Warning- guns are hazardous to your health and safety. What about this have we failed to recognize or understand? It’s a conundrum but I do believe the public at least is beginning to pay attention. And if I and others keep alerting the public and our politicians about the dangers of guns and lax gun laws, something just has to change, doesn’t it? One thing I know is that we can work to change the politicians if they don’t change their resistance to gun safety reform measures. In just Minnesota alone in the past few days, we have had carnage and mayhem in our homes and streets.

In my last post, I wrote about the murder/suicide of a 5 member family in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. This incident is much talked about, as you can imagine. Not only is it a domestic shooting, it is a murder/suicide and it is a mass shooting. 5 are dead. The Gun Violence Archive site is keeping track of these incidents. Thank goodness somebody is doing this because the corporate gun lobby doesn’t want the public or politicians to have a real understanding of the scope of the gun violence in our country.

According to someone at that site who posted on a page of which I am a member, there have been 400 murder/suicides in 2015. That’s more than one per day. If this isn’t enough to make your hair stand on end, I don’t know what is.

And then, over the week-end 10 people were involved in shootings in 2 separate places in Minneapolis. One is dead, the others injured. If that wasn’t enough there was another murder/suicide in western Minnesota involving two men.

And we’re not done yet. A man in his 90s shot and killed his own son in a Twin Cities suburb. More details are coming but the man is being held in jail at this time.

Shots were fired in Rochester, MN over the week-end and after a brawl in downtown Duluth..The police didn’t buy the shooter’s claim of self defense. Guns and alcohol don’t mix.

By my count, that’s 9 dead, 9 injured and 2 incidents of gun fire where no one got hurt. And that’s all in a few days’ time. Stunning and total lunacy.

So, what’s the solution to this public health and safety epidemic? We should begin with common sense. And we need to fight the mistaken and misleading assertions by the corporate gun lobby. It’s time to be strong and fight back with the facts, tell real stories about gun violence and expose the nonsensical arguments of the NRA and others in the gun lobby. A blog post from Mike the Gun Guy encourages those involved in gun violence prevention to take off the gloves. When lives are at stake and shootings are taking the lives of so many people, being polite about it doesn’t change anything. We need to be noisy and insist that our voices are heard. Time to get to work. Are you with me?