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Monday, October 2, 2017
Sandy Hook Senator: ‘It’s Time For Congress To Get Off Its Ass And Do Something’ On Mass Shootings
By Marina Fang
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted no time responding to the shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest such attack in modern U.S. history.
Following yet another mass shooting in America, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who made gun control his cause after the 2012 attack by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state in which the victims included 20 children, pilloried his colleagues in Congress for having done nothing to prevent such assaults.
Wasting no time responding to the shooting in Las Vegas last night in which at least 50 people reportedly were killed ― the deadliest such incident in modern U.S. history ― Murphy on Monday morning issued a statement imploring Congress to “get off its ass and do something.”
“My heart goes out to the victims, their families, the first responders, and the entire Las Vegas community. Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen with this degree of regularity,” he said.
“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic,” he said. “There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.”
Murphy has continually lambasted lawmakers for “giving quiet endorsement to these murders” and for providing “thoughts and prayers” without any action, following numerous mass shootings in recent years.
Six school staff members also were killed by shooter Adam Lanza in the attack at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza then killed himself.
Cost of gun violence: hospital charges for 100,000 shot annually reach $2.8bn
Jessica Glenza
More than 100,000 people are shot each year in the US at a total cost of $2.8bn in hospital charges, a study published on Monday has found. If lost wages and hospital charges are considered together, the authors said, the annual cost of shootings in the US could be as high as $45bn. The study was published in the journal Health Affairs, hours after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, at a music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday. At least 58 people were killed and 515 wounded.
Although mass shootings represent the most high-profile gun violence in the US, homicide, suicide and everyday violence kill many more. The study, which looked at more than 150,000 patients in a national database of emergency department visits between 2006 and 2014, is one of just a handful on American gun violence published each year, because of a lack of congressional funding.
“The numbers are really, really startling,” said Faiz Gani, one of the authors of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine department of surgery. “Previous studies just focused on the mortality, but ignored the larger chunk of people who don’t die but are affected by this issue. “That really struck me as something that was really alarming. There are 100,000 people who are affected and we’re not really doing anything.”
In 2015, about 36,500 people died of firearms-related injuries. When that total was added to those injured, Gani and his co-authors found more than 100,000 people each year were shot, either as part of an assault, accidentally or while attempting to kill themselves.
Dr. Thomas Weiser, a trauma surgeon and associate professor at Stanford Medicine, called the mass shooting in Las Vegas, “Totally shocking, incredibly tragic and totally expected”. Recent research by Weiser estimated that victims of firearms injuries cost $700m in hospitalizations between 2006 and 2014.
“It’s just a matter of time before this happens again,” said Weiser. “The truth is these tragedies – these mass shootings – attract tremendous headlines. The other truth is there is daily carnage throughout the United States in ones, twos and threes that don’t make headlines.” Patients pay a high price for being shot. On average, those treated in emergency departments incurred $5,254 in charges. If they stayed in hospital overnight, charges were far higher – $95,887 on average.
Patients who stayed overnight in hospital were more likely to be discharged to expensive rehabilitation facilities. About a third of inpatient gunshot victims were discharged to another medical facility and incurred costs of $179,565 on average. Over the course of the study, 2006 to 2014, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated 970,622 people in the US were wounded or killed by a firearm.
“A lot of these individuals tend to be from a lower socioeconomic background and tend to be uninsured,” Gani said. “They’re paying that out of pocket directly.”
Firearms injuries are the third-leading injury-related cause of death in the US, behind drug overdoses and car crashes. Nevertheless, research on the causes and consequences of gun violence remains severely underfunded because of the “politicized environment” around guns and gun sales.
One of the co-authors of the new research, Dr Joseph Sakran, is a professor and trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins, and was a shooting victim. When Sakran was 17, he was shot in the throat after a high school football game and nearly died, he said, an experience that inspired him to pursue medicine as a career.
“I love what I do, and I love being able to take care of patients, but what I would love more is to not ever have to take care of such unnecessary violent crimes,” said Sakran. “This is a public health crisis we’re facing here in the US.”
As many people die from gunshots every year as from sepsis. However, gun violence research receives only 0.7% of the funding given to research into sepsis. For every 100 studies published on sepsis, four are published on gun violence.
The study was conducted by researchers based at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, a city that is experiencing one of the worst waves of gun-related homicide in its history. In late spring, the city’s mayor said “murder is out of control” and that there were “too many guns on the streets”.
The study reflected that reality. Nearly half (49.5%) patients who arrived at the emergency department after being shot were victims of assault, accounting for 348,000 patients.
Men between 15 and 24 had the highest incidences of gun wounds and were nine times more likely to be injured by guns than women.
“There’s a lot of violent crime,” Gani said, “and I think really just being a citizen of the city it’s something that is pretty disconcerting, and you want to find a solution, and do something.”
In the US, for every 100,000 people, 25.3 will visit an emergency department with a gunshot wound each year – a rate “disproportionately higher” than in other developed countries such as Germany, Japan and the UK. Some of the best international data compares homicide rates between countries. In the US, 27 people are killed by firearms for every 1 million people. In the UK, that rate is one per 1 million, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey.
“Although numerous studies have identified and proposed effective interventions to limit firearm-related violence, efforts to reduce firearm-related injuries have been limited as a result of the politicized environment surrounding gun violence and a lack of will to consistently implement proposed policies,” the Johns Hopkins researchers wrote.
The authors suggested that “future policies must promote more effective ways of limiting firearms access” for the mentally ill and people with criminal records.
Researchers drew data from the National Emergency Department Database, a record of 30m emergency department visits in 950 hospitals in the US.
Barack Obama calls Las Vegas shooting 'a senseless tragedy'
Narjas Zatat
(Former President Barack Obama called the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night – the deadliest in modern US history — "another senseless tragedy."AP)
Former President Barack Obama responded to Sunday night's mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas that left at least 50 people dead and over 400 injured —the deadliest shooting in modern US history.
"Michelle & I are praying for the victims in Las Vegas," he tweeted Monday morning. "Our thoughts are with their families & everyone enduring another senseless tragedy."
Beginning in the days following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, Obama aggressively advocated for more gun-control and safety measures during his time in office, and called his failure to pass significant reforms one of the "greatest frustrations" of his presidency.
He delivered 17 speeches following mass shootings during his eight years in office, which saw 37 mass shootings on American soil.
"This is not normal. We can't let it become normal," Obama said during a speech after a 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. "If we truly care about this — if we're going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough."
During a January 2016 speech in which he unveiled a new set of gun regulations, the president broke down in tears while calling on lawmakers to support "common-sense" gun-control measures. He blamed the powerful gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, for pressuring lawmakers to oppose even the most basic gun regulations and safety measures, calling the industry "almost entirely unaccountable" in a 2016 op-ed.
"Each time this comes up, we are fed the excuse that common-sense reforms like background checks might not have stopped the last massacre, or the one before that, or the one before that, so why bother trying," he said. "I reject that thinking. We know we can't stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence … So the gun lobby may be holding Congress hostage right now, but they cannot hold America hostage. We do not have to accept this carnage as the price of freedom."
The Las Vegas shooter, identified by police as Stephen Paddock, opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, aiming into a tightly packed crowd of many thousands of people attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.
Paddock, a 64-year-old from Mesquite, Nevada who appeared to have been armed with at least one automatic weapon, used the elevated vantage point to fire into the crowds across the Las Vegas Strip at the Route 91 Harvest festival, where Jason Aldean was onstage.
Soon after the shooting, which began at 10:08 p.m. PDT, a SWAT team stormed the building, forced their way into his hotel room, and found the gunman already dead. Officers believe he was the only attacker, and that he killed himself before they arrived.
Police discovered at least 10 rifles in his hotel room, which he checked into on Thursday, September 28.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-sends-prayers-las-vegas-144505960.html
Clinton talks gun legislation immediately following massacre
By Ashley Killough, Jim Sciutto and Miranda Green, CNN
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, amid the fallout of the massacre in Las Vegas, turned the political spotlight on a gun bill that's currently making its way through the House.
"The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get," she tweeted Monday morning.
She wrote later, "Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again."
The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.
Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.
The "Hearing Protection Act," which would make it easier to purchase silencers, is part of a larger bipartisan measure that would ease restrictions on transporting guns across state lines and narrows the restricted category of armor-piercing ammunition. Supporters point out that silencers don't make guns silent, but it decreases their decibel level and muffles the noise.
The House Committee on Natural Resources passed the larger package, known as the SHARE Act, last month. It aims to "expand opportunities for hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting" and "increases safety and hearing protection for sportsmen and women," according to a statement from the committee at the time of passage. The bill would now go to a floor vote, and would need to pass the Senate, but no such vote has been scheduled in the House.
When authorities stormed the room of the Las Vegas gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, authorities found a cache of weapons, including 10 rifles, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters over night. Authorities have not said whether any silencers had been found or were used among the shooters' weapons cache.
A congressional hearing on the bill had been scheduled in June, but was canceled in the wake of the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice that seriously wounded House Republican Whip Steve Scalise and several others.
The House Committee on Natural Resources eventually held a hearing September 12 and passed the bill a day later. Multiple GOP leadership aides told CNN there is no House floor vote scheduled yet on the measure.
Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is on natural resources committee, told CNN on Monday that the only thing between the bill and its passage is "timing."
"The current system for background checks for silencers is very important," Gallego said. "The only thing that's stopping Republicans now is timing."
Clinton repeatedly brought up the need for tougher gun control laws during the 2016 president campaign. The previous deadliest mass shooting in modern US history -- the shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub which killed 49 people -- occurred in June 2016, during last year's presidential election. With authorities saying 58 people were killed in Vegas, the most recent shooting now becomes the country's deadliest mass shooting in modern history.
"The Hearing Protection Act" was introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about suffering hearing loss in his left ear after growing up hunting without earmuffs or suppressors.
Currently, federal laws are more restrictive for silencers than firearms. Buyers must undergo a nine-month approval process that involves getting fingerprinted and submitting a photo, along with paying a $200 tax. The bill calls to eliminate those steps and make purchasing a silencer as easy as purchasing a firearm.
One key supporter of silencers is Donald Trump, Jr., the President's eldest son and an avid hunter. He appeared in a video for SilencerCo last year.
As seen with other recent mass shootings, some Democrats were quick to ramp up pressure Monday to enact more gun control.
"To my colleagues: your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted. "None of this ends unless we do something to stop it."
"We need to stop the carnage. More talk and prayers will not save lives. Only action and real changes in our laws can," Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, tweeted.
Others were more specific about weaponry.
"When you have weapons of war in wide circulation, you get war-like casualty counts. Not what the Founders had in mind," Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, tweeted. "House bill for easier access to silencers = more carnage in these kinds of shootings. Terrible idea."
"Congress should take up and vote on legislation to ban military-style weapons," Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, tweeted.
A recent Pew study showed that 52% of Americans feel that gun laws in the country should be more strict than they are currently, while 18% feel they should be less strict and 30% feel they are about right.
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