Aside from the willful misrepresentation of the scope of the problem, the creation of a new phrase “gun anxiety” they are ignoring the obvious:
Where would I hide or how would I get out?” These are the questions that Tess thinks about constantly, especially when she goes places with her two young daughters. She doesn’t like to take her kids into any big box stores because it feels too risky. There’s always the chance someone could walk in with a gun and start shooting, turning her mundane family errand into another tragic national headline with deadly consequences.
Many parents can relate to Tess’s anxiety over the increased levels of gun violence in the United States. There have already been more than 325 mass shootings this year according to The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that uses police reports, news coverage and other public sources to provide near-real time data about gun violence in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease and Prevention also names firearms as the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens, while research has found that the risk of gun violence is significantly higher for Black and Hispanic children.
First the willful misrepresentation.
The National Institute of Justice has studied mass shootings. The database they use reports five mass shootings this year. NOT over 300 hundred.
The obvious and ignored solutions are:
- Use the best defense against a murderer with a gun. A trusted adult with their own gun.
- If you are suffering from “gun anxiety” to the point of thinking about mass shootings constantly and are afraid to take your children into large stores over something that happens less than ten times per year in the entire country then get some counseling.
