Target Audience

Let's say that you attended a soccer game in Japan, in a stadium that held 100,000 people. You could bet yen to donuts that .07 of the assembled crowd would die of a firearm-related fatality within one year. That's not less than just one person per year, that's about one hand of one person per year.

That same stadium in the USA would see, conservatively speaking, 10 people dead of gunshots within a year. Now multiply that by three thousand similar stadiums and you begin to understand the scope of the problem.

Incidentally, these numbers only include the dead. It does not count the maimed and wounded results of greed, anger or stupidity-inspired assaults.

For people who enjoy lists the U.S. ranks about 8th (some say 4th) in gun deaths per 100,000 citizens, behind such bastions of tranquility as Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and, at #1, South Africa.

The same sort of massacre that occurred Saturday in Tucson essentially occurs every single day in the U.S., it's just spread out over the entire map and doesn't usually involve important people. That is, if you don't consider your friends or relatives, your son or daughter for instance, to be very important.

In fact, raise your hands if someone in your family has already been involved with an incident featuring a gun.

That's a lot of you.

Such is the price we pay for ensuring that the British never invade New England again.

If you're fascinated by such things you can find an enlightening chart comparing gun deaths world-wide here.

=Lefty=

---------