I am sitting here, in my only orange shirt, in observation of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and my thoughts turn to the New York Times’ remarkable recent study of 358 shootings last year in which four or more people were killed or wounded. As the Times noted, these were not the high-profile mass shootings in unlikely places like schools, churches and movie theatres that capture national attention, but rather “a pencil sketch of everyday America at its most violent.” The Times’ reporters penetrated beyond the body count to describe the circumstances of these shootings, in which 462 died and over 1300 were injured. The scenarios were varied, but the terrifying descriptions point to a conclusion common to all: if no guns were available, violence may have ensued, but countless lives would have been saved and serious injuries avoided.

Typically, the violence was sparked by the most banal of offenses, like one person shoving another in a bar, or a Facebook taunt, or a disagreement over the music at a house party. They occurred mostly outdoors, at virtually any place groups of people gather; at neighborhood barbecues, family reunions, music festivals, basketball tournaments, Sweet 16 parties, public parks. Only about one-third were gang-related or were drive-by shootings typical of gang violence. Even those that were gang-related were prompted, not by criminal activity like drug dealing, but by eruptions begun by a boast, an insult or some other sign of disrespect. Take the guns out of the picture, even if the combatants had been armed with other weapons, like knives or baseball bats, there is no doubt countless lives would have been spared.

The gun lobby gets much mileage from the slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The Times’ study shows how far this idea is divorced from the brutal reality of everyday gun violence, particularly in our inner cities. The truth is that “Guns don’t kill people, they enable people to kill people,” more effectively and efficiently than any other widely available weapon. Even grossly incompetent shooters can be multiple killers. In one shooting at a Cincinnati Elks Lodge, according to police officials, as many as half of the 24 victims were not the intended targets. The perpetrators of such shootings are often high on drugs or alcohol. Some barely know how to hold a gun, yet it gives them lethal power over whoever crosses their field of fire. In the shootings surveyed, more than 100 bystanders were killed or wounded, including a 10-year-old boy who was struck in the eye as he peered out his window at a fracas in an Orlando, Florida housing project, a soldier struck by a stray bullet during a shootout in a public square in Savannah, Georgia and a 19-year-old college sophomore killed when a gunman sprayed a crowd outside an Ocala, Florida club. It is the gun that affords this kind of indiscriminate killing power; few are killed by stray knives or baseball bats. Put simply, guns make killing easy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-a-henigan/guns-make-killing-easy_b_10267512.html