Gun Control - Reloaded

 

"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (1961) is a folk song. The first three verses were written by Pete Seeger in 1955, and published in Sing Out! magazine.[1] Additional verses were added by Joe Hickerson in May 1960, who turned it into a circular song.[2] Its rhetorical "where?" and meditation on death place the song in the ubi sunt tradition.[3]In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the "Top 20 Political Songs".[4]

Seeger found inspiration for the song in October 1955, while on a plane bound for a concert in Ohio. Leafing through his notebook he saw the passage, "Where are the flowers, the girls have plucked them. Where are the girls, they've all taken husbands. Where are the men, they're all in the army."[5] These lines were taken from the traditional Cossacks folk song "Tovchu, tovchu mak", referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), which Seeger had read "at least a year or two before".[3]

A Violent Society Have We Become

by Alex Hutchins

From 2000 to 2008, of the 129, 741 homicides perpetrated in the United States, 66% used some type of firearm, such as: handguns, rifles, and shotguns with 51% of those murders being committed with handguns.  The remaining 34% were attributed to knives, blunt objects, person weapons with knives accounting for 13% of that total.

Data Source:US Census 2011 

From the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is estimated that 30,000 citizens die annual from guns and that for every death 2 victims are wounded.  While the media usually informs the public of the high profile killings by handguns like:  Virginia Tech students in April 2007 or the Northern Illinois University students in February 2008 or most recently Treyvon Martin in Florida a few weeks ago, most of these 30,000 annual deaths never appear in mainstream media.  What is so hideous about handgun violence and death are the countless family members and relatives whose lives have been forever changed.

Interesting Comparisons

Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers – less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.⁴

^4. U.S. Department of Defense, Statistical Information Analysis Division, Personnel & Military Casualty Statistics, U.S. Military Casualties in Southeast Asia: Vietnam Conflict – Casualty Summary As of May 16, 2008, at http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/vietnam.pdf (last visited Feb. 10, 2012); WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2009, supra note 1.

In the first seven years of the U.S.-Iraq War, over 4,400 American soldiers were killed. Almost as many civilians are killed with guns in the U.S., however, every seven weeks.5

^5. U.S. Department of Defense, Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) U.S. Casualty Status, Fatalities as of: March 12, 2012, 10 a.m. EST, at http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf (last visited Feb. 10, 2012); WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2009, supra note 1.

 We Were Just Wondering

1. Is this the Democracy that we want the rest of the world to emulate? 
2. Is this the Democracy over which we have fought wars? 
3. Is this the legacy that we want to leave to our children?