Apparently the “March for our lives” was all the rage in most media. It was heralded and promoted well before so much as one participant had taken a single step. The coverage during and after made sure to match the pre-game hype.
Reporters cast these kids, at least the ones calling for 2nd Amendment restrictions and in some cases gun confiscation, as the awakened conscience of our nation. Claiming the virtuous mantle of “saving lives”, and inspired by the recent horrific loss of life at Marjorie Stoneham High School, students ceaselessly called on us to “do something”. Their goal is to end the deadly bloodshed. “Enough!” scream the signs.
But if these activists are genuinely committed to preventing tens of thousands of avoidable deaths, their focus would not be limited to headline-grabbing gun murders. If they were truly sincere and better informed we’d like to think their life-saving focus would be on the less spectacular, but much deadlier drug overdose epidemic gripping our nation.
The OD Scourge in Broward
As a point of fact, it’s hard to believe that youngsters hailing from Broward, the birthplace of this media charged movement against gun violence, have been untouched by the OD scourge. That county had 582 accidental overdose deaths in 2016 and was on track for a 30% increase in 2017. The total could reach over 1300 in a two-year span. That computes to over 76x the loss of life suffered at Stoneham.
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But lacking the single ghastly event needed to stoke media coverage, people are dying in gruesome heartbreaking ways without anyone “Marching for their lives.”
The Stats About Guns and Drug Overdoses
Here are some recent stats. Analysis of FBI data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016. The semi-automatic AR-15 rifle was considered responsible for roughly 330 of those. Meanwhile, in the same year, drug overdoses took the lives of over 64,000 Americans, many of them are school age.
News Flash-Someone should tell student activists, their adult handlers, and the fawning media, that in today’s America people are, by exponentially rising factors, much more likely to lose their lives to a drug overdose than to a die at the hands of a killer with a gun.
Specifically, the probability is almost 6 times greater, unless the weapon happens to be an AR-15. In that case, there is roughly 195 life robbing ODs for every one fatality caused by the semi-automatic rifle the screaming, sign holding marchers love to hate.
So when will it dawn on these student activists, that while they wage an uninformed, ideologically driven war against the 2nd Amendment, tens of thousands of their peers are losing a daily life and death battle against addiction? When will they finally say “Enough” and “do something”?
Probably only after they step out of the intoxicating, celebrity media spotlight and wash all that stardust from their eyes. They should hurry because overdoses are killing their fellow Americans at the tragic rate of about 7 per hour.
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