It’s the headline, but shoot — let’s ask the question again to get it through our thick skulls: what’s a bigger threat to America — to Americans — to your grandfather and your son and your daughter and your poker buddies and Taylor Swift and the Miami Dolphins and your coworkers and the Winnebago Man and your soulmate? Is it terrorists (which could be all of the sh*tbags combined like ISIS and al Qaeda and the Taliban and lone wolves, etc. etc.) … or us — as in Americans — with loaded guns in our hands.

Us.

Americans with guns.

And it’s not even close.

According to a recently-published examination by Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times, “more Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.” Which is staggering.

There’s also these three extremely ugly facts:

  • More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.

     

  • American children are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway, a Harvard professor and author of an excellent book on firearm safety.

     

  • Hemenway also calculates that the U.S. firearm homicide rate is seven times that of the next country in the rich world [first world] on the list, Canada, and 600 times higher than that of South Korea

 

Kristof supports these indisputable facts (you can’t argue facts, o’ faithful patriots) with a number of great points. The first being this: “We the People” — without hesitation — rubber stamp a litany of regulations and legislative padlocks on items that are far less menacing than firearms because we know that they still possess the ability to injure or maim someone. And we care about one another, so they exist for that very reason. No one deserves to die or be seriously injured over human error. Sure, it still happens, but the attempt to lessen the likelihood that it can is what differentiates us from animals. It’s a matter of civility, and living in a modern society.

Toys. Mutual funds. Ladders. Swimming pools. Food. The United States of America regulates all of these things in some way — and seriously, too. But guns? Eh.

Oh, and how about cars? Automobiles. You can make a case that they’re just as quintessentially “American” as guns are. The open road. Freedom. The cherry red convertible blazing through the Southwest, past the Wile E. Coyote rock features, soaking up the Spaghetti Western sun.

Yet, according to Kristof and others, we’ve made vast improvements over the decades on how safe cars can be. Through seatbelts and airbags and licenses and driving tests and inspections we’ve “reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent” since 1921.

Here’s the best part though …

Pragmatically, we don’t have to search far and wide for a model to mimic. Because it exists in fine working form in a country the exact same size as the continental United States. In a land … down under. Where women glow and men plunder. Where beer does flow and men “chunder”. And carry huge Bowie knives and wrestle crocodiles and get turned down for life insurance policies and punch sharks and really aren’t any less tough/macho than we are.

Going to leave this right here (via the NYT):

Australia is a model. In 1996, after a mass shooting there, the country united behind tougher firearm restrictions. The Journal of Public Health Policy notes that the firearm suicide rate dropped by half in Australia over the next seven years, and the firearm homicide rate was almost halved.

Here in America, we can similarly move from passive horror to take steps to reduce the 92 lives claimed by gun violence in the United States daily.

First order of business: pull the fire alarm and kick the callous, greedy politicos out of bed with the gun lobbyists. You know, gun lobbyists. The guys and gals who make it impossible to do anything regarding legislation — even in the wake of a bloodbath at a f*cking elementary school.

Gun lobbyists. The sniveling life forms that operate on dollar signs, clammy handshakes and cold 7-Eleven pizza.

Gun lobbyists. The trolls who allow things like this …

flamethrower

… to be legal in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOYuhLNwh3A