Las Vegas massacre

When there’s an exceptional mass shooting in the US I usually post up a small piece about the prospects of gun control in this interesting country.

I was particularly horrified by what I saw this time, because my wife and I have both been to Las Vegas on a couple of occasions and have stayed very close to the scene of this appalling crime.  Our thoughts and sympathies are with all those caught up in this senseless violence.    

So in this article I’ve tabled the latest data recorded by Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a not for profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States. 

I’ve only selected a portion of the data and please note that it does not include the estimated 22,000 gun-related suicides that occur annually in the US.  You might want to visit the GVA site to see the rest of their collected data. 

According to Wikipedia The United States' Congressional Research Service acknowledges that there is not a broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting, and defines a "public mass shooting" as one in which four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed, echoing the FBI definition of the term "mass murder".

As far as gun control is concerned (of the very strict type we see in the UK and to a lesser extent in most of the rest of the western world) it seems that the US government are more than happy to allow their citizens to purchase military grade killing machines with which to continue the annual carnage.  Research in 2013 by the Pew Research Center suggests that the American public are rather split along party lines about gun control, although there is some broad support for measures such as barring people with mental illnesses from buying guns; prohibiting gun purchases by people on federal no-fly or watch lists; and background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows.

According to the Washington Post in July 2017 President Trump, when talking about gun crime in his inaugural speech, said “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”  Well it hasn’t and it appears to be getting worse.

The number of gun deaths in the US is equivalent to a Boeing 747-400 passenger jet (typical three-class layout) crashing in the US every ten days killing everyone on board.  Now if that was happening I’m sure someone would want to do something about it!

*Third leading cause of death for children in the US

On a brighter note, Four Hundred Thousand Brits travel to Las Vegas each year (the largest overseas group to visit the city) and although the majority of us don’t really get the gun love thing we are a resilient bunch of people and I’m sure we will continue to travel there even though a few will understandably think again.