Will We Ever Figure Out Who’s Doing All That Shooting?

Last week there were two legal decisions involving guns, and each side got one win. Gun-nut Nation was given a gift by a Federal judge in West Virginia, who ruled that a law prohibiting persons under 21 from buying a handgun was a violation of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ In California, the state Court of Appeals said that a law giving personal information about individuals who bought guns could be shared with qualified gun researchers.

No doubt, both decisions will be appealed but I’m not convinced that either of the laws that are the subjects of these rulings have any real relevance or value to the one gun issue which remains to be solved, and the issue is: what do we do to reduce gun violence which results in more than 100,000 deaths and serious injuries every year?

The last year for which we have any data — 2021 — gives us 26,000 suicides and 21,000 homicides involving guns (I’m slightly rounding off.) We don’t have a number for aggravated assaults, i.e., non-fatal, intentional gun injuries, but this number was probably somewhere around another 70,000, give or take a thousand here or a thousand there.

So, altogether we probably had 115,000 injuries and deaths from guns, and we only have any data on the shooters who were suicide victims, which means we don’t really know anything about how and why the…