Two simple numbers, one big surprise – or are the Syrians safer during a revolution than the US citizens in peace time?

Picture credit: http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/exhibits/timesachangin/images/54223-1-2.jpg

Although I have written a piece of my mind on a similar subject, today two recent related news items caught my eyes again.

The first one was about the Arab Spring in Syria: UN: Death Toll in Syria Tops 3,000.

The second: Salon shooting suspect was angry over divorce.

The first news is a sad death tally of revolutionary times in a troubled country attracting international attention on a daily basis.

The second one is a local US news item about a disgruntled husband who killed 8 people and wounded a number of others in a hair salon in a small CA town. This kind of shooting rampage has recently become frightfully common place which is not to say that for my taste it hadn’t been already disturbingly frequent before. The report goes on to document the horror of the shooting and its consequences: the sorrow, the praying services, candle light vigil and sympathetic appearance of therapeutic dogs in the mourning crowd.

These are far too familiar symbolic actions that in my view the survivors tend to orchestrate in order to make themselves feel better, without offering even the slightest hope to do any good to the victims or those who, in their undue time, will become victims of similar future tragedies.

When asked about it, people evoked the standard conciliatory explanation for such shocking events: the victims were in the wrong place in the wrong time. To my great discontent, nobody risked to utter that those guns were in the wrong hands in any time! After all the perpetrator of this mass murder suffered from post-traumatic disorder following a boat accident, once pushed a gun to the head of his ex-wife, and according to the wife, "(he) is a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same, and he certainly shouldn't be allowed to have unilateral and unfettered control of any and all medical and psychological aspects of our son's life."

So, he seems unfit to control the upbringing of his child and nobody questions why he had free control over his firearms?

Fired up, I launched to perform an Internet search and a couple of quick calculations, and oh boy, did I get a staggering surprise!

The death toll rate of the Syrian revolution, based on the UN estimate of the number of vicitms and the total population of Syria is: 13.35 death/100,000

The death toll rate of Americans from firearm: 10.38/100,000 (crude rate; from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008 data; including homicide and suicide committed with firearms).

What? So, practically we live through a Syrian Arab Spring Revolution every single year, decade after decade, after decade!?

And then, there are states, such as DC, Puerto Rico and Louisiana, just to mention the "medalists," where the firearm death rate is much higher for homicide alone – excluding suicide! -: 35.4, 19.6, and 9.9 respectively for the 3 regions (data from Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2005).

The question begs: without proper background check, appropriate monitoring, and when needed, proper punishment of gun owners, how can the population at large ever feel safe from “law-obedient” gun owners going berserk?

You put a gun against someone’s head? Kiss good-bye to your gun license for ever, whether you pulled the trigger or you didn’t; and this should go without saying. All other criteria of proper gun ownership background check could be the subject of careful evaluation of this sensitive issue with the goal of eventually leading to a sensible dialogue between sane parties, Congress included. NRA, where are you?