[In reference to John Seven's column on Feb. 8:] No, John, as much as you would like to believe it, guns do not shoot people. They are inanimate objects, and because of that, they have no ability to perform any thought-processed task.
As usual, you take things out of context and use them to prove your point. When you pick and choose these articles, it is easy to twist the story to which ever direction that you want.
These articles fail to give an overall look at injury related deaths in the U.S. They fail to mention the gun deaths that came about from police shootings -- that number is a very hard one to get a total on. Mostly, you can find some city statistics, but no countrywide totals.
One example is that in 2011, in Los Angeles county alone, 54 people were shot and killed by police. To their benefit, I'm sure most were justified, however, those numbers get rolled into the total number of gun-related deaths and with numbers like that in one county, I'm sure that a sizable percentage of gun deaths in the U.S.comes from these types of shootings.
Also, another large percentage comes from gang- and drug-related shootings. I'm sure that taking the guns away from law-abiding cops may help a little, but I think taking the unregistered, illegal guns away from gangs, drug dealers, criminals and U.S. fast-and-furious operatives would help more.
Since most of the anti-gun comments
I'm using government statistics -- mostly FBI and from 2009 since it was the most complete -- and gun-related deaths then were 31,672. However, I find it amazing that deaths by poisoning were 42,917. That's about a 133 percent of gun deaths. Even stranger, 33,041 of them were unintentional poisonings. (I guess chemicals really do poison people.) Where is the outcry? Why aren't we doing more to prevent this? Simple things like making the directions on the medicine more easily read without a magnifying glass would be a start.
Deaths by falls in 2009 totaled 26,009 -- almost 90 percent of guns. (Sidewalk cracks and steps do trip people on purpose.) Workplace deaths were 4,690, and that is with OSHA watching out for us.
Even more interesting, in 2009, there were 10,800,000 car accidents causing 33,808 deaths -- 4,092 were pedestrians just caught in the crossfire so to speak. (Darn cars are out to get us.) In those car accidents, there were 2,217,000 injuries, of which 59,000 were pedestrians.
All told in 2009, there were 120,859 unintentional deaths and a grand total of 180,811 of all types of injury related deaths. This is not meant to trivialize any of these deaths, it is only meant to put it into perspective. We humans are pretty accident-prone and we will find a way to hurt ourselves or others with or without guns.
Neil Oleson
Drury
Feb. 19
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