American gun use is out of control. Shouldn't the world intervene ?
Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company's concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald's case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America's recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.
Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company's chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.
That's America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC's navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.
The annual toll from firearms in the US is running at 32,000 deaths and climbing, even though the general crime rate is on a downward path (it is 40% lower than in 1980). If this perennial slaughter doesn't qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/american-gun-out-control-porter
"One more figure. There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour."
= new reply since forum marked as read
I learn something new about myself almost every day on DU. 
We can hear all the dog whistles you're blowing without noticing them, we can look past your false consciousness to see your true motives and how they correlate to your true interests.
One day you'll realize how much superior we are by comparison with you ... and find a danged good instance in daily life for using very large negative numbers. 
massacres are just to be expected but DON'T BE VULGAR!! 
I think I deciphered the rest of it.
Thanks in advance!
American gun use, that is.
this place is atrocity central. Maybe that's the price of "freedom", but if the moral authority to call air strikes is about protecting the innocent, we need an intervention.
