America Is the Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World Today

[billh58]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-a-love/america-is-the-greatest-p_b_820729.html

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With 90 guns for every 100 people and 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey in Switzerland, the U.S. by far is the most heavily armed nation in the world. Yemen, in second place, has 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, and Iraq with 39.

And not surprisingly, America has the world's highest gun-related death rate, with nearly 100,000 people shot or killed with a gun each year. Over a million Americans have been killed with guns since King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, according to the Childrens' Defense Fund. Moreover, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says that America's homicide rate is 6.9 times higher than rates in other 22 advanced nations combined. And among 23 high-income countries, 80 percent of firearms deaths occur in the U.S.

This is a travesty and an embarrassment in the industrialized world. And with guns aplenty in a nation that is hungry, ill and need of repair, guns are ready available for the mentally unstable, domestic abusers, criminals and others who should be prohibited from having a gun. But what do you do when the county itself is sick? As Michael Moore recently noted on Twitter, "Tons o guns & unstable people all over world but they don't kill each other like we do. Guns Don't Kill People. Americans Kill People. Why?"

The Second Amendment -- an anachronism that was meaningful only when people hunted for their food -- reads, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It is hard to believe, but the gun lobby and right-wing militia groups who would wage violence against the government have interpreted this to apply to an unlimited right for individual citizens, the right to amass a personal army. The weapons makers pay politicians millions of dollars to back it up. Unfortunately a right-wing Supreme Court tends to agree.

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Like Mr. Love, most thinking Americans and especially Liberal Democrats see and understand that the United States has allowed the right-wing NRA extremists to hijack our political process and flood our nation with lethal weapons. This state-of-affairs was never the intent of the Founders when they wrote the Second Amendment, and the extreme neoconservative Gang of Five SCOTUS members are seditious traitors to the trust bestowed on them, and to their country.

Support a gun control organization of your choice today in any way that you can. The future of this nation depends on the reversal of the "guns for all" policies purchased from corrupt politicians by the right-wing gun lobby all across this nation.