Our Generations Failed - A New Generation Marches To Fix It

The graphic above shows the results of a 1998 survey by Arther Kellermann. The NRA and its adherents tell us that keeping a gun in the home makes us safer. That study explodes that myth. For every one self-defense shooting, there are 22 shootings caused by accident, criminal assault or homicides, or suicides. In other words, a family member is 22 times more likely to be shot than a burglar entering your home -- if you have a gun in that home.

This is just one aspect of the NRA idea that more guns means a safer country. That is not true of a home, a state, or the country as a whole. The truth is more guns = more deaths. Consider this from the Scientific American:

"Most of this research—and there have been several dozen peer-reviewed studies—punctures the idea that guns stop violence. In a 2015 study using data from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University reported that firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in the states with the most guns versus those with the least. Also in 2015 a combined analysis of 15 different studies found that people who had access to firearms at home were nearly twice as likely to be murdered as people who did not."

The NRA would also like for us to believe that the huge number of gun deaths in this country (especially mass shootings) are not the result of the easy access to guns, but due to mental illness or violent video games. That's just ludicrous. Other developed nations have mental illness and violent video games, but their ratio of gun deaths in much lower. That's because they have reasonable gun laws -- laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

The sad truth is that our generations (Silent - Baby Boomer - Generation X) have failed. We bought into the NRA lies and let our elected representatives get by with doing NOTHING! We decided that it was OK to have 30,000 gun deaths each year (including 12,000 gun homicides). We let the right to own a gun (by any nut) become more important that the right of our fellow citizens to live.

Fortunately, a new generation is now rising up (millennials and post-millennials) and they are taking a stand. On Saturday, millions of them will march in more than 800 cities across the nation. They aren't trying to abolish the Second Amendment. They just want reasonable (and constitutional) laws that will save thousands of American lives each year. They want the holes plugged in the background check law, so every gun buyer must have a background check before being able to buy that gun (even in gun shows, on the internet, and in private sales). They want assault weapons banned (along with magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition). They want gun laws that make sense and make Americans safer.

Older generations are guilty of inaction in the face of an epidemic of gun deaths. It is time to excise that guilt -- and that can only be done by supporting the young people speaking out for common sense.