Preventing Mass Shootings Like the Vegas Strip Attack

[yallerdawg]

Source: New York Times, by Nicholas Kristof

It’s too soon to know what, if anything, might have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas, and it may be that nothing could have prevented it. In some ways, these mass shootings are anomalies: Most gun deaths occur in ones or twos, usually with handguns (which kill far more people than assault rifles), and suicides outnumber murders.

But in every other sphere, we at least use safety regulations to try — however imperfectly — to reduce death and injury.

The best example of intelligent regulation is auto safety. By my calculations, we’ve reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by more than 95 percent since 1921. There was no single solution but rather many incremental efforts: seatbelts, air bags, padded dashboards, better bumpers, lighted roads, highway guardrails, graduated licenses for young people, crackdowns on drunken driving, limits on left turns, and so on. We haven’t banned automobiles, and we haven’t eliminated auto deaths, but we have learned to make them safer — and we should do the same with guns.

The gun lobby will say that this isn’t a time for politics. But if we can’t learn the lesson from this carnage, then there will be more such shootings — again and again. This is a particularly American tragedy and completely unnecessary.

So let’s mourn. But even more important, let’s act.

Read it all at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/opinion/mass-shooting-vegas.html

[Girard442]

1. Mass shootings occur with such predictability and regularity now...

...that it's beginning to look like there are powerful players in our society that like the mass shootings and want them to continue.

[yallerdawg]

2. I just might be 'political.'

From "Bladerunner":

[Aristus]

3. Yeah. It's no mystery that gun sales go through the roof every time a gun massacre happens.

The NRA's "KEEP YOURSELF SAFE! song and dance drives people out to the gun stores in throngs...

[BigmanPigman]

4. I never want to hear the words "right to bear arms"

unless it is about sleeveless shirts as a fashion statement..