America is 'sick in the head with guns'
By David Ferguson
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Friday night on Current TV's "The Young Turks," host Cenk Uygur charged that there's one party in the Trayvon Martin slaying that is truly, undeniably guilty, but it isn't a person.
"Guns are the real problem," he said.
Rolling recently released store camera video of 17-year-old Martin buying a pack of Skittles candy and an Arizona Iced Tea just moments before he encountered Zimmerman and was fatally shot, Uygur said, "That kid that you just saw” he's 17 years old, he would be alive today if George Zimmerman didn't have a gun."
Citing the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies's Small Arms Survey, Uyger pointed out that the United States is the most heavily armed nation in the world, with 90 guns per 100 people. Yemen is in second place, but only has 60 guns per 100 people. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard University Injury Control Research Center, authored a paper in 2011 called "Risks and Benefits of Guns in the Home," which stated that children in the U.S. are 11 times more likely to die in a gun-related accident than children in other developed nations. The Centers for Disease Control's statistics for gun fatalities in 2009 include 11,493 homicides, 18,735 suicides and 554 accidental deaths, a combined 31,347 gun deaths for the year.
"We've turned our country into the O.K. Corral," Uygur said, "We're sick with it, sick in the head with guns."
The host blames gun manufacturers and their powerful lobbying group, the National Rifle Association (NRA). "I know, I know — progressives aren't supposed to fight back on this. Nobody's supposed to fight back” we're just supposed to lie down and say, 'okay, NRA, I know you represent the gun manufacturers and then get rich off of all those people dying.' And you use all your fancy arguments and you've already bought all the politicians. But someone's gonna stand up to you and it's gonna happen right here. You don't like it, that's too bad."
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