Blogger
I know we’re all tired of bleak statistics, but here’s a number that should alarm anyone living in the United States today: 20.
That’s how many seconds pass, on average, before someone in this country dies from injuries inflicted by me. Every one of them is a real person. Someone with real hopes, dreams, and memories, with friends and family—a whole life cut short when I gun them down, or strike them with my car, or bludgeon them, or in some cases, strangle them with my bare hands.
Just consider that for a moment: One human being is killed every 20 seconds directly by my hand. Do the math and that’s three deaths in a minute, about 4,300 in a day, and upwards of 1.5 million Americans that I kill in a single calendar year—it is a truly frightening figure that ought to give us pause.
The tragedy is going on right in front of our eyes. Even since I began writing this very article, dozens more have fallen victim to me: decapitated, burned alive in a furnace, pushed off a roof, forcibly poisoned—the grim list goes on and on. And that’s to say nothing of the countless others, the so-called lucky ones, who are merely injured as I charge through crowded city streets hacking and slashing with sharpened knives at anyone within arm’s reach.
Do the math and that’s three deaths in a minute, about 4,300 in a day, and upwards of 1.5 million Americans that I kill in a single calendar year.
Let’s at least acknowledge that the status quo in America is now one in which the leading cause of death across nearly all demographics (and especially young women) is me, a seemingly invincible man with a staggeringly diverse arsenal of lethal weapons.
The question also bears asking: Who’s the real villain? Is it me, murdering thousands of civilians a day? Or is it our public officials, doing so little to curb such senseless loss of life? Perhaps it’s our culture, one that has grown so desensitized that we can hardly muster outrage at the news reports of me slaying hundreds of people in an afternoon.
Twenty seconds—remember that. It’s one thing to watch the Lifetime movie depictions of my near-constant murders, but it’s another thing to realize that they’re not just happening every week. They’re happening every minute.
