Update:

Tomorrow, April 23, 2013, will be Gun 9-11 Day in the United States.  This is the day of the year, every year, when gun-related deaths in our country equal or exceed the number of victims in the September 11, 2001 attacks.  This Slate website has been keeping count.

The post that follows was originally posted on December 14.  Politically, nothing much has changed since then.  The gun-fetish lobby controls the money and the conversation.

In light of the Boston bombings and shootings, maybe the FBI should take another look at the trip that the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre took to that hotbed of Caucasian antipathy to the U.S. government: the state of Texas.  LaPierre might have been radicalized there.

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With much sadness I propose a new national day of observance — I call it “Gun 9-11 Day.”  This is the day of the year on which U.S. citizens with guns kill the same number of people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.  The number who died that day is 2,977.  Here is a chart of U.S. homicides caused by guns, for the years 2003-2010*:

The solid gray portion of the columns represent the number of people who died as a result of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.**  The total height of the columns indicate the number of people murdered by gun-bearing, terror-causing United States citizens.

Gun 9-11 Day in the United States usually occurs around April 9th.  That’s right.  That is the day of the year, every year, when there are more victims of gun-related murders in the U.S. than were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In 2010, Gun 9-11 Day was April 19th.  We are not powerless to move this date.

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* Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

** I would like to remind my readers that I have the most profound respect for the victims and families of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and my comparison by no means intends to demean the magnitude of their (and our) loss.  September 11, 2001, is in fact the yardstick by which we now measure horror.