Every day, 33 Americans are murdered with guns. Too often, the people pulling the triggers were able to buy firearms because of the gaps in our broken background check system.
After the horrific shooting in Newtown, CT, President Obama committed himself to delivering a set of concrete proposals to address the epidemic of gun violence in America. Requiring a criminal background check for every gun sale should be part of that plan.
But for background checks to be effective, states need to submit hundreds of thousands of missing records to the national background check databases. Every missing record is another tragedy waiting to happen.
"Therefore, we assess each state's performance by comparing it with the performance of other states after controlling for population. The map shows how many mental health records each state needs to submit to match the performance of the nine best-performing states."
ReplyDeleteSo if I understand correctly, the states can't be trusted to report the correctly, so fortunately we have these people to tell us how many mentally ill people we should have.
Or perhaps the states with the highest numbers, just have the highest numbers.
Interesting that there's no correlation between gun laws and state reporting, even if we accept the categories given. Texas and Pennsylvania do a lot of reporting, and so do. New York and California.
ReplyDeleteLeave it to you to pretend to find a couple exceptions to the rule. Any normal person would have noticed that every single state, about 15 of them, designated in the worst category was a gun-friendly state.
DeleteGun friendly makes a state better.
DeleteNot to the millions who would like to live free of deadly weapons when simply shopping, or being in public. Where is there right to a country free of deadly menace?
DeleteAnon, your rights don't include interfering with my rights. Being free of things that distress you in public isn't guaranteed. However, you are quite free to ban guns on your property.
DeleteSarge has it exactly right.
DeleteA smug attitude given it's your right to a gun that causes 33,000 gun shot deaths a year. Got it, you love killing and could care less about innocent deaths.
DeleteYour right to own a gun has proven to kill and harm 10's of thousands. You right is causing needless death. I know you don't care about that, but it is evidence and reason why your right should be taken away. Not to mention the 2nd Amend. does not mean individual right.
Delete"Not to mention the 2nd Amend. does not mean individual right. "
DeleteAnon, I'd suggest you look up the Heller and McDonald decisions made by the SCOTUS which seems to make it an individual right. In fact, Heller was cited in the decision which resulted in the state of Illinois implementing a shall issue carry permit system. So I suspect you might be mistaken.
Any gun under my control, has never killed anyone. To paraphrase Jeff Cooper, when my gun is ever used to commit an illegal or negligent act, you are welcome to my head on a platter. In the US, we don't punish collectively, we punish the person who did the crime.
Right, the Court also found slavery legal.
DeleteYes, you guys put a lot of weight into those Supreme Court rulings which passed by the slimmest of margins only due to the fact that the Court was lop-sided with conservative old fogies. The times they are a-changin'.
DeleteMike, the number of votes on each side of the decision doesn't necessarily make it more just than other decision. For example Miranda vs Arizona was a 5-4 decision. Would you suggest that this decision by the slimmest of margins was a bad one?
DeleteAre you referring to that really important speech the cops make every time they arrest someone? You know the one they ONLY do on TV but never in real life? Is that the one?
DeleteActually it only has to be given before an interrogation. They can arrest you and take you to jail. My guess is that they also prefer to get it documented either on a signed statement or on tape.
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