W. K. Lis
Superstar
Nice when the USA has its own vaccine manufacturing companies within the USA. Unlike Canada, after the Conservatives sold off its vaccine manufacturers because it would be cheaper for us versus getting vaccine sooner.
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Nice when the USA has its own vaccine manufacturing companies within the USA. Unlike Canada, after the Conservatives sold off its vaccine manufacturers because it would be cheaper for us versus getting vaccine sooner.
We don’t know if the previous vaccine manufacturing capacity would have been able to make any of these covid vaccines.Nice when the USA has its own vaccine manufacturing companies within the USA. Unlike Canada, after the Conservatives sold off its vaccine manufacturers because it would be cheaper for us versus getting vaccine sooner.
He is being charged not only with assault, but hate crimes as well. He is beaten up really badly, but he deserved it.WTF! Is the guy completely nuts?
Careful, you're going to get cancelled!#AsianLivesMatter
On Thursday, it happened again: a mass shooting in America. This time, a gunman killed eight people at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis.
Already, the shooting has led to demands for action. “10 Republican Senators — including Indiana’s @SenToddYoung & @SenatorBraun — decide whether we are going to do something about this deadly epidemic or continue to do nothing and live with this death every damn day.” the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence tweeted.
But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.
This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues to experience levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress; nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.
So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it’s important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States but also America’s unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.
1) America’s gun problem is unique
No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times the rate of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to 2012 United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
To understand why that is, there’s another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the 2018 Small Arms Survey.
Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population, as surveys from the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey suggest.
These three basic facts demonstrate America’s unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
2) More guns mean more gun deaths
The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths...
And it’s clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations. Data compiled in 2018 from GunPolicy.org shows the United States is an extreme outlier in both categories.
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America’s unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness. But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, had a mental illness. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.
Yet high gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.
Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process...
Riots again in Portland. Don't the people of Portland have anything better to do then destroy their own neighborhoods?
Riot declared in Portland; arsonists set fires downtown
For the third time this week, a riot was declared in Portland after marchers left Director Park and began smashing windows, burglarizing businesses and setting fires.www.koin.com