After lamenting "the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives," newly inaugurated President Donald Trump pledged: "This American carnage stops right here and right now."
In 2017, his first year in office, nearly 40,000 Americans left this world suddenly and violently when bullet entered brain or chest or gut, the highest number of firearm deaths in at least 40 years.
These lives were not taken by immigrant hordes flooding across the border. The call to the emergency room or the mortuary came from inside the house.
Suicides account for six in 10 gun deaths. A gun in the hand makes it all so very easy for someone to do the worst at a moment when the abyss seems to open. Load, point, pull, die.
Homicides, which plague big cities with corrosive criminal cultures and policing inferior to the NYPD's, and which troublingly rose last year, are most of the rest of the total.
We can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk around it, or we can finally face a fact that stares us in the face as plainly as the barrel of a gun: Easy access to firearms and ammunition is killing us in droves.
