By Kristen Hoggatt-Abader
Academia is often accused of being out of touch (click here) with the rest of the world. I might agree, sometimes, but since gun violence often takes place on college and university campuses, including the University of Arizona where I am pursuing a Ph.D., academia is not studiously aloof to this societal illness.
The accounts of gun violence are never ending these days. They’re becoming so common that many foreign-born people (I’m married to one of them) think this is just what life in the United States looks like. Isn’t that horrific? So I did some research to see if academia had something to offer and discovered actor-network-theory (ANT)....
...ANT emphasizes the relatedness between living and nonliving things, considering how each action triggers another action in an expanding network of players. Everything’s connected. I can’t drink my coffee without my cup and I can’t hold it comfortably without the handle....
...ANT would say the answer lies in a different question, highlighting the matrix that enables the action: the pull of the trigger, the explosion of gunpowder, even the humidity of the air that the bullet travels through to reach its target.
In a mass shooting, guns will kill some and not others in part due to this complex interplay of agents.
Considering ANT, one begins to see that the current gun debate fuels a false dichotomy. To prevent shooting deaths, we need to change the matrix: we need a multi-pronged approach to prevent more people from dying due to gun violence. That means better education. That means improved mental health services. That means more reliable tools for families to flag distressed relatives. That also means more gun control legislation to make guns harder to get....
Saturday in the USA saw three major mass murders. That should surprise no one. Since the insurrection of January 6, 2021, Americans have been buying guns as if there are going out of style. I wish they were going out of style. How do you tell a country that witnessed an insurrection that buying more guns is not the answer? How do you tell Americans that gun proliferates violence and does not end it.
Some time ago on this blog I put together a Sunday Night, back then it might have been Saturday or Friday Night, that talked about what happens when guns become pervasive in society. In that presentation of facts the one country that stood out as having changed drastically when it came to gun violence was Brazil. Today, Brazil is among the most violent countries in this Hemisphere with ambitions of greed that will defeat the benevolence of tropical rainforests. The reason for all this violence is the presence of the NRA. That was true then and it is true now.
The NRA was proliferating gun purchases long before an escalation of crime and violence in Latin America.
By Diego Sanjurjo
The vast majority of Latin American countries (click here) share a similar trend of rising crime and violence. Most forms of violent crime have intensified, with property crime being the most notorious. Nonetheless, homicides are easier to account for. Murders experienced an 11 percent increase in the region between 2000 and 2010, resulting in more than 2.5 million killings since the turn of the century. Furthermore, homicides have arguably turned into a Latin American singularity, because it is the only region in the world in which murder rates increased during the first decades of the twenty-first century. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the region surpassed Africa for the first time and became the region with the highest number of murders globally, both in absolute numbers as in relation to its population.
Guns are fundamental in these dynamics and their use as murder weapons supposes a particularity of the Latin American homicide epidemic. Firearms were used to commit around 50 percent of all homicides worldwide between 2010 and 2015, but their impact in Latin America is even more pronounced. In Brazil and in Central America, for instance, gun homicides correspond to at least 70% of the total. Their use in non-lethal forms of crime has drastically increased as well in recent decades, while national reports show that rising insecurity and mistrust in state authorities appear to be linked to increase popular disposition to acquire them as instruments of self-defense. Hence, self-protection and criminal predatory behaviour fuel a rising demand for guns in a region that already possesses important surpluses dating back to the civil wars and military dictatorships of the 20th century....
The gun culture has now inundated the USA with killing spree after killing spree. Why? An insurrection in the USA? Whoever heard of such nonsense? It scared people and they are looking at the government's potential to do harm when the wrong people are in power. "Preppers" have never felt so vindicated.
There are also still problems with chronic unemployment and the issue of racism has never been so keenly observed in the USA. When cops kill, people become insecure and not more secure and they turn toward self-sufficiency and guns.
By Emma Ascott
Phoenix - An escalation in firearms sales last year, (click here) driven in part by new gun owners, is prompting some health experts to call for more attention to gun safety and the relationship between owning weapons and injuries or suicide.
In 2020, the FBI processed a record 39.7 million firearm background checks, one of the best measurements of likely sales. The week of March 16-22 – just after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic and then a national emergency – is the top week for background checks since the agency’s instant system launched in November 1998.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms industry, estimates more than 8 million people were first-time gun buyers last year, and experts cite pandemic-related worries, as well as the presidential election, as primary drivers of rising sales.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine are among those calling for action to help prevent firearm injuries or deaths amid the uptick in purchases.
More safety education “is essential to address the potential downstream adverse effects of increases in firearm ownership with regard to injury and suicide prevention,” the researchers wrote recently in JAMA Network Open....
