During a BBC interview that aired a few hours before the shooting in Louisiana, Obama said he was “distressed” he has been unable to weaken the Second Amendment.
“You mentioned the issue of guns, that is an area where if you ask me where has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings,” he said during the interview.
“And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands. And for us not to be able to resolve that issue has been something that is distressing. But it is not something that I intend to stop working on in the remaining 18 months.”
According to government figures, there are approximately 32,000 gun deaths per year in the United States. 60% of those deaths are attributed to suicide, 3% are accidental, 34% are classified as homicides and the majority of those homicides are gang and drug-related.
Also omitted by Obama is the fact “violent crimes in 2013 decreased 4.4 percent when compared with 2012 figures, and the estimated number of property crimes decreased 4.1 percent,” according to the FBI.
“According to DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011,” writes Larry Bell for Forbes.
Obama and the corporate media have managed to distort the record and portray gun violence as a ominous and ever increasing threat when in fact the opposite is true.
Bell writes:
Pew researchers observed that the huge amount of attention devoted to gun violence incidents in the media has caused most Americans to be unaware that gun crime is “strikingly down” from 20 years ago. In fact, gun-related homicides in the late 2000s were “equal to those not seen since the early 1960s.” Yet their survey found that 56 percent believed gun-related crime is higher, 26 percent believed it stayed about the same, and 6 percent didn’t know. Only 12 percent of those polled thought it was lower.
The corporate media and Democrats will use the shooting in Louisiana to champion their call for restrictions on the Second Amendment and the wholesale disarmament of lawful and non-violent American citizens.
Despite an interminable anti-Second Amendment campaign the American people continue to purchase firearms, particularly after incidents like the Chattanooga shooting.
Media coverage of crime and shootings results not in calls for dismantling the Second Amendment, but a spike in gun sales and an increase in firearm training for first time gun-owners.
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