Stop gun deaths

A few numbers: 2020 (611, 513, and 2,543) and 2019 (417, 465, and 1,707). What are they? The year, the generally accepted number of that year’s number of mass shootings in our country, the number who were killed, and the number who were wounded.

Those numbers are frightening. Some of those mass shootings make the news, most recently from Boulder, Colo. And yet the Boulder mass shooting, and the two other mass shootings that occurred on the very same day in Cleveland and Detroit (and that you likely did not even know about), brought the number of mass shootings to 107 for the first 81 days of 2021.

A percentage: About 60%. What is it? The generally accepted approximate percentage in recent years in the United States of all deaths by firearms that are suicides.

That percentage means that annually more Americans die from self-inflicted gunshots than are homicide victims.

The time has come for a change in how we think about guns, how we view the violence, and how we deal with those who see no way other than to end their own lives with guns. Lawmakers at all levels can try as they might to pass laws, but without a buy-in from large cross-sections of our country who decide that this madness, inflicted upon others or against oneself, must change, we will, sadly but assuredly, continue to read and hear these grim statistics, and very little will change. And while that lack of change may not be a crime, just ask all those affected by those mass shootings and suicides what they think.

JON SCHMERLING

Mt. Lebanon