The Las Vegas Tragedy is just another September in Chicago
Surprised? No one should be at this very late date. http://heyjackass.com/
Chicago
totals:
September 2016: 69 killed, 301 wounded.
September 2015:
63 killed, 303 wounded.
September 2014: 46 killed, 211 wounded.
No one in their right mind considers Chicago the home of the NRA, Republicans, or the citadel of country music. Chicago isn't the poster child of conservative values to anyone. Just how could anyone be so ignorant as to what happens in Chicago every month, every year?
Chicago lives don't seem to matter all that much to politicians, CNN, or Jimmy Kimmel. Yet, Chicago's problems are not those of “once in a lifetime” and it requires no special vision to see them: it is called every weekend and every month, in the same neighborhoods and is the same problems, continually. Eighty percent of the homicides in Chicago have been classified as gang-related.
October
3, 2017 Chicago Year to Date
Shot & Killed: 499
Shot
& Wounded: 2403
Total
Shot: 2902
Total
Homicides: 536
It isn't a story worth covering to CNN, apparently: they would rather report on Tom Petty's death before it happens. Murder-suicides don't always have easy answers, although the media invariably finds them an easy path to making money off of the misery of others.
Suicides in the United States are at a 30 year high, according to the New York Times, and “And while the share of suicides involving guns declined — guns went from being involved in 37 percent of female suicides to 31 percent, and from 62 percent to 55 percent for men — the total number of gun suicides increased--.”
Overall, the U.S. suicide rate is about the same as Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and Iceland, and well below France and Russia. Although armchair critics like to cite the approximate 33,000 deaths from guns in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released these figures for 2014, the most recent year for which complete data on firearms-related deaths and injuries are available. In 2014, 21,386 firearm deaths were suicides.
If you believe in the value of human life, about 65% of the problem associated with guns is eliminated if we could simply convince people not to kill themselves. It would save some 21,000 lives every year.
It is a great pity that Facebook would apparently rather sell ads to Russia, Yahoo now (four years after the fact) admits that all 3 billion of their accounts were hacked in 2013, and we waste incalculable amounts of time, money, and energy investigating air-ball claims of collusion, while ignoring 44,193 suicides in the United States each year, and the 136,053 Americans that die from accidents (unintentional injuries) each year as well.
New preliminary 2016 data from the National Safety Council estimates that as many as 40,000 people died in motor vehicles crashes last year, a 6% rise from 2015. If those numbers bear out, it would be a 14% increase in deaths since 2014, the biggest two-year jump in more than five decades. Crashes result in the very real cost of human life. But there are also millions more who are seriously injured—an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC—and a financial cost to society as well. NSC estimates the cost of motor-vehicle deaths, injuries, and property damage in 2016 was $432 billion, a 12% increase from the previous year.
It may not be newsworthy enough to sell ads, but if we really want to save 80,000 lives every year in the United States, that would be accomplished by 1) drive safely and 2) please do not decide to kill yourself.
Copyright 2017 by Randy Wakeman. All Rights Reserved.
