NRA IGNORES REAL REASONS FOR U.S. SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

…Santa Fe School Shooting Victims

US has 6 times the number of available guns compared to other major countries.

The latest available evidence suggests that the NRA-backed gun policies are making the nation’s crime issue even worse.

The less-than-bright new president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Oliver North, is blaming all the school shootings on a “culture of violence,” and he criticized prescription drugs like Ritalin, which is used to treat the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder of children and young adults.

According to North in an interview on Fox News: “The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.  They've been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male, and they're young teenagers in most cases. And they've come through a culture where violence is commonplace. All we need to do is turn on the TV, go to a movie. If you look at what has happened to young people, many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten.”

But what the president of the NRA totally ignores are what the statistics tell us when you look at why the United States has so many school shootings. 

The US has the same basic issues of individuals with mental health issues, young children in schools and on Ritalin and those that play violent video games and watch violent movies.

But the statistic that is different is that in Russia, China and India, there were less than 20 school shooting in each of these countries from 1966 to 2012, while at the same time in the US, there were 90 school shootings.

And why is that?

Could it be that with in these three large foreign countries, they all are estimated to have somewhere between 10 to 50 million guns among their civilian citizens.  But here in the US, that number is more like 270 million guns within the nation’s population.

Study after study analyzing mass shootings within the United States and in comparison with other countries demonstrate that the single most important variable is the high number of guns in the country, this is according to a study by the New York Times. Yet after the high school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., had left 10 people dead last week, the NRA and other conservative entities have offered a host of reasons for the violence, none of which involve the number of weapons.

But an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion: The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

However, the blame from the NRA doesn’t stop with just what its president had to say.  There are other excuses that do not include the Elephant In The Room, the millions of guns in the US.

The spokeswoman for the NRA, Dana Loesch, he blames the media for the shootings:  “The media has got to stop creating more of these monsters by oversaturation,” Loesch said on the NRA’s television station. “I'm not saying don't responsibly report on things as they happen. Look, I understand it. But constantly showing the image of the murderer, constantly saying their name, is completely unnecessary.”

Loesch’s criticism seemed to echo parts of a longtime campaign by some victims’ families and others to get national media organizations to focus less on the shooters and their manifestos, pictures, postings and even their names, and more on victims as a strategy to reduce publicity that could inspire others seeking notoriety.

David Hogg, an 18-year-old activist, also asked media organizations this week not to state name of the Santa Fe High School shooter, although Hogg has remained one of the most prominent gun-control advocates since the Parkland shooting in February.

But the NRA blame doesn’t stop with just the media as the Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick, a Republican and prominent gun proponent in the state, has pointed to numerous issues that he sees lurking behind last week's school shooting.  In the hours after the violence, he said that reducing the number of entrances at the high school and others like it could have stopped the shooter, a remark that drew jeers on social media from gun-control advocates and others.

On Sunday, the Lt. Gov Patrick also took aim at video games and complained about the lack of religion in schools, as well as the prevalence of abortions in the United States.  “We have 50 million abortions,” he said to CNN. “We have families that are broken apart, no fathers at home. We have incredible heinous violence as a game, two hours a day in front of their eyes. And we stand here and we wonder why this happens to certain students.”

However, the New York Times has reported on the studies that examined many non-gun-related issues that are often held up as explanations for the mass shootings in the United States. It noted that mental-health issues and video game use did little to explain the mass shootings, as some have claimed, as other developed countries experience similar levels of both but much lower shooting rates. Other studies have shown that the United States is not more crime-prone than other nations, just more mass-shooting prone. And some have shown a strong positive correlation between higher gun ownership and more gun violence.

When will the US Congress ever come to the conclusion that the only correlation to substantiate the school shootings is the amount of available guns in the US?

Copyright G.Ater  2018