Our gun-crazed nation will have more massacres

In the past two weeks, two 18-year-old men armed with Ar15-style rifles carried out mass slaughters. The first, a racist attack in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, left 10 dead. The second, an assault on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and two teachers.

The carnage continues. The victims of mass shootings in the past decade have included Latino, Black, White, Asian and gay people; Jews and Baptists; transit workers, festival celebrants, worshippers, grocery shoppers, teachers and students. There will be more. And the problem is getting worse.

We have become a gun-crazed nation. The United States has more than twice as many guns per capita as Yemen and more than three times as many as every other country in the world. We have more guns than people. Annual firearm manufacturing has nearly tripled here since 2000. Semiautomatic handgun sales have surpassed rifles since 2009.

In 2020, a record 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., a 14% increase from the year before, a 25% increase from five years earlier and a 43% increase from a decade prior. Fiftyfour percent of those 2020 gun deaths were suicides; 43% were murders.

The rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by about 50% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020. An FBI report this week shows that activeshooting incidents, attempts to kill people in populated areas, increased 52% in 2021 from the year before and 97% from 2017.

Here in California, our lawmakers continue to pass tough gun laws. Consequently, we have among the lowest per capita firearm death rates in the nation.

But we can't seal our borders. And much of the nation is frozen by inaction. In Washington, the elected officials feeding at the financial trough of the National Rifle Association continue sacri

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