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We've Tried Doing Nothing, and That Hasn't Seemed to Work

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives, by the editorial staff at Scientific American:

The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.

And:

While cars have become increasingly safer (it’s one of the auto industry’s main talking points in marketing these days), the gun lobby has thwarted nearly all attempts to make it harder to fire a weapon. With federal protection against some lawsuits, the financial incentive of a giant tort payout to make guns safer is virtually nonexistent.

There's tons of supporting documents here, so I highly encourage you to go to the article and check out the studies that are used to back up these arguments.

Also, I know some of you will say "guns aren't the problem, stop suggesting gun regulations will change anything." To you I would simply ask, given this is a profoundly US-specific problem, we need to look at what is different about the US than other places around the world. If your argument is video games, show me studies proving Americans play more violent games than the rest of the world. If your argument is that teachers should be armed to stop this, show me other countries that solved their school shooting problems by arming kindergarten teachers. If it's something else, show me the studies backing up your ideas. This can't keep happening, and doing nothing hasn't seemed to work, so I'd humbly suggest we should try something, because "now's not the time to talk about it" and "thoughts and prayers" haven't seemed to work yet.