Fifty-nine killed and 527 injured. A new record. A new horrific number of casualties, this time in Las Vegas at a country music show. Too bad there were not enough good guys with guns or kindergarten teachers to take down the shooter, which could have kept the number down to maybe two or three hundred shot and twenty or thirty dead. Here's another horrific number, 300,000. That's just ten years of average American gun deaths if one includes suicides (because a gun is usually finally fatal, with no time to get through a personal bout of depression), and if you insist on that exclusion let's just say 110,000 for our ten-year average. That's 110,000 deaths that could have been avoided if we had taken steps to curtail the high prevalence of available weapons, to just anyone, ten years ago.
A recent radio show explained that the FBI has resources for surviving an active-shooter scenario Run. Hide. Fight. Surviving an Active Shooter Event. Their considered advice is to, first, run like hell and keep running. If that's not an option one should hide, preferably behind something that can stop projectiles. The last resort, if running and hiding are not available, is to fight back or charge the guy with many semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines. They don't have a backup plan if the "duck into a phone booth and don your cape and cowl and attack" plan doesn't work but there may still be other courses of action.
Deciding not to live in a country that allows any idiot with a hundred bucks to buy a gun may be a valid option. Another course of action may be to refuse to re-elect senators and congressman who continue to defer to powerful lobbyists rather than the American people, and there are no more powerful lobbies than weapons manufacturers. Yet a third very valid option would be to elect people who will change the laws to get money out of politics altogether. It might also help if we had single-payer healthcare and the people with violent tendencies could be treated and or relieved of their guns.
But if we could at least dispense with the notion that any and everybody should be able to have or a buy a gun, maybe a few lives could be saved.
Max Clow, Colorado Springs, CO. 719-660-9095
