Merry Christmas Gun Owners

File this under "more guns make us safer." One week in the USA.

Let's just run down the list real quick:

• Last Sunday, Dec. 20, a 24-year-old recent college graduate returns home to Asbury Park and is shot and killed in his home neighborhood.
• Also Sunday, a 17-year-old girl is accidentally shot by her father in Ohio, who doesn't realize his gun is loaded. (Family takes her off life support Christmas Eve and she dies Dec. 26).
• Wednesday, a man with a gun kills his wife and his child and then kills himself in an apartment in Edgewater, N.J.
• Christmas Eve, a man pulls a gun and starts shooting during an argument in a N.C. mall; an off-duty police officer working as mall security shoots and kills him.
• Christmas morning, a 2-year-old girl is shot in the face in Oregon by a relative who accidentally fires his gun while cleaning it in the next room. She is expected to live.
• On Saturday, police shoot an emotionally disturbed man charging at them with a baseball bat, (because a gun is the defense of first choice, i guess) and accidentally shoot a 55-year-old mother of five who happened to be in the way. Both are killed.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – I list these as examples because they made headlines in my news feed and social media. You can visit www.gunviolencearchive.org for a look at just how many are out there. It's my understanding that that website tabulates incidents of gun violence by voluntary submission of verifiable reports -- so a good guess is the real total is much higher than what is listed there.

I suppose I need to say it again, just to be perfectly clear: more guns do not make us safer. They make us less safe.

--C.
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photo from sketchport by thebrotato under creative commons license