Tracy Keagles column on the opinion page of Saturdays paper may have left readers too scared to take in a Saturday afternoon movie or a Sunday morning worship service. Lets take a look at some of the statements she used in her efforts to terrify the populace about mass shootings.
1. Nearly 40,000 died from gunfire last year. Im guessing she might have been using 2017s figures because I found a New York Times article from late in 2018 with basically that headline. That article included the information that about 60% of those gun deaths were by suicide and only 37% were homicides.
2. Between January and April of this year, there have been 105 mass shootings. While the FBI defined mass murder as four or more victims slain, in one event, in one location, (not including the shooter if he, too, dies) and Congress defines mass killing as three or more killings in a single incident, Ms. Keagles source uses a different yardstick as those 105 mass shootings resulted in 120 fatalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2019
3. No other nation has this problem gun laws are changed mass shootings stop. Although European countries have put in the gun control measures that people such as Tracy crave, somehow the bad guy can still get a gun. There were four mass public shootings in France in 2015, all involving machine guns. Eighty-nine died in a single event, an Eagles of Death Metal concert. Also of interest is this from Reuters after the latest school shooting in our country: The District of Columbia has the highest rate of school shootings per one million people since 1970 (32.74%), this in spite of its strict gun laws. (The state closest behind is Alaska with a rate of 13.56%.)
In 2016, nearly 45,000 people committed suicide in the United States (cdc.gov) with slightly over half of them (about 23,000) being by firearm. That same year, just over 40,000 died in auto accidents. Should we ban cars? Over 58,000 died of unintentional poisoning. Didnt we already ban illegal drugs and legal drugs obtained illegally? The most surprising statistic was that over 34,000 people died from unintentional falls. Thats right more than twice as many people died as a result of a fall than died by homicide with a gun! Maybe we should ban walking.
Putting some math to the matter: There were 49,839,400 students enrolled in K-12 of U.S. schools in the fall of 2015. During the 2015-2016 school year, three (3!) K-12 students died as a result of being shot by another person at school (about 1 in 17,000,000.) In 2016, there were 34,673 people that died from an accidental fall out of a population of 324,118,787 (or about 1 in 10,000). In other words, a U.S. citizen was 1700 times more likely to die as a result of an accidental fall than an elementary or secondary student was to be killed at school. Even in 2018, when 35 K-12 students died at the hands of another, those deaths were at a rate less than 1/140th that of deaths from falls.
So how about we quit scaring the kids with ALICE training? Lets tighten up the school entrances, put locks on all the classroom doors, and train the teachers what to do in the (very) off chance that something happens.
And lets quit the push for gun control. Guns are not the problem. A full one-quarter of 2016s homicides were accomplished without one.
Juanell Garrett,
LaHarpe, Kan.
