-equipped assault rifles at a Las Vegas music festival. It was one in a series on the greater lawlessness tearing apart Americans.

Nothing has changed with the Supreme Court now deciding the executive government, in the form of its ATF agency, did not have the power to outlaw bump stocks because when equipped with same, an assault rifle didn’t fit the exact definition of a machine gun, which is banned for civilian use.

The SCOTUS majority has caused a greater lawlessness because there is now no law or regulation to prevent the use of bump stocks in more mass killings.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has been the credo of NRA, gun lobby and most Republicans since the 1980s when gun manufacturers came up with automatic pistols, so that guns could fire more rapidly.

But Las Vegas shooter Stephan Paddock had no discernible mental illness, criminal record — or anger problems, according to his brothers. The NRA will try in vain to find a reason this inhuman act was committed when there is no reason, other than the fact that military-style weapons are legal in most of America and easily obtainable.

Paddock’s assault rifles reportedly fired 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes, which is more than one round per second (1.5 rounds, actually). How is that not a machine gun?

Only guns can kill that many people — always the most vulnerable unable to defend themselves. His brothers didn’t even know he was a gun nut who owned more than 30 weapons and was able to smuggle in 10 suitcases containing 23 of those weapons without any Mandalay Bay Hotel staff even noticing such an oddity. Who needs that many suitcases in a hotel room?

President Trump’s administration did ban bump stocks at the time. But not for long with the Supreme Court majority now stepping in to make them legal again.

No existing laws now protect children in elementary and high schools from military-style assault rifles because in Justice Alito’s words, congress must decide, which said congress hasn’t been able to do.

For shame on the conservative SCOTUS majority.

Australia, the country most like US in population, had a similar gun problem until 36 people were killed in Port Arthur, and Prime Minister John Howard was able to pass strict gun control laws in 1996, the same year of the Port Arthur massacre. There hasn’t been a mass killing since then in Australia.

Australians apparently don’t believe owning an assault rifle is the ticket to manhood. Their gun control laws are maintained by weapon buyback programs and the requirement that gun owners must belong to a certified gun club.

How did our gun laws become so lax that military-style weapons are this easy to obtain? It was a little-known Supreme Court decision authored by its most extreme ideologue, Justice Antonin Scalia, in the 1980s which said that said gun owners no longer must heed the constitutional Second Amendment stricture that owners of such guns be members of a well-regulated militia.

Our founding fathers must have put the works, “a well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment for a reason. Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was not a member of a well-regulated militia.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

'Armed and Ready'...for What?

Answering Kennedy’s Call

NYTimes.com

The NY Times front-page picture of a teacher “armed and ready” to wear a gun in her classroom shocked and disheartened me. I remember the fear I felt as a small child hunkering under classroom desks in civil defense drills during the cold war.

And the irony of teachers wanting to arm themselves to protect their schools shouldn’t be lost with the current celebration of the killing of Al Qaeda’s number two—Ayman al Zuwahiri. This is looking in the rear-view mirror of foreign terrorism now vanquished, when domestic terrorism holds the greatest threat to our national security.

How does that teacher think her children will feel seeing her arming herself, and other staff whose job it is to care for them?

“Today, after a seemingly endless series of mass shootings,’ said the NYTimes, “the strategy has become a leading solution promoted by Republicans and gun rights advocates, who say that allowing teachers, principals and superintendents to be ar.med gives schools a fighting chance in case of attack.”

Really? I fear children will learn that violence is the only answer to combat terrorists in schools, in a country that allows weapons of mass destruction to be owned by 18-year-olds as happened in Uvalde, Texas.

More guns have never been the solution to reducing gun violence, as Australia’s history has shown. Australian demographics are similar in many ways to America’s—similar age distribution, wealth distribution, etc.—yet Australia has only had three mass shootings since it banned military-style assault rifles.

That happened because of a 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania. During that event, a gunman killed 35 people and wounded 28 others with a semi-automatic weapon he bought from an ad in the newspaper. Twenty of those people were killed in just a minute and 15 seconds.

Will we ever subdue gun violence in America, which means enforcing the real intent of the Second Amendment by disarming our unregulated militias?

A country such as ours that cannot protect its children from domestic violence is a country that does not care for the welfare of its future generations that once again will have its children cowering under desks because of the threat of legally acquired assault rifles, which are literally weapons of mass destruction.

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Failure of the Bully Mentality

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

UvaldeSchoolDistrict/AP

We need no more evidence than the Uvalde Elementary school massacre that the gun-toting male machismo of the NAR and extreme gun rights advocates doesn’t protect children or adults,

Adults with military weaponry and tactical gear waited more than 70 minutes before engaging the shooter while 19 fourth graders and two teachers were killed; and 15 children and a police officer were wounded by one AR-15 toting 18-year-old.

Why is it a surprise when studies have shown that such male machismo, or “toxic masculinity” to use the contemporary term, is a façade that protects the gun bearer from his own fears of inadequacy but not those that need protection?

It’s a form of bullying behavior that is well-known to Psychologists and behavioral scientists that have studied bullying behavior. A state like Texas with its ruling political party that discriminates against women and immigrants exhibits such behavior is concealing just such an innate feeling of weakness and ineffectiveness.

What more evidence do we need than to witness 376 guardians of law and order, including more than 90 Texas Rangers, cowering in the halls of Robb Elementary School while those children were being slaughtered? What more evidence do we need than the NRA assertion that “good men with guns” are the solution to gun violence when not one of the 376 guardians was good enough to risk life and limb to save those children?

It turns out such “manliness” has been all show and posturing that has led to an ideology that espouses such Machismo with nothing behind it except their guns? It should be obvious that they carry those weapons to protect themselves, not those they have sworn to defend.

I have written in the past to describe such behavior as a bully mentality, a mental state that seems to govern those that prefer to prey on the weaker but avoid confronting those that exhibit strength, such as the leader of their party, ex-President Trump.

Psychology Today posted a list of bullying behaviors at the time, a list that fits a political party that opposes all gun regulations like a glove:

– Uncontrolled anger and unpredictable irritability, frequently directed at the weakest people (‘safe targets’) or those perceived as a future threat
– A sociopathic ability to control their own image – the selective ability to look like a different person to different audiences – for example, being aggressive to ‘subordinates’, while being charming and helpful to others
– Having little status outside of work, bullies wield the power that their job gives them with vicious zeal
– Running ‘witch-hunts’
– Gratuitous domineering behaviour – sometimes physical
– The ability to make the unreasonable seem reasonable, even to the victims
--Projecting their own inadequacies onto others
– Making irrational accusations
– Publicly putting people down
– Sadistic enjoyment in humiliating others

One commentator on toxic masculinity described exactly what happened in Uvalde: “Our country is saturated in guns, and yet the mythical “good guy with a gun” who is supposed to stop these mass shootings has yet to actually be produced. That is because the good guy with a gun is a myth, propped up to justify toxic masculinity’s obsession with guns, and nothing more.”

The foremost characteristic of bullies is that they prey on weakness. That also goes for a political party that preys on the less fortunate by denying them adequate medical care and restricting their voting rights. What is their excuse?

New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, perhaps said it best. “And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. “Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.”

Heroic deeds are conspicuously absent from those who believe the Second Amendment allows 18-year-olds to own assault rifles.

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

America's (Ongoing) Civil War

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Why should it be a surprise that Americans are still fighting the Civil War? Though it is no longer Generals Ulysses S Grant vs. Robert E Lee, it is still being fought with guns, as the latest Uvalde and Buffalo Supermarket carnage with military style assault rifles makes plain.

This is while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just banned the sale of handguns because of rising run violence in Canada! He said, ‘There is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives’.

The signs of a active civil war are everywhere; with red states wanting almost anyone over 18 years of age to own an assault rifle in the name of a well-armed militia (Florida is the exception at 21 years old after the Parkland, Marjory Stoneham Douglas High shooting); with most of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, fomenting theories that colored peoples are inferior in some way; and their denial of President Biden’s win.

And then we have the last President’s followers’ blatant attempt on January 6 to overturn the election results.

It has been states’ rights vs. the Federal government since our founding: with red states keeping most of its citizens poor by denying benefits such as expanded federal health care and union organizing efforts that would boost wages with right to work laws.

Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman once highlighted why the poorest states tend to elect conservative politicians, who have not enhanced the economic opportunities of their own constituents.

“And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs,” says Krugman. “Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.”

But perhaps we have suffered the most casualties in our ongoing civil war from the COVID pandemic.

A NYTimes article by Damien Caves highlighted a study of how Australia, a country very similar to the U.S. in demographics, had a much better outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic. In Australia and in the United States, the median age is 38. Roughly 86 percent of Australians live in urban areas, compared with 83 percent of Americans.

It was as much about having a culture of trust, he said, a culture that recognizes caring for others is as important as caring for oneself because it saves more lives, especially during disasters.

“If the United States had the same Covid death rate as Australia,’ said Cave, “about 900,000 lives would have been saved (vs. one million American lives lost to date). The Texas grandmother who made the perfect pumpkin pie might still be baking. The Red Sox-loving husband who ran marathons before Covid might still be cheering at Fenway Park.”

Instead of trusting each other to do the right thing, many Americans, and past-President Trump as a matter of policy, chose to distrust science and advocate every kind of snake oil cure, as if we were still living in the 1800s.

“In global surveys, Australians were more likely than Americans to agree that “most people can be trusted” — a major factor, researchers found, in getting people to change their behavior for the common good to combat Covid, by reducing their movements, wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Partly because of that compliance, which kept the virus more in check, Australia’s economy has grown faster than America’s through the pandemic,” continued Cave.

Every country has probably had a civil war sometime in its past, as part of its growing pains. Europe has certainly had it share, such as The Hundred Years War. And civil wars have always pitted brothers and sisters against each other.

But why have an ongoing civil war that has lasted 157 years and made lives worse for everyone, since 1865 and the abolition  of slavery. Isn’t it time for US to put our guns away and make peace with each other?

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Is Killing Our Children?

Popular Economics Weekly

The fact that the NRA contributed $30 million to Donald Trump’s campaign is all we need to know about who is responsible for deaths of 14 high school children and 3 adults in Florida, or the 58 killed and 851 wounded in Las Vegas.

What made the NRA the killing machine it has become, from the sporting association it once was? The NRA contributed a total of $55 million to 2016 presidential campaigns.

We can thank the Second Amendment of our Constitution that enshrined gun ownership as an unalienable right, and to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller that interpreted its original wording: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” to mean every individual has the right to bear arms. But he added, that does not prevent the state from banning “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

We can also thank the gun manufacturers themselves that fund the lobbyists that keep Republican congressmen opposing all forms of gun control. We really should be talking about gun safety, rather than gun control, since gun owners aren’t required to have a license or training to own a gun, as is required for operators of other dangerous machines, like car owners.

We also know the carnage that guns can wreak. In 2016 alone there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths, according to the Center for Disease Control. Just-released autopsy reports from the Las Vegas carnage show the damage done by military-style assault rifles at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.

A military-style assault rifle bullet travels 3,000 feet per second—more than 3 times the speed of a pistol bullet because it is meant to kill instantaneously. It has such power that many bodies of the Las Vegas victims were literally torn apart by bullets that were probably tumbling by the time they reached the victims more than 500 yards away from Stephen Paddock, the Mandalay Bay Hotel’s 32^nd story shooter.

Graph: Mother Jones

Military-style assault rifles have been banned before; during the Tommy gun era of 1930’s gangster wars, and in 1994 after a series of similar mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons. But it had a ten-year sunset clause that was never renewed when Republicans again dominated Congress.

There have been 1600 mass shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of elementary school children, according to Maureen Dowd.

When will American children again feel protected? When a Congress is elected that admits military-style, semi-automatic guns of all shapes and sizes are “dangerous and unusual weapons” needed only by those trained to use them—the police and members of our military.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Stricter Gun Controls Now Inevitable

Financial FAQs

You know the tide has turned against gun violence when even the American Medical Association calls it a public health menace at the finish of its annual convention.

“CHICAGO – In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history and with more than 6,000 deaths already in 2016 from gun violence, the American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted policy calling gun violence in the United States "a public health crisis" requiring a comprehensive public health response and solution,” said its press release.

Additionally, at the Annual Meeting of its House of Delegates, the AMA resolved to actively lobby Congress to overturn legislation that for 20 years has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence.

This is after the US Senate could not even agree on banning gun purchases for anyone on the terrorism watch list in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre. You know it’s a public health menace when such mass killings are the work of both domestic and foreign terrorists, whether at Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, and Orlando.

You know more effective gun control measures are coming, including the banning of military assault weapons like the AR-15, when Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed stating that more Americans had died from gunfire since 1968 than in all the wars ever fought by the United States — a claim PolitiFact twice pronounced to be true.

“When 50 people were shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando,” wrote Kristof, “the toll from gun murders this year rose to somewhere around 6,000 deaths, which means if the trend continues, this year may end up with the highest gun homicide count since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Add to the homicide number the 550 or so victims of police shootings, roughly the same number of accidental gun deaths and the 21,000+ Americans who use a gun to end their own lives, and the total gun mortality number this year may go above 35,000.”

And now the women are getting together, as did those MADD women that enabled stricter drunk driving laws. (You would think the insurance companies would be behind this initiative as well, for all the money in lawsuits they would save.)

Recently, a powerful new gun control group has emerged, called Everytown for Gun Safety, a combining of several smaller gun control groups, including Women Against Gun Violence and Mom’s Demand Action.

This is while former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was getting ready to launch Everytown for Gun Safety with a pledge of $50 million, but it lacked foot soldiers. So today Bloomberg and the women’s groups have merged together with 3.5 million supporters.

And the nail in the coffin of unregulated gun violence may have been supplied by the now 8-member Supreme Court which allowed a lower court ruling banning assault weapons to stand, which in effect means that the Second Amendment right to own guns does have limits. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in last week's massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semiautomatic rifles.

“"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence," said AMA President Steven J. Stack, M.D. "Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries."

So we can now have a discussion about the latest public safety menace, the epidemic of gun violence. It requires similar treatment as did the Ebola and Zika epidemics—eradication of the carriers of that violence; which means stricter licensing requirements for starters, and maybe the banning of military-style assault weapons.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen