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Rhetoric + guns = a bad mix

Commentary on the tragic shooting of US politician Gabrielle Giffords,and the death of innocent by-standers, continues.

Reflect on each piece as you read them......for America has to take stock of itself.

From The Nation:

"After Sarah Palin targeted her district with a gunsight on a map identifying Democrats Palin was urging her followers to "reload" and defeat, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords said: "We are on Sarah Palin's targeted list. The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of the gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action."

From AlterNet quoting a Republican Congressman at a rally in Washington:

"Fellow patriots, we have a lot of domestic enemies of the Constitution, and they're right down the Mall, in the Congress of the United States -- and right down Independence Avenue in the White House that belongs to us," Broun told the crowd. "It's not about my ability to hunt, which I love to do. It's not about the ability for me to protect my family and property against criminals, which we have the right to do. But it's all about us protecting ourselves from a tyrannical government of the United States."

Finally, this from an op-ed piece in the IHT:

"There are almost 300 million guns in America, a third of them handguns, and almost 100 million are owned by the public. This is the highest concentration of gun ownership in the world.

Not surprisingly, the United States also has the highest gun homicide rate, almost 3.5 per 100,000, of any industrialized country. European countries and Japan have only a fraction of such firearm homicides."

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