Letter: Gun deaths must be addressed

When will we care enough to demand that Congress enact sensible gun regulations? What will it take?

Dozens of slaughtered first-graders wasn’t enough. Between Newtown in 2012 and Orlando in 2016, another 185 people were killed in mass shootings, and an additional 162 were injured. Will Orlando finally be the catalyst for change?

If a passenger plane crashed daily, would we look into that problem and institute some safety regulations? You bet! Congress would be on that like locusts. But each and every day in the U.S., 100 people are killed by firearms, just not all in one place. So we don’t notice. And we’ve done nothing.]

In the year 2015, there were 425 air crash deaths. Guns kill that many people in about 4.3 days.

In a year, we have 12,000 murders and 20,500 suicides with guns. That’s equal to 65 Airbus crashes per year, 5 per month.

This is a serious public health issue. We jumped on the Zika virus train and the Ebola train; why not the gun-death train?

Automobile-crash deaths have dropped 60 percent since the 1960s, due to decades of new safety regulations on automobiles. Meanwhile, gun deaths have remained unabated and now surpass auto deaths in nearly half of our states.

Why the difference? I suggest that regulations have made the difference, because we took on an issue we knew we could do something about. It’s no different with guns. Sensible firearm regulations can save lives. Call your Congressmen today.

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Letter: Gun deaths must be addressed."