If you ask most Americans about a mass disaster, they’re likely to think of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or the Southeast Asian tsunami. Very few people—including law enforcement officials—would think of the number of missing persons and unidentified human remains in our Nation as a crisis. It is, however, what experts call “a mass disaster over time.”Pro-gun folks love to demand statistics and proof. Well, how about this? I'd say we can easily double or triple the gun violence statistics if we include missing persons. If only a small percentage of these cases involved gun play, and I would think it's more than that, then the well-know stats of 600 accidental firearms deaths and 15,000 firearms murders a year are woefully under-reported.
The facts are sobering. On any given day, there are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the United States. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish under suspicious circumstances. Viewed over a 20-year period, the number of missing persons can be estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
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