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This article was originally published on 11.10.15
As a world-renowned scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his unbiased embrace of cold and hard facts …
And the occasional beach ball game with a late night comedian. Photo by Cindy Ord / Getty Images.
… which makes him the right fit to tackle a controversial topic: the disproportionately high number of Americans dying of gun violence.
Umpqua Community College in Oregon, the site of a mass shooting earlier this year. Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images.
In November 2015, he composed three tweets where he exposed the numbers.
And they sober up.
According to PolitiFact, this actually slightly underestimates the case (US war deaths were closer to 1.2 million in 2013).
This, unfortunately, is also true.
Estimates vary – and Tyson is on the high end – but 2015 should see around 33,000 gun deaths in total, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or nearly 3,200 every five weeks (comparable to the nearly 3,400 Americans who have died in terrorist attacks since 2001).
Tyson’s tweets are a stark reminder that we have a problem. And it’s not going to go away on its own.
The father of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting holds a picture of his son. Photo by Mark Wilson / Getty Images.
The uncomfortable statistics don’t end there. For every time a domestic weapon is used legally in self-defense, there are four unintentional shootings, seven assaults or murders, and 11 attempted or attempted firearms suicide.
Yes, people sometimes use other weapons to kill people (although firearms are by far the most popular). Yes, people try to kill themselves in other ways (although when they do, they are much less likely to be successful). Yes, car fatalities are comparable (not enough attention is being paid to finding ways to reduce auto-related deaths, and like gun deaths, it’s ludicrous that we accept the amount we make).
But none of that is a reason to sit down and do nothing.
A safe for guns. Photo by BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.
On a personal level, that means making sure that, if you own firearms, they stay locked up and unloaded when in storage to help prevent accidents.
Politically, that means supporting laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and opposing laws that make it easier for them to access and transport guns wherever they want.
It’s true: we have a problem.
But it is only by admitting it that we can hope to find a solution.
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