344 Guns


Guns 


Another mass shooting this weekend in the US; they just love their guns over there, and from a very early age ... this cool pictorial is by An-Sofie Kesteleyn, brought to us via Visual News from Wired.


Please note: These are not my pictures



There are about 30,000 gun related deaths in the USA every year, which is about 10 per 100,000 of population. In Australia the number is 1, in the U.K. it is 0.25 (in some South American and African countries the number hovers around 40 and peaks at 65 in Honduras).


Why is gun violence so prevalent in America? Because there are so many guns in the country, and because Americans love their guns. And they argue that it is necessary to teach children the use of guns, so as to prevent gun related accidents, such as the accidental shooting of a two-year-old in Kentucky.


This is a comment on these photos and a typical justification for giving children guns:


Every single one of these children is holding a single shot 22LR ... minutely more powerful than an air rifle or pellet gun. This is how children learn firearm safety and proper handling. If you never show a child a firearm and then hand them one at virtually any age, even teenagers... they won't have the proper respect for what they have in their hands. This is when accidents happen, guns become toys at that point.

If you're anti-gun, so be it. Don't buy them. But, there are still people who use guns to feed their families and their children will probably grow up doing the same. We need to realize that people in the city live very differently than people in the country. We can't expect all to live the same way.

Frankly, it seems a lot of the city folks need to worry more about how those inner city youths are being raised than these kids in the country.

 


Myself, I'm very opinionated about guns. I would counter the above comment by saying that were Americans not so obsessed with guns (and the accompanying 'Freedom' argument), were guns not so ubiquitous in the US, there would be a lot less gun deaths. I have an essay on GUNS in my book en.light.en.ment.