Opinion

A few facts to arm thoughtful people when confronting gun defenders Commentary on the Oregon campus massacre

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All the gun defenders once again have come out to spout their meaningless cliches defending the undefendable.

Here are a few facts, however, to help arm thoughtful people in arguing with the charitably uninformed masses:

This is the 264th mass shooting this year. Yes, 264 mass shootings in less than a year.

Firearms kill 33,000 people every year.

Every 6 hours in America more people die from gun violence than were killed by terrorists in all of 2014. If a disease like Ebola was killing as many people as guns there would be rioting in the streets to cure it.

In the last 30 years there has never been a single instance of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy intent on killing a bunch of people... 30 years.

In the last 50 years, half of the world's mass shootings have occurred in the U.S.

The U.S is the most armed country in the world.

We have as many guns as people and 1/3 of the populace owns at least one.

Nearly half of all civilian guns in the world are held by Americans.

Besides bombs and chemical weapons, guns are the most efficient killing machines. Bombs and chemical weapons are illegal.

The second amendment was written by slave-holding men who carried muskets to protect themselves from tyranny and from their slaves. A musket took over 10 seconds to reload for a single shot.

The second amendment does guarantee the right to bear arms for a "well-regulated" militia.

So far there is very little regulation and a lot of guns.

The founders allowed for laws that regulate gun ownership.

I'm fine with guns being legal. Let's just make them very, very hard to get.

Commentary by Kevin Benz, a journalist, former television news director, and ethics presenter from Austin, Texas.

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