Peter Graffagnino of Bridgeville is a retired educator.
The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University has prompted me to revisit the topic of gun violence in America. On Dec. 15, 2023, I wrote an Opinion in the Daily State News titled, “Where is our outrage about school shootings?” In my report, I listed just shy of 40 schools nationwide that had been victims of such attacks, with countless children and adult lives lost! The aforementioned started in December 2012 and ran through December 2019. The list included elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and various colleges and universities.
I recently received a mailing from “BRADY United Against Gun Violence.” In that correspondence was a page titled, “Number of Gun Violence Deaths Per Year by Country.” The author of that report stated the following: “People in the U.S. are 26x more likely to die by firearm homicide than in other high-income countries.” There is a footnote to the above statement that reads, “High-income countries with populations over 10 million.” The following is the list of nations by name and the average number of deaths by guns in any given year:
Australia took action to reduce gun violence. In 1996, a gunman there used a semiautomatic rifle to kill 35 people and injure 23 more. In response, that country established a national gun registry. It banned all semiautomatic rifles and instituted a government buyback program for newly banned weapons.
After a deadly hate crime, New Zealand’s ban was swift. One week after a gunman shot and killed 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019, the prime minister banned all semiautomatic weapons and initiated a buyback program. A year later, the nation enacted a gun registry to track the purchase and sale of weapons, and installed a ban on a wider variety of guns. Over 60,000 firearms and more than 180,000 components, like large-capacity magazines, were turned in as part of New Zealand’s buyback.
In the United Kingdom, prior to the mid-1990s, there had been only one mass shooting in nearly 30 years. Then, in 1996, in Dunblane, Scotland, a gunman killed 16 children and one adult using a handgun. Within a year, the U.K. government introduced a near-total ban on handguns, which was later expanded to include all handguns, and implemented a buyback initiative. Since instituting those laws, fewer gun deaths have been recorded, and there has only been one mass shooting.
And, in the United States of America, on average, over 40,000 lives are lost this way every year! Is there anybody who is comfortable with that?
For what it’s worth!
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
