Click link for entire article: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/15/who-gets-shot-in-america/
Before starting work on Gun Report, I had
my own ideas about gun violence: Most of it probably resulted from gang
activity, I assumed, along with the marital domestic shootings we so
often read about.
More than 350 posts and 40,000 deaths later, here is what I learned.
Gang shootings are prevalent, especially
in former hubs of industry now in economic decline in Ohio; the
Flint/Tri-Cities region of Michigan; in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne,
Indiana; Newport News, Va.; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Carjackings and
home invasions often appeared in my Google news searches. I was
surprised to learn that suburbs were a magnet for gun violence, perhaps
mirroring the housing implosion, which decimated the suburbs and
propelled people to cities, where there are always jobs.
Not that nation’s largest cities are
exempt: Miami, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark, New Orleans,
Philadelphia, and Dallas are notable examples. (Less so New York,
possibly because of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which was ruled
unconstitutional.) Drive-by shootings still plague northern and southern
California; Los Angeles, Fresno and the entire east side of the state
are rife with gang activity. Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri also
frequently popped up in this regard.
What was also notable was where the shootings aren’t:
Maine, Hawaii, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, and New Hampshire were rarely
mentioned in the report. Why? Weapons don’t easily flow into Hawaii,
surrounded by the Pacific, and Montana and Wyoming are sparsely
populated, mostly by experienced, rural gun owners. But homeowners in
these states are also armed against home invaders, and as we saw in Montana in May, tragedy can result.
But while half of the shootings I
featured were the result of a crime, the other half, I was most
surprised to learn, resulted from arguments — often fueled by alcohol —
among friends, neighbors, family members and romantic partners. More and
more, people are solving their differences not with their fists but
with guns. Husbands and wives are shooting each other, as are sisters
and brothers. In many homes across America, loaded guns are easily
accessible, and children find them, accidentally shooting themselves or
each other. One hundred children died in unintentional shootings in the year after Newtown, which breaks down to two every week.
A year and a half later, you might expect
that I’d have a solution to the country’s scourge of gun violence. But
there is no one answer. It’s a favorite talking point of the right, but
it’s true: Criminals will always find a way to get guns. But a lot of
the people I covered weren’t criminals until the bullet left the
chamber. How do you prevent a law-abiding person from obtaining a gun
when he or she hasn’t done anything illegal yet?
