Easy access to guns versus keeping our children alive - you decide
30 March 2023
Source: New Hampshire Bulletin
Guns are now the leading cause of death for US children and teens since surpassing car accidents in 2020.
Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year. That’s about five children lost for every 100,000 children in the United States. In no other comparable country are firearms within the top four causes of mortality among children, according to a KFF analysis.
Source: CNN, CDC
Regrettably, mass shootings are predictable in the US:
People often call these killings senseless, but tragically, they do make sense: we are seeing exactly the results the system is designed to achieve. We know that most countries have vastly lower rates of firearm-related violence and deaths. And yet we in the United States choose to give ready access to weapons of war to people who will use them to hurt themselves and destroy others.
There are three responses to this gun violence:
Do nothing. Some people either don’t care, are overwhelmed by other issues or don’t think that anything they do can make a difference.
Advocate for more guns because “easy access to guns makes us safer”. This is the position of the Republican Party across the United States.
Advocate for reasonable restrictions on guns. This is the position of the Democratic Party.
I support reasonable restrictions on guns and believe that makes us safer. I am proud of Michigan’s Democratic governor and Democratic legislature that recently passed laws that most Michigan residents support, including universal background checks, extreme risk protection orders and safe storage laws. These laws will start to change the direction of gun violence in Michigan, although there is more work that needs to be done, including enforcement and other prevention activities.
Gun violence is a partisan issue. Republicans believe many “big lies”, including that easy access to guns makes us safer. Easy access to guns may make people feel safer but our experience as a country is that it promotes gun violence in a major way. Democrats believe that reducing access to guns to particular groups (children, the mentally unstable, those prone to violence) makes us safer, which is what the data shows, although change will be slow. How you vote in State and Federal elections affects this issue.
If you care about gun violence, do something. If you have never done anything on this issue, you can start by making a contribution, attending a meeting, emailing an elected official or asking others what they are doing and doing something similar. If you have acted in the past on this issue, please do a little more, for the sake of our children.
Therefore man was created singly (i.e. from Adam) to teach us that he who destroys one human life has destroyed an entire world and he who saves one soul is considered to have saved an entire world. Talmud Sanhedrin Chapter 4.
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