Slaughterhouse of Civilization by Richard North Patterson

[Wetzelbill]

Slaughterhouse of Civilization
By Richard North Patterson
The Los Angeles Times

Monday 20 October 2003

For far too long, the United States has been subjected to staggering carnage, thanks to an entrenched gun lobby.

We Americans tend to think of gun violence in terms of some traumatic event: Columbine or Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Kennedy, rather than as a daily fact of American life. All of us know that every assassination of an American president was committed with a gun. All of us who were alive remember the terrible day when John F. Kennedy was murdered. But too few of us know that, since that day, more Americans have died from gunshot wounds here at home than died in all the wars of the 20th century, the bloodiest 100 years in world history.

And as horrific as was the carnage at the World Trade Center, it would take Osama bin Laden nine more such attacks to equal what we Americans do to ourselves every year with guns.

By trade, I'm a fiction writer, a creator of the imaginary. But in my latest novel, I chose fiction to expose a real-life American tragedy: the state of law and politics that has allowed the gun lobby to turn our country into the slaughterhouse of the civilized world. That's not a rhetorical flourish I've invented to sell books; it's a truth we've tolerated for far too long.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102103F.shtml

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