A day in the death of America [View All]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2098569,00.html


A two-year-old shoots himself with a gun he finds behind the sofa, a shopper is killed by a security guard, one brother fires on another - so it goes. Nine dead in 24 hours


-snip-

On an average day, eight Americans aged 19 or under are killed by firearms - over a year, that adds up to more than the number who perished in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Of those eight victims, according to Centres for Disease Control and Prevention figures for 2004 (the last year for which statistics are available), seven are likely to be male and one female; variously, three are black, four white and one Hispanic; five are likely to be the victims of murder, two suicides and one classed as "unintentional", "undetermined" or "legal intervention" - a police shooting.

In many respects, then, Gerardo's death set the scene for just another day in America. Over the following 24 hours, on this day picked at random, another eight children would lose their lives. Gerardo was the eldest; the youngest was two. Eight were black and one was Hispanic. They died in housing estates, suburbs and malls, at parties and on porches, in areas of average income and of above-average poverty. They were shot by a relative, friend, unknown assassin, a pizza delivery man, an off-duty police officer and by accident. It was Thanksgiving, the biggest travelling weekend of the year, when people are returning home after joining their families for the holiday. By the time the day was over, nine families were one member short.

-this snip holds the info on the lives of the 9 killed in this 24 hrs., hr. by hr.-

A few months earlier, Georgia had passed a "stand your ground" law that permitted state residents to use deadly force to respond to threats in public places, with no duty to retreat. Zaid walked free.

And so Thanksgiving Sunday ended in Atlanta as it began in the Bronx - with robbery, death and the sound of gunshot. No one would know from where the next day's deaths would come. The only certainty was that they would come.

On the morning of November 27, a gunlovers' website, glocktalk.com, ran a discussion thread about Kenyatta's death the night before.

The Fly wrote, "I do love a cleaner gene pool."

Butcher asked, "How many 14-year-old gangbangers are gonna be killed this week?"

Lcarreau responded, "Not enough."
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men with guns and america with inadequate gun laws. how stupid are we to let gun nuts rule?