All You Need Is Love And Gun Control!
No matter how much hate is in someone’s heart, no matter how disturbed they are and how much they want to do violence, UNLESS guns and machine guns are available, how can they do anything? Could this man named Mateen have killed 49 people if he had not been able to stride into a gun store and purchase a machine gun? The answer is NO!
Despite being on an FBI list for terrorists, despite beating his wife for not doing the laundry, despite his coworker reporting him for hate speech and violent thoughts, he could walk into a store and legally purchase a weapon! Incredible! Why? Because the NRA made sure that even a person on a list as a suspected terrorist is able to purchase guns.
Read the article below to see how much more common gun deaths are in the US as compared to other civilized Western countries. Why? Lack of gun control because of the NRA lobby. This needs to change, here and now!
“Gun homicides are a common cause of death in the United States, killing about as many people as car crashes (not counting van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents). Some cases command our attention more than others, of course. Counting mass shootings that make headlines and the thousands of Americans murdered one or a few at a time, gunshot homicides totaled 11,961 in 2014, according to the F.B.I.
This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.”
Bipolar1Blog 
Shocking statistics, thank you for sharing this
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Pretty awful!
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Please take this in the spirit that it is offered in, I just wanted to correct a couple of common misconceptions. I don’t want to start a debate about gun control, and I am not going to say that the attack in Orlando is anything other then a purely evil act by an evil man.
But I must take exception to the claim that the United States is an exceptionally violent country. In raw numbers there are a lot of shootings, but when you adjust for population size, it changes the picture. In the US, one person in 8,000,000 commits a mass shooting. Contrast that figure with 1 in 500,000 for Norway and 1 in 250,000 in Finland..This information comes from a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD. This organization is made up of 34 developed countries. To put the population numbers in perspective, if you take the total population of all 34 countries the US accounts for 25% of the total. If one looks at per capita deaths from mass shootings in OECD countries, the US ranks 5th, behind Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Isreal, and Switzerland. If one looks at the number of mass shootings per capita, the US ranks 7th. None of this minimizes the seriousness of the problem, one shooting is too many, but it does show that the US on average is not an unusually violent country.
The second misconception is regarding machine guns. In the US there has not been a single mass shooting where a machine gun was used.
Furthermore, it is a myth that one can go into a gun store or gun show and walk out with a machine gun. Machine guns are strictly regulated, and even the possession of certain parts for machine guns is a felony under federal law. Certain machine guns can be owned by individuals is most states, but under federal law, the weapon must be registered to the individual that intends to possess it. Registration requires payment of a $200 tax at the time of filing the paperwork. That paperwork includes a passport type photo, fingerprints, and the signature of the Chief of Police or County Sheriff in the jurisdiction where the applicant lives. The current wait time for BATF to process the paperwork is 6 to 8 months.
Another issue is the fact that for a machine gun to be legal for private ownership, it has to have been manufactured and registered prior to May 1986. If it was imported from another country it must have been imported and registered prior to November 1968. Yes, there are illegally owned machine gunsite the US (and most other countries in the world) but those are exceedingly rare. Typically, is is a gun that was brought home by a veteran of WWII or Korea and has been in a basement or attic since then. The use of machine guns by criminals is even rarer. In the case of legally owned guns, there has only been one murder since 1934 when machin guns were first regulated. The murder was committed by a police officer using a department issued weapon.
Again, my intent is not to start a debate or minimize the seriousness of gun violence. I just feel that before one debates what the laws should be, one should first understand what the laws currently are, as well as understanding the scope of the problem.
Best Regards from a regular reader of your blog.
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I appreciate you took the time to write out your thoughts, but this assault rifle was bought by someone who was on FBI watch lists, THIS was legal, this was allowed. Also however the statistics are manipulated, whether because of some technicality US is 7th not 1st, you can’t deny the fact that there have been 173 mass shootings in the 164 days that have passed in 2016. That is way, way too many deaths of innocent people for me and I am positive that gun control and gun reform needs to be stepped up.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
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