Quote:
|
The discussion to be had is around gun violence and how to reduce it.
|
The discussion should be about how to reduce violence. It doesn't do any good to reduce gun violence if other forms of violence are still at unacceptable levels.
People love to bring statistics from the UK into the discussion. They have low rates of violence, with or without firearms. Even if you excluded all homicides committed with firearms in the US, we still have a far higher homicide rate than the UK. So the problem we need to discuss is not "gun violence", it's violence.
It's just convenient for politicians to talk about gun violence, because it leads to talks about gun control legislation, which is politically expedient. The smart thing to do is reduce violence, but it doesn't make the sound bites and photo ops that lead to votes.