For decades now the NRA has successfully lobbied Congress to prevent any funding for the CDC to study why gun violence in the US has grown to epidemic proportions.
I don’t have a Ph.D, and I’m not a social scientist, but I’d like to offer a few observations and ask that we perhaps “study” the following:
1. Nearly all gun murders are committed by one gender. Let’s study why that is.
2. The vast majority of guns are owned by white people. Why is that? Most of these white people live in nearly all-white suburban and rural areas which have little or no crime. Why, really, do they need all those guns?
3. Why are most of these school shootings and other mass shootings committed by young white males?
4. Why, when the media covers gun violence in our black communities, do they never speak of it as the result of millions of African Americans still forced to live — 150 years after slavery — in a premeditated, predetermined system of enforced and cruel poverty, thus causing a tremendous amount of suffering and pain and death.
5. Why are many men unable to work out their anger issues without violence? And what are they afraid of? Why not study why there is so much unfounded fear within white men. Are they subconsciously afraid because they know they live in a society where one race gets a pass (or at least a chance), and the other races are left to fight for the crumbs? Why not study why there is so much unfounded fear within white men. Do white men who see so many fellow white men crushed by a dog-eat-dog economic system, they fear they too may be next?
So the frightened scared man needs a gun. Yet women — who have a REAL reason to be afraid in this society — carry hardly ANY of the 300 million+ guns in this country. Let’s study that.
6. Why are women so often the victims of this violence? Let’s study how millions of boys are raised and socialized in this culture to be man-boys who fear & despise women. And why women end up dead because of this ugly misogyny.
7. Perhaps it simply comes down to this: In the US, women hold no real political, economic or social power. 75% of Congress are men. A woman wins the presidency, but a slave-era law prohibits her from taking office. Just 6% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies are women. None of the major religions are run by women. Wall Street is not run by women. We still haven’t passed the Equal Rights Amendment for women.
Wouldn’t a scientific study by the CDC show that if Congress was majority female (which might give us better schools, universal health care, day care and senior care), and if women were paid the same as men (a strong wage so all could have a decent life), wouldn’t this then be the ultimate result: Far less of us will die on any given day from an angry spray of random bullets?
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