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Originally Posted by Spats McGee
Overall, a decent article. I disagree with his notion that someone other than criminals is to blame for "gun violence." Does "gun violence" include accidental or negligent shootings? Does it include DGUs? That seems to use an awfully broad brush for the term. Frankly, I disagree with the use of the term "gun violence" altogether, but that's beside the point for discussions of this article.
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But the term "gun violence" applied with a broad brush fits right in with the effort to classify "gun violence" as an epidemiological problem and funnel money to the CDC to study it.
The fact is, any time a person dies or is seriously injured due to external physical impact, a "violence" is perpetrated on that person's body. So, in that vein, a batter who is struck by a knock-down pitch is a victim of "baseball violence," a pedestrian who is struck by a automobile or a person injured in a car accident is a victim of "car violence," and a person who slips while showering is a victim of "bathtub violence." But there's no political capital to be gained by declaring that cars and bathtubs are dangerous weapons and need to be further studied and heavily regulated, so the politicians don't go there.
The latest furor is to renew (and expand) the AWB. They're after the AR-15s again. Yet FBI statistics over a recent five year period show that more people were killed with hammers than were killed with rifles (of all types). So there's a bunch of people out there who were clearly victims of "hammer violence," yet there's no move to have the CDC study violence by hammers, or to enact a sweeping Federal AHB.
He who controls the terminology controls the debate.