A 14-year old and 16-year old were shot outside of a Bronx Police Athletic League facility on Thursday, according to reports. The younger teen was shot in the head and is in critical condition and the other was shot in the leg and expected to make a recovery.
A witness across the street told police he heard three gunshots.
“He was face-down on the sidewalk in front of the PAL,” the man said of the more seriously injured teen. “He wasn’t moving. It was bad, man, bad.”
Why Were Two Teens Shot Outside Bronx PAL Basketball Game?
Police say the two teens were with a group outside the facility where a basketball game was taking place when a masked gunman pulled up and opened fire. Authorities estimate it was around 8:50 p.m.
Both teens were taken to nearby Lincoln Hospital.
How do we feel as a society when incidents like this happen? It isn’t an abnormal situation. Gun violence occurs frequently in the United States. Is it because gun violence is so prevalent that we’ve become numb? Or is it an expected part of life here in the U.S.?
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), among 64 high-income countries and territories, the U.S. is an outlier for its high levels of gun violence. The U.S. ranks eighth out of 64 for homicides by firearm.
What’s even more startling is if you look exclusively at high-income countries with populations of 10 million or more the U.S. is first in gun-related homicides, with four times as many deaths as the second-ranked country (Chile).
“Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole. The U.S. has 23 times the rate of firearm homicide seen in Australia,” according to IHME.
Gun Violence In America Is Out Of Control
It seems that the majority of the world is able to live life without excessive gun violence, but here in the States we struggle.
This country’s obsession with guns is weird and extremely dangerous. However polling data indicates almost three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem.
Given all of this data and the will of the people, why are elected officials committed to doing nothing?
We can point to the NRA, lobbyists and Super PAC groups. But the reality is one side of this country’s two-party government system has decided to make guns and the safety of its citizenry a political issue to consolidate minority rule.
These elected officials count on the fact that the citizenry is so desensitized to gun violence that they won’t actually demand common sense gun laws.
Instead elected officials propose to ban abortions and limit the health and reproductive rights of women but make access to guns easier.
In America, gun homicide is the leading cause of maternal death and gun violence is the leading cause of death among children. Yet Republicans’ policy platform is to ban abortion and give dangerous people easier access to guns.
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) January 20, 2023
Teens shot outside of a basketball game, mass shootings at schools, shootings at Little League tournaments, mass shootings at malls, home invasion murders with guns. None of it seems to matter.
What will it take for us to seriously deal with this issue? So far nothing has worked. Being around kids is not even enough of a reason for people to temper their guns anymore.
