For Sandy Hook's sake: learning from the tragedy of Newtown

We must turn from this trauma to tackle America's complex failures over gun control, inner-city crime and mental healthcare
Michael Williams
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 15 December 2012 15.30 EST

... There is no getting around the fact that lax gun control measures are a principal contributor to gun violence. In the US, in 2010, there were 12,966 gun deaths. Compare that to the most recent UK data in 2011, showing there were 58 gun deaths in the United Kingdom; even when the rate is adjusted for population, the number of gun-related deaths in the UK would only be 290 – nowhere near the US figure. In other western countries, where guns are similarly well-regulated, numbers are also low: in the Netherlands, the rate of gun deaths is 0.57 deaths per 100,000 people; in Germany, that figure is 1.16. The US rate is a whopping 2.98.

America's current patchwork of state laws and federal regulations is not adequately comprehensive, nor properly enforced to be effective in mitigating gun violence. A report produced by the organization Mayors Against Guns (pdf) offers strong evidence that weak control measures in states such as Kentucky and Virginia directly led to some 21,000 guns being used in murders elsewhere in the country.

This has been a problem in Connecticut for a long time, where many of the guns used in inner-city crimes (in cities such as Bridgeport and Hartford) are trafficked from the south. Because of free movement between states, gun control has to be dealt with at the federal, not state, level ...

The second dimension of learning from the Newtown horror is that we must have a more honest national conversation about mental healthcare. We don't yet know enough about what set in motion Newtown's tragedy, but it is clear that mental illness was strongly implicated in the September 2012 Sikh temple shooting in Minneapolis, the July 2012 slaughter in a Colorado cinema, the 2011 rampage in Arizona (which nearly killed Congresswoman Gaby Giffords), and the 2007 Virginia Tech slayings. These massacres indicate severe problems with America's mental health capabilities and law, as well a failure to regulate gun sales based on mental health assessment ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/15/gun-control-sandy-hook-newtown