President Obama challenged the media to do the math on the number of deaths by terrorism in the US compared to gun violence, and data shows that gun deaths are a bigger threat to the American people than terrorism.
Zack Beauchamp at Vox took President Obama up on his challenge to the media yesterday, when the defiant President asked news organizations to do the math on deaths by terrorism versus deaths by gun violence after yet another mass shooting, this time at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.
President Obama said:
I would ask news organizations because I won’t put these facts forward. Have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who have been killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade, and the number of Americans who have been killed by gun violence and post those side by side on your news reports. This won’t be information coming from me. It will be coming from you.
Obama pointed out, we have “spent over a trillion dollars, and passed countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?”
So Vox did the math and it is astonishing:
More than 10,000 Americans are killed every year by gun violence. By contrast, so few Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks since 9/11 that when you chart the two together, the terrorism death count approximates zero for every year except 2001. This comparison, if anything, understates the gap: Far more Americans die every year from (easily preventable) gun suicides than gun homicides.
In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), Chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, called on Congressional Republicans to do something for the love of God. Anything to “act on commonsense gun violence prevention laws”.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Congressional Republicans have done nothing over and over again and, predictably, the results have been the same: more innocent lives lost, more families forever changed, and more mass gun violence.
“Hours before the UCC shooting 147 bipartisan Members of Congress sent Speaker Boehner a letter urging him to act on gun violence prevention. The five brave co-authors of our background check bill notwithstanding, Republicans have done nothing. Republicans have a majority in Congress, and a White House and Democratic Caucus willing to work with them. All they need to do is get off their hands and act.”
Republicans took action, immediately after the South Carolina church massacre, in fact, to make sure that no money could be spent on researching gun violence. In their report on their continued ban for funding of gun violence, “Republicans wrote that the ban is to protect the rights granted by the Second Amendment,” the Hill reported.
“The restriction is to prevent activity that would undertake activities (to include data collection) for current or future research, including under the title ‘gun violence prevention,’ that could be used in any manner to result in a future policy, guidelines, or recommendations to limit access to guns, ammunition, or to create a list of gun owners,” the report says.
Well, we wouldn’t want to have any data or limit access to guns or keep track of people who own them. That would result in accountability and reason-driven policies, which would not help the NRA one bit.
Republicans are financially attached to NRA talking points, such as if only everyone was armed, and the manufacturers behind the NRA were even richer! However, as CNN pointed out in an unrelated article:
Japan has very strict gun control laws, and in a land of 127 million people, there were six gun-related deaths last year, according to statistics by the National Police Agency. The possibility of the gang war reigniting frightens the general public considerably.
That’s not a one-off or an accident. In a separate article, Vox detailed, “America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and 15 times as many as Germany… Extensive reviews of the research by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Center suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.”
Got it? That’s all thanks to the NRA propaganda, their profit motive, and the purchased lawmakers who puppet for them, while enabling American terrorism on other Americans.
Congress isn’t even allowed to do a study on gun violence.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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