Land of GOD - Guns, Obfuscation, Denial

***Added some clarification***
On Friday we were discussing culture and its various aspects in my business class. I wrote down
S G A on the board and asked students what it was. After the obvious answer I told them that it was not Student Government Association but Sex, Guns, and Alcohol.
We discussed the fact that it is legal for employees to carry guns to work and leave loaded weapons in their vehicles in some states. We also talked about students carrying guns to school- the Columbine incident, the NIU shootings come to mind.

***It is impossible to do do controlled experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis that stricter gun control laws lead to lower crime rates. Common sense indicates that a culture and system that makes it harder for one to procure weapons might help, everything else remaining constant. However, the legal systems are not the focus of this piece. Rather, it is on the culture of gun ownership and and the widespread gun violence.***


Today three people were killed and at least one was injured in Athens, Ga., on Saturday when a University of Georgia professor opened fire at a community theater, police officials said. (NYT).

Bob Herbert wrote a really good op-ed piece in the NYT titled "A Culture Soaked in Blood." According to Mr. Herbert, "When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission. We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows. There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself. A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind. Homicides are only a part of the story. While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns). And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police. The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays. The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police. Another 17,000 are shot but survive. I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.” Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood. This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them."
Obama has begun to change the culture of America. His biggest challenge will be to change the culture of violence and cruelty that is all-pervasive, and best exemplified by the high chief, Dick Cheney.