Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Gun violence is America’s deadliest scourge
I can’t quite agree with the author of “Dispelling myth of the ‘angry white man,’” an April 11 letter claiming that “the deadliest attack against Americans since the year 2000 was committed by 19 Islamic terrorists.”
Yes, the 9/11 attack that took the lives of almost 3,000 people was horrible and shocking. But, in the grand scale of things, our continuous gun violence has done much more damage to Americans and America.
In 2001 alone, gun violence took the lives of nearly 30,000 people, and the annual numbers have risen since then.
For years, studies have shown that we have the highest rate of gun homicides, gun suicides, gun injuries and mass shootings in the developed world.
Some readers have suggested that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is biased in its reporting.
In “Does money talk in Florida vaccine rollout?” a Palm Beach Post editorial in the paper March 13, Gov. Ron DeSantis was accused of ignoring farmworkers to evade the charge of vaccinating undocumented workers ahead of full-fledged citizens, even though DeSantis is on record as supporting vaccinating by age. Is there bias here?
No matter how well the vaccine is distributed, there will always be charges of discrimination. All Americans should be very grateful that a vaccine was developed in record time and that the pandemic will soon be behind us.