Guns and the American Way Lead to Violence and Death

From WashingtonPost.com: It's an American way of death. More than 30,000 people die from gunshot wounds every year, through murder, suicide and accidents. That is an average of 82 a day, and prospects for reducing the toll are dim.

Justice department figures put the number of guns in private hands at more than 200 million -- more than any other country -- and swelling by several million every year. The annual U.S. production of pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns for the domestic civilian market has been running at between 2.6 million and more than three million for the past seven years, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives.

"The U.S. level of lethal violence is far out of line with those of other industrialized nations," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. "The fact that most of our lethal violence involves firearms lends credence to the hypothesis that the prevalence of guns is a prime reason." Rest of Article. . . [Mark Godsey]