There has been ANOTHER shooting at a school, this one at Lone Star College outside Houston.
Can we have the honest conversation that needs to happen about guns in the U.S. now?
Here are a few numbers…..in 2011:
32,163 people died because of guns
11,101 people died through gun homicide
19,766 people died through gun suicide
Now…to put this into a broader conversation….
India…a country of 1.1 billion people had a little over 6,000 total gun deaths in 2011, 3,200 of those were homicide
The only countries that had more gun homicides than the U.S. were Mexico (11,309), Brazil (34,678), Columbia (12,539), and Venezuela (11,115).
I think there is a component of this that is not discussed enough; every country that has a high gun homicide rate is somehow involved in the U.S. drug war (yes, Brazil is involved in the drug war, it’s just not talked about much). And if you added in the numbers for Guatemala (5,009) and Honduras (5,201), there is definitely a pattern.
So while Newtown “changed everything”, nothing changed. We continue to talk around guns (and drugs, to a lesser extent) and focus on everything else.
Can we have the honest conversation about guns now?
