Guns

No, not the kind that you get from working out.  The kind that kill people. Except for the occasional rumblings about the assault weapons ban, Obama and the Democrats have been noticeably silent about any form of gun control. The lunatic fringe thinks that Obama will ban all guns or tax ammunition like cigarettes (or they just hate that black socialist Obama) so they've been stocking up on guns and ammo ever since he got elected. So the gun issue will get worse before it gets better.

I came across some statistics the other day that are more than a bit shocking. Every year in the US, around 100,000 people are shot. Of those 100,000, about 70,000 don't die from their wounds, leaving about 30,000 who do. Of the 70,000 gunshot survivors, 48,000 were criminally attacked, 4,200 botched their own suicide, 15,000 were shot accidentally, and 1,000 were shot by police.  Of the 30,000 who died, about 17,000 are suicides, about 800 are shot accidentally, and about 300 are shot by police. That leaves 12,000 who are murdered with guns. (2/3 of all murders are committed with guns in the US) If you want to read more, check out The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

And here's an interesting tidbit for those who don't think that guns kill people (people kill people)... the American murder rate of 5.7/100,000 is more than three times the Canadian rate of 1.7/100,000. As noted above, about 2/3 of the murders in the US are committed with guns (roughly half the murders involved handguns.) About 1/3 of the murders in Canada are done with guns, and almost none with handguns. On the surface, it appears that if handgun availability were similar in the two countries, the murder rates would be similar. 

In the 7-1/2 years since 9/11 about 8,000 Americans have been killed in the "war on terror." It only takes eight months to kill the same number of Americans all by ourselves.