As I write this just after midnight on the third day of the
year, the first two days of 2018 have already seen 68 deaths by gunfire in the
USA.
Last year in 2017, we saw a total of 68,556 casualities
wounded or killed by gunfire here in the USA.
Of those casualties, 730 were children aged 11 and under, 3,224 were
children between the ages of 11 and 17, and 321 were law enforcement personnel,
a group which inflicted 2,076 of the overall casualties by gunfire. Law enforcement personnel killed 1188 people
by gunfire and other means in 2017.
Of these 68,556 gunfire casualties, 37,490 were deaths, with
15,490 of these killed by others accidentally or purposefully and about 22,000
being self-inflicted with gunfire. The
remaining 31,066 people were merely wounded.
The year 2017 opened with three mass shootings on New Year’s
Day in which five people were wounded, 1 person killed and 3 wounded, and 7 people
wounded, respectively. The last day of
the year saw an ambush mass shooting of 6 police officers in Colorado, one of
whom was killed. There were in all 346
mass shootings in the USA in 2017. This
year, 2018, maintained the traditional New Year’s Day opening with a mass
shooting, this time in Huntsville, Alabama, in which one person was killed and
three others wounded.
Thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts and prayers. Moment of
silence. Thoughts and prayers.
The body count of those killed by others in 2017, 15,490, is
just over a hundred people below the number of American military personnel
killed in action in the Viet Nam War during the peak year of 1968, which came
to 16,592, and far surpassed the total killed in action for the other
years. The total number killed in action
for the entire war, with deaths by suicide, accident, and disease extracted,
was 40,934, just 3500 more than the total number of deaths by gunfire in 2017.
God bless the Second Amendment and the National Rifle
Association and the Republican Party and the Christian Right and ammosexuals
from sea to shining sea.
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