In a Pittsburgh suburb called Wilkinsburg two gunmen ambushed a backyard party one Wednesday evening recently, killing five people and injuring three more in the attack.
The shooters are still on the loose, and the attack marked the 62nd mass shooting in 2016 according to
MassShootingTracker.org.
In just one week following that attack, 6 more people were killed and 35 more people were injured over the course of nine more mass shootings across America.
In the early Democratic debates, the issue of gun control was front and center after the San Bernardino attack in December and the massacre at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in June.
On the other side of the aisle though, the Republicans refused to admit that any gun control laws would have changed anything.
They generally refuse to talk about gun control, and they continue to argue that the best way to reduce gun deaths in America, is to have everyone own more guns!.
And aside from pointing out the general absurdity of trying to reduce gun deaths by arming more people, it's been very difficult to prove that gun control is effective.
Perhaps more importantly, it's also been very difficult to figure out which gun control laws are actually effective in curbing gun deaths.
That's in large part because of the Dickey Amendment that the Republican Congress passed in 1996 on the behalf of the NRA.
The Dickey Amendment said plainly that "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control."
After last year's mass shooting at Umpqua Community College, former Congressman Jay Dickey told the
Huffington Post: "I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time. I have regrets."
It's good that Dickey has regrets about the amendment, but it doesn't change the fact that we've lost 20 years of gun violence research because of the unadulterated greed of gun manufacturers and the NRA's willingness to buy legislators like Dickey.
What the NRA and the Republican shills for the gun lobby in Congress really don't want you to know, is that it is possible to reduce gun deaths by passing sensible gun control legislation.
Researchers from the
Boston University Medical Center just found that we can actually reduce gun deaths - by more than 80 percent! - if we just nationally expanded three gun laws that are already in place at the state-level in various states.
