The mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, made national news. I guess because in one mass shooting, Maine had more gun deaths than it does in a full year. The state is unique in that it has a low murder rate and does not regularly suffer mass shootings, which are defined as an event where more than four people are injured or killed in one shooting event. Thus, an incident where only three people are killed does not qualify as a mass shooting.
In the United States, we average 323-gun related deaths per day, and roughly 692 injuries. Those numbers exceed all gun deaths in Western Europe in one year. This year our death toll from gun violence is 35,453 people dead and 68,487 injured. Civilian deaths from the war in Ukraine reportedly totaled 9,614 as of September 2023.
The U.S. also leads the world in mass shootings with 565 to date. In contrast, Russia had 21 mass shootings, Germany had a total of five, Canada four and China, with a much larger population, had none.
The number of mass shootings seems to be in direct correlation to the ease by which civilian gun ownership can be realized. While the U.S. population is 5% of the world’s total, our civilian gun ownership accounts for 46% of civilian gun ownership worldwide. In 2017, there were 393.3 million guns owned by civilians in this country when our total population was 326.5 million. We have more guns than adults and for that matter, more guns than most armies. Gun sales went up from an average of 6 million per year to an astounding 21 million in 2020.
Our problem in this country is that we take the right to bear arms more seriously than we take the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I think most of us are resigned to the fact that nowhere is safe in this country. We are not safe in supermarkets, movie theaters, in churches or synagogues, and our children are definitely not safe in school. Our political leaders stand hapless as more and more people get mowed down by automatic weapons and by the crazy person’s weapon of choice, the AR-15.
Reginald J. Clyne, Esq.
I thought on April 20, 1999, after the massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, that we finally had a significantly horrifying event that enough members of our nation’s Congress would get the balls to draft legislation to end the nightmare. But apparently, the death of 15 high school students and the injuring of 24 others just wasn’t horrific enough.
On December 14, 2012, we experienced another horrifying mass school shooting – 20 elementary students ages 6 and 7 were killed along with six adult teachers and staff. Even after the killing of so many young children – babies, really – Congress still did not find the testicular fortitude they needed to fight the gun lobby. Then, of course, Florida experienced the Valentine’s Day massacre in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead in our own backyard. Again, not a peep out of Washington, except for the by-now meaningless “thoughts and prayers.”
We have come to the point where most of us realize our government will do nothing. Indeed, our gun violence is so horrific, China has requested that the United Nations investigate the number of school shootings in the U.S. as part of a human rights violation.
Reginald J. Clyne is a Miami trial lawyer who has practiced in some of the largest law firms in the United States. He has been in practice since 1987 and tries cases in both state and federal courts. Clyne has lived in Africa, Brazil, Honduras and Nicaragua.