lpnmajor wrote:
My State lost another fine Sheriffs Deputy today in a blaze of gunfire. He killed his murderer, but that is small comfort for his family and community. Like so many other in law enforcement, the Deputy was a combat Veteran. What are the odds, living through multiple firefights, only to die at the hands of a fellow natural born American? Surprisingly, the odds are better than even.
Whether it was climbing out of trenches into the teeth of a Maxim machine gun, crawling through hedgerows, sloshing through rice paddies trying to avoid bobbytraps, or walking down streets full of IED's, suicide bombers or worse, death stalks the war fighters every step. What do you suppose the damage to a youngsters psychological health could be, never knowing where, when or by whom death comes, day in and day out, days upon days upon days?
Here, in our own country, kids never know when a nutjob will invade their school and shoot/stab them to death. Cops never know when a welfare check ( such as in today's tragedy ) or a traffic stop will turn into a fight to the death. Factory and office workers never know when some disgruntled fellow employee will show up with a shotgun and take as many lives as they can. Tell me, what's the difference between the daily slaughter here in America, and the slaughters that have/are occurring in foreign battlefields? The answer is; no difference at all.
We seem to be at war with half the world ( or more ), but the real tragedy is......................we're at war with ourselves. Americans are killing Americans at a faster rate than in any war in our history, including the Civil war. This epic violence has little to do with firearms, since we'd obviously beat each other to death with a rock if that's all we could find. Worse by far than the opioid epidemic.....................is the violence epidemic. We don't seem too troubled about admitting that we have a National drug problem, while pretending not to see the gigantic elephant that invades our lives much more profoundly, that elephant being - America's love/hate relationship with violence.
My State lost another fine Sheriffs Deputy today i... (
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Time for a reality check! Your allegation:
"Americans are killing Americans at a faster rate than in any war in our history, including the Civil war."
The Reality IS: More than 600,000 "Americans killed each other" in the Civil War, over 150,000 per year.
The Reality IS: The population of the U.S. in 1861 was less than 32 million people.
The Reality IS: The "Americans killing each other" rate in the Civil War was about 468 per 100,000.
The Reality IS: 17,284 Americans "killed each other" in 2017, 5.3 per 100,000.
Worse by far than the opioid epidemic.....................is the violence epidemic.
The Reality IS: Rates of murder and violent crime remain at historic low points,
almost 50 percent below their early-1990s peaks.
The Reality IS: A preliminary analysis of 2017 crime rates in the nation's 30 largest cities
projects that the overall crime rate and the violent crime rate will decline
to the 2nd-lowest levels since 1990.
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/crime-rates-americaThe Reality IS: 70,237 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in 2017 (21.7 per 100,000),
more than four times the number of "Americans killing each other", for the same year.
An increase of 9.6% from 2016 (19.8 per 100,000).
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.htmlThe Reality IS: You've got your "facts" bas aackwards.