It is hard to watch the news these days and not hear about guns. Whether you are for them or against them, that is irrelevant here. I am going to look at simple FACTS! You can accept them or ignore them, but that will not change them. So, let’s take a look at some numbers I found that I think are really interesting.
It is no secret that a large number of politicians want guns GONE! They kill people, so why not? The simple answer is because we have the Second Amendment. They have created a sense of fear and blame, making it sound like guns are killing insane amounts of people. I have found slightly different numbers on different sites as for how many people are killed per year by guns, so I will go with the largest number, 34,000 per year. That is a LOT of people, right? You can see why the government wants to take our guns, right? Well, if the real reason is that they want to save lives, guns need to get in line behind two things that kill WAY MORE people.
Let’s start with cigarettes! The following is from the CDC website. “Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day. On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers.” Not only do more than 10 times the number of people die from smoking than guns, more people die from second hand smoke than from guns. Let that sink in for a second. More people die from being around smokers than from guns! Anyways, smoking is killing 10 times as many people as guns, with 41,000 of them being innocent victims.
What about alcohol? Again, remember that about 34,000 are killed by guns each year. Once again, the following is straight from the CDC website. “Drinking too much can harm your health. Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years.” Where are the politicians on that one? More than twice as many people die from alcohol than guns each year.
So, I ask you this question. If you have strong emotions about guns being banned, how passionate are you about cigarettes and alcohol being banned? If your concern is safety, it’s a no-brainer. You must be very against people smoking and drinking, right? If not, you must have a reason. Cigarettes and alcohol must be used for good too, like saving lives, right? Interestingly, NO! However, guns do. The following information is from https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm
* Guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.
* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.
Wow, those are some pretty amazing statistics! So, why do so many politicians want to disarm America? I’d love to know your thoughts. Like, share, or comment.
