MountainMornings

Look around you America. If it looks like you’re surrounded by Barbara Striesand’s least favorite color, orange, you’d be right. And to be honest, being a strawberry blonde meant I avoided that particular hue too. But today is National Gun Violence Awareness Day, and I thought I’d share a few facts with you this morning while I listen to Ms Bean snooze.

Gun injuries to children and young adults cause twice as many deaths as cancer!

Now just think about that for a second. Think about all those pink ribbons, yellow bracelets, and fund-raising schemes non-profits have come up with to draw attention to a disease we still can’t quite pin down. Is it hereditary or arbitrary? Is it environmental or viral? We know some people have the right sequence of genes to make them more susceptible to certain types of cancer, but we still don’t have a cure.

Look at Beau Biden. He died at about the same age that my father died of the very same tumor. Robert Lynn left 6 children behind. Brain cancer is a death sentence 66 years later. Our society is pouring money into research and development to fight cancer, but in our nation’s capital, the NRA is pouring money into the bloody hands of politicians. Why? To keep doctors from asking questions of parents about guns. To get guns on college campuses. To fight any legislation that might make purchasing a gun difficult – background checks? So what if you have a restraining order and domestic abuse issues, step right up and tell us what kind of rifle you like.

Gun injuries cause five times as many deaths as heart disease.

Well now we’re talking. The American Heart Association once thought that educating Americans about their risk of heart attack and stroke was their main mission. Today they’ve upped their game, to include educating us on our diets, legislating “heart healthy” packaging strategies state by state, fighting childhood obesity and running anti-smoking campaigns. “Sitting is the new smoking” one doc told Bob at a recent medical conference. Leverage that against gun lobbyists spouting “freedom” like they invented the word. The freedom to walk into a movie theatre in Colorado, an elementary school in Connecticut, or a college in Virginia with a rifle. The freedom to leave a handgun unlocked and loaded where a child might pick it up. These should be the NRA’s four freedoms.

Gun injuries kill 15 times as many people as infections! 

MERSA? Tuberculosis? Flesh eating bacteria, SARS and the flu? HA, we may have some antibiotic-resistant strains roaming around the world, but they pale in comparison to the sheer number of guns and ease of availability we Americans have simply taken for granted. So every time someone dies from, let’s say West Nile, since I just happened to experience that horrific infection, 15 people die from gun violence.

A child shoots herself in the face; a child shoots his friend in the yard; a child shoots his mother while sitting in a shopping cart playing with her purse…

I am so sick and tired of reading about the ways we humans can so easily kill each other with guns. No other country in the world is as lax as we are in regulating guns. Make women wait 2 days for an abortion and watch some video about it beforehand, maybe even get a pelvic ultrasound in the interim, sure  –  but make you wait for a background check before buying a gun? Nonsense.

I’m wearing orange today for my grandchildren, so that they may grow up in a country without this scourge of gun violence. Because we need to elect leaders whose pockets are not lined with blood money.