By The Numbers

 Lately I have noticed a tendency for those who like to argue about mass shootings to choose the path of comparing "street crime" and "gangs" alongside those events that are more typically considered in this category. The "lone gunman." The deviants who spend months or years planning their killing sprees in order to garner the highest body count or the most attention. I have, on occasion, told anyone who would listen that living in Oakland, California gives me a little bit of security on this account since most of our gun violence takes place in a very short window. Someone gets mad, on a street, in a car, late at night or early in the morning and they open fire. No meticulous planning with schematics and diaries. No social media bread crumbs. Just sudden and chaotic violence. 

Well, I'm here to tell you that these distinctions do not matter in the least. Rather than argue about which is worse, or even more bizarrely, which is better we should agree that there are too many guns. If there weren't, there would be no need for this distinction. Far too often we are offered up the factoid that "the gun (or guns) used were obtained legally." I have regularly opined form this cyber-soapbox about the fact that we can't get to our collective front door without tripping over all the guns and ammo. One hundred twenty guns for every one hundred humans crowded into these fifty states. And while everyone's attention seems to be drawn to those fascinating machines under the heading of "assault weapons," it is the garden variety handgun that leads the way when it comes to how we Americans kill one another. But the very last thing that we as a country are willing to do is ban handguns. Instead, we focus on what seems to most of us to be the most indefensible case: semi-automatic weapons, the kind you find on or near battlefields. Our school houses, parade routes, and grocery store parking lots are not battlefields.

We agree on this, right? 

Except we don't. We have this convenient (if you'll pardon the expression) target for our anger: The National Rifle Association. The leaders of this peculiar organization seem quite happily resolved to insist that any and all facts, polls and incidents that involve guns have nothing to do with their insistence that nothing can or ever should infringe on America's desperate need to own a gun. The NRA's current membership totals just under five million, down from a high of six million just four years ago. A majority of those members support common sense regulation like universal background checks. 

So, where is all this furor and fight to keep such laws from being passed coming from? Look no further than the United States Senate to follow the trail of money that comes straight out of the NRA and into the campaigns of these lawmakers. And then compare the ratio of gun deaths in their state compared to the number of millions of dollars that each senator received. Right near the tippy top of that pyramid you will find Florida's Marco Rubio, who raked in more than three million dollars in contributions alongside two thousand four hundred forty-nine gun deaths in the Sunshine State. It was this politician who complained that the NBA's Miami Heat had urged their fans to demand support for new gun legislation by saying that the team was “politicizing a horrific tragedy in America.”

Check me on this, Marco, but having "legally obtained" firearms pretty much suggests that there is a legal if not political side to all of this death. 

And in the end, the only number that matters is the number of victims. I'm done counting.