Gun Violence

As we continue to feel sad about the deaths of the 3,000 people killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, we need to be saddened as well by the deaths of more than 10 times that many individuals killed every year by gun violence in the United States. Firearms kill more than 30,000 people every year in the U.S. In 2007, the latest figure available from the Centers for Disease Control, 31,224 people died from gun injuries. As cartoonist Gary Trudeau pointed out in a February "Doonesbury" strip, since the terrorist attacks of 2001 some 270,000 Americans have been killed by gun violence.

One person was killed and three were wounded in shootings Tuesday night and Wednesday morning as a surge in violence that began Friday continued. The shootings come on the heels of a weekend that saw eight people shot, followed by a drive-by fatal shooting Monday night in the Bayview neighborhood. Several of the incidents appear to have stemmed from robbery attempts, and others have occurred in neighborhoods not typically associated with gun violence in the city. Because of a similar rash of shootings last year – 18 people were shot the weekend of March 20, 2011 – shootings were actually down compared with last year, with 72 shot compared to 76 at this time last year.

AS THE gun battles continue to rage in the schools, on the streets and in the fractious House of Representatives, something is missing.Amid all the emotional rancor, something has gotten lost in the controversy.In a bygone era, they used to call it horse sense. Today, in the absence of any sense whatsoever, all that's left is the artful dodge.Throughout the debate so far, reason has been trumped by strident hyperbole. But it need not be this way.It would be helpful to approach the issue of gun mortality from a more clinical perspective, taking a cue from the medical community, which deals with death and morbidity all the time.

In your editorial "Attack on Md. gun laws" (March 7), you state, "Maryland's high gun violence rates ... warrant strict regulations on handgun permits. " But the criminals who are creating the high gun violence rates don't have permits, nor are they concerned in the slightest about getting one. Restricting permits does not affect them in the least; in fact, to some degree it benefits them by telling them that their intended victim is probably unarmed. The restrictions on our Second Amendment rights only affect those of us who want to protect ourselves from these unrestricted criminals.

GUN VIOLENCE traditionally has been regarded as the responsibility of the criminal justice system. But it is also an important public health problem that can be most effectively fought by combining public health strategies with criminal justice efforts. An example of such an approach is an innovative strategy to reduce gun violence recently spearheaded by Baltimore City Health Commissioner Peter L. Beilenson and Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris. The police set up stings to deter illegal sales of handgun ammunition to underage youths.

One victim was a 16-year-old girl who died six days after being shot by a boyfriend who didn't know the gun he pointed at her was loaded. Another was a 3-year-old boy who miraculously recovered after being struck in the head by a stray bullet that came through a window while he was eating dinner in his family's apartment.Dr. David Nichols, director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, told the victims' stories yesterday as a way to personalize the "numbing" statistics on firearms violence.

CITIZENS AND public officials in Baltimore face the perennial and politically contentious question of how to reduce a serious gun violence problem. At times it appears to be an insurmountable challenge to reduce the deaths and injuries caused by gunfire. Politics is always at play when it comes to the gun issue - and the debate over solutions represents an emotional flashpoint that most elected officials would like to avoid. There is, in fact, a different way to address gun violence: by approaching it is as the problem it is - a public health problem.

Thirteen-year-old Donte Harrington lives in Columbia now, but the former Baltimore resident remains deeply affected by the gun violence he experienced in the city."

The attorneys general for Maryland and the United States exhorted an overflow audience at the Johns Hopkins University last night to press for more sweeping measures to reduce the roughly 30,000 annual deaths caused by guns. "We changed the culture on smoking, and we can do the same thing on gun violence," Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. told about 200 listeners in Schafler Auditorium. Maryland has been a leader among states in fighting tobacco companies. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno praised Maryland's recently passed law that requires safety locks on handguns, and she suggested further steps.

Trying to make sense of a year in which three of her relatives were killed by handguns, Marlene Foote-White composed a public statement about the deaths of her niece, 6-year-old Tiffany Smith; her grandchild's mother, 18-year-old Shawneek Gunter; and her cousin, 26-year-old Darrin Roderick Johnson-El:"In the Arbutus Memorial Park Cemetery Lies Three (3) Of My Family Members Whose Lives Were Taken Because OfG GreedinessU UglinessN NegativenessS Selfishness."Tiffany was killed by a stray bullet as she played near her home.

Kudos to Judge Benson E. Legg for overturning Maryland's draconian and unconstitutional gun-carry laws. Statistics are very clear - granting carry permits to law-abiding, well-trained citizens does not increase gun violence. In fact, when the good are armed, the bad are hesitant. When I lived in Pennsylvania, I had a weapons permit, carried the gun often and never once fired it anywhere except the shooting range. But I was prepared to protect myself and my family, if necessary. Our neighbors in Pennsylvania and Virginia, both demographically very similar to suburban Maryland, rank lower in gun deaths per 100,000 than our lovely state.

The annual number of killings in Baltimore has fallen below 200 for the first time in more than three decades, a symbolic threshold that seemed elusive for a crime-weary city just four years ago. As a new year begins, city officials say the decline is a major step toward revival efforts. Soaring crime and decades of abandonment made the city synonymous with urban violence in America, fictionalized on television crime dramas and leading to nicknames like "Bodymore, Murderland. " Though Baltimore is still among the most deadly cities per capita, as murder has declined more steeply across the country, the drop extends an overall downward trend in gun violence here since 2007, the year Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took office.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III is at a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing this morning. He's in the audience to support federal assistance in combating crime, according to a department spokesman. The city's top cop is not scheduled to testify, but the spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said a question or two could be directed his way. The oversight hearing is addressing concerns about the ATF Fast and Furious program, which has come under heavy criticism for allowing guns to be purchased in the U.S. and transported to Mexico where they were used by drug cartels.

A man was fatally shot Monday afternoon in Southeast Baltimore's McElderry Park neighborhood, police said. The shooting occurred at about 3:30 p.m., apparently at the intersection of Belnord Avenue and Pulaski Highway, with the victim running up the street and collapsing on Orleans Street, where the curb was covered in blood. A police spokesman identified him Tuesday evening as Kevin Pierre, 20. "I saw the dude laying on the ground, trying to catch his breath," said Shawnte Surles, 37. "After that, he wasn't breathing no more.

Regarding Justin Fenton 's article "Man slain downtown; three hurt in Westport (May 12), I am a 17-year old junior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute who thinks gun violence is becoming an all too common story. What caught my attention the most was Mr. Fenton statement that "this killing broke a streak of nearly 12 days without a homicide ... one of the longest such stretches in years, according to records. " We are tired of being the city with the one of the nation's highest murder rates.

As we continue to feel sad about the deaths of the 3,000 people killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, we need to be saddened as well by the deaths of more than 10 times that many individuals killed every year by gun violence in the United States. Firearms kill more than 30,000 people every year in the U.S. In 2007, the latest figure available from the Centers for Disease Control, 31,224 people died from gun injuries. As cartoonist Gary Trudeau pointed out in a February "Doonesbury" strip, since the terrorist attacks of 2001 some 270,000 Americans have been killed by gun violence.

The fiercest foe of effective public policy is the human trait that insists that being absolutely right is more gratifying than getting something done. Piety -- often hysterical -- commonly cripples important debates about privacy, abortion, capital punishment, land use, criminal justice, education, economic principles and more. No subject of wide public concern in the United States is more polarized than the matter of guns. As every American knows, guns, wielded by people, kill people -- far, far too many of them.

When the video-cassette war was won by VHS over Sony's Betamax design, Mexico became flooded with Betamaxes. When DDT was banned in the United States, the pesticide was still vigorously marketed in Mexico. If it does not play in the first world, it usually gets dumped in the third.A new case is now becoming too deadly to ignore. When the U.S. Congress voted to ban certain types of deadly assault rifles, their export to Mexico became a lethal certainty. As if on cue, on May 13, Mexican police found an arsenal of 103 AK-47s, assembled from illegally imported parts, in a warehouse in the crime-ridden border city of Tijuana.

President Barack Obama's speech in Tucson last month and others' eloquent calls for civility since have been heartening. It seems de rigueur these days to call for "bipartisanship. " However, good intentions and individual commitments to behave better can — like New Year's resolutions — fade quickly. We need to employ proven approaches that foster sustained civility and actually bring results on key national issues. And not only elected leaders must make this commitment.

Police were investigating an apparent drive-by shooting Tuesday evening in Northeast Baltimore's Rosemont East neighborhood that killed a 21-year-old man. The fatal shooting is the sixth this year in the city's Northeast District, which is one of nine districts but has seen a third of the city's homicides in 2011. The district has seen a sharp uptick in homicides in recent years, and city officials have called for police to shuffle resources and redraw district boundaries. Most of the violence has occurred in the southern part of the district, closer to East Baltimore and Herring Run Park.