Jim Cahillane’s moving column in the March 28 Gazette (“End America’s bloody love affair with AR-15s”) is one more excellent comment on the issue of gun violence in the U.S. written in the aftermath of the most recent “St. Valentine’s Day massacre” in Parkland, Florida.
However, I have yet to see a wider circulation of an article from the March 22 New England Journal of Medicine, “Broken Hearts and Opened Eyes,” in which Charles A. Morris and Jonathan B. Miller note that in addition to the 17 murders in Parkland, there were at least 28 other deaths by gunshot that day in the U.S., occurring in ones and twos, with the various circumstances mentioned by the authors.
Fewer than half of the deaths by gunshot that day occurred in Parkland, and the total “40-plus victims” that day are just half the average 96 deaths by gunshot daily reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the other hand, the 17 teens and children killed that day by guns (14 at Parkland and 3 elsewhere) were over twice the daily average of 7 for those aged 19 or younger reported by the CDC to be killed daily by guns.
Sadly, Parkland and other mass murders are only the tip of a very large and bloody iceberg to which we need to attend.
George Kriebel
Florence