Can you see what’s wrong with this picture?
by digby
I’m talking about the fact that CNN considers it a highlight that it’s not terrorism and also that it happened close to the year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub attack. I know people are concerned about terrorism an that’s to be expected. But workplace gun violence is not just some normal everyday thing that we don’t need to worry about because they are are not usually committed by terrorists. This piece is from Think Progress in 2015:
Guns are by far the most common instrument that kills people at work. In 2013, there were 316 fatal, intentional workplace shootings. They made up 80 percent of homicides at work.
Women are far more susceptible to being murdered at work than men. While women have a lower workplace fatality rate — there were 302 fatal workplace injuries involving female workers in 2013–22 percent of them involved a homicide, making it the leading cause of death. For men, just 8 percent related to a homicide. That’s thanks to the fact that for victims of domestic violence, who are overwhelmingly female, the workplace is an ideal target for an abuser, given that it’s often a public and easy-to-find place. A woman is killed by an intimate partner at work about twice a month.
These workplace killings fit into the nation’s broader gun violence problem. There are far more gun killings in the United States than other countries. Among developed nations, the U.S. has by far the highest rate of homicides by firearm. It also owns most of the world’s guns: the country makes up 4.4 percent of the global population but almost half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. This leads to more violence. The largest study to look at the issue found that in the U.S., an additional 1 percent increase in the proportion of gun ownership in a given state results in a 0.9 percent higher firearm homicide rate. States with looser gun laws also have higher rates of gun deaths and injuries.
Things haven’t improved since then.
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