Who is doing what to whom?
On October 25, 2013, Jeff Nesbit in an article about gun violence asked the question "is gun violence a public health epidemic?" I hope that Mr. Nesbit has read, or reads, Allie Bidwell's November 14, 2013 article in the same publication where she reports on a recent homicide study.
Andrew Papachristos, an associate professor of sociology at Yale, analyzed police and gun homicide records from 2006 to 2011 for people living in a high-crime neighborhood in Chicago. He found that 41 percent of all gun homicides occurred within a network of less than 4 percent of the neighborhood's population, and that the closer one is connected to a homicide victim, the greater that person's chances were for becoming a victim. Each social tie removed from a homicide victim decreased a person's odds of becoming a victim by 57 percent.
If gun violence is an epidemic, it's only because that one more word in our language has been redefined. The data in the Yale study agrees with some older and ongoing data published by the Baltimore Sun—as pointed out by Alan Korwin in his web article Gunshot Demographics.
Of course there will always be people who think that the gang-banger gun-homicide problem in Chicago and Baltimore can be solved by disarming the citizens of Colorado. However, after the recent recall election in Colorado, those people are not quite as outspoken.... At least that's an improvement.
-fl