Our Blind Spot About Guns

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This NY Times editorial, Our Blind Spot About Guns, by Nicholas Kristof, seems to have struck a chord with our supporters:

If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.

Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.

We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.

To read the full article click here.

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Why NRA’s scary “open carry” craze is not about freedom

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by for Salon.com

Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.

To read the full article click here.

Home 2013 Gun laws vs gun death

Gun Laws Matter

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Chart from Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, www.smartgunlaws.org

The gun industry and the Corporate Gun Lobby have long claimed that we do not need more restrictions on guns. They claim that more guns mean less crime. When we passed our comprehensive gun violence prevention bill in the 2013 Connecticut legislative session, they claimed that this bill would not stop a single gun death.

The kind of claims they make can be difficult to dispute. They often require trying to prove a negative. How do you prove that a given law was responsible for preventing a crime that did not happen?

But here is what we do know. In 2013 gun homicides here were the lowest since 2005.

CT Gun Death through 2013
[1] Data confirmed with CT Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Read more