Guns still don't add up

Because any newly penned editorial on gun violence and the prevalence of weapons of war in the hands of seemingly everybody only adds to long held positions, this editorial is being reprinted from Feb. 21, 2018, after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.Add the numbers up: 58, 17, 13, 10, 27, 2012. That is an old exercise, written in 2018. Here are only the latest, late May, last week, murders: 10 in Buffalo, May 15 and now 21 in Uvalde, Texas, May 24. Include Joe Garcia, dead of a heart attack – heartbreak – May 26 and the total is 22 in Texas.

That first sentence of numbers is from the Feb. 21, 2018 editorial, a week after 17 students and staff were massacred in Parkland, Florida.

The other numbers: Fifty-eight dead in Las Vegas in 2017; 13 at Columbine High School in 1999 and 10 years since 27 students and teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

What does that equal altogether? More of the same. No change. The status quo equals more carnage. Assault rifles are an equal opportunity destroyer. They will take lives at a concert or in a classroom. People with these rifles kill students and party goers, males and females, coaches and counselors.

The equation turns to none of us knowing where and when we will be safe from a gun and especially from assault rifles.

Responsible gun owners – my neighbors, readers of this newspaper – being responsible, have to fish or cut bait. Hunting, or even protecting all of us from a possible coup or invasion is one thing.

Assault rifles are another. The Merriam Webster definition of assault is “a violent physical or verbal attack; b: a military attack.” Neither has to do with taking deer, elk or turkeys down.

Consider: our population was 317 million in 2015. The Washington Post estimated the number of firearms nationwide at 357 million that year. Yes, there are more guns than people in our beloved country. Awash with guns? No, we are drowning in them.

Another number: $5.2 million. That how much the National Rifle Association spent lobbying Congress and the federal government in 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Pay attention to the names of politicians who spoke at the NRA convention last week. Those people are not your friends or allies.

Gun owners: it is time to stop protecting the three percent of seriously confused people who own a collective 133 million guns. That number is from The Guardian newspaper.

You want change to reduce the number of guns that have flooded the country? Embrace zero. That is the number of politicians to vote for whose hands and campaigns are bloody by their taking money from the NRA.

Either we dry up the supply and inventory of guns or guns will be the death of us.

Otherwise the dead bodies will continue to pile – and add – up.

Count on it.

Postscript: One day society will come to see a passion for these weapons as an addiction as dangerous as gold lust. We will find gun manufacturers as guilty as pharmaceutical companies have been in flooding our communities with drugs.

There will be lawsuits.

Let’s hasten that day.