sylvia devenay

Guns are a uniquely American problem. The rest of the world has mental health issues. The rest of the world has ideological & philosophical division. They have social media, pot, porn, cellphones & video games. What they don’t have — is more guns than people, they don’t have more than 500 mass shootings in less than a year, they don’t have a populace paralyzed with fear that their child will be next. That THEY could be next. At least, not until they arrive here. After a British gunman killed 16 people in 1987, the country banned semiautomatic weapons like those he had used. It did the same with most handguns after a 1996 school shooting. It now has one of the lowest gun-related death rates in the developed world. In Australia, a 1996 massacre prompted mandatory gun buybacks The rate of mass shootings went from once every 18 months to only one in the 26 years since. Canada also tightened gun laws after a 1989 mass shooting. So did Germany in 2002, New Zealand in 2019 and Norway in 2021. Meanwhile here in America… since the Columbine massacre, there have been a total of 304 fatal school shootings in the United States. Since 1999, 440 people have been killed and 1,243 injured in shooting events at K-12 schools. Since Sandy Hook — mass shootings have nearly tripled. 121 people have been killed and 281 people have been injured from school shootings since Parkland. And there have been well over 100 incidents of gunfire at K-12 schools since the Uvalde school shooting. In 2023, in the 632+ mass shootings recorded, 597 people died and 2,380 people were injured. In total last year in this country - more than 40,000 people died from gun violence. That is an average of almost 118 gun deaths each day. Every year, approximately three million kids are exposed to gun violence. This. Is. An. American. Problem. There are more civilian owned guns in this country than there are civilians. It’s not the pot, the porn, the video games, it’s not the wrong kinds of locks, or too few “good guys with guns”, and it’s not the mental health issues. Every country on earth has those things. And they don’t live this way. It’s the guns.