It has been 50 days since Sandy Hook, 50 days since the nation woke up to the horror of gun violence that eats away at this country every day. It is not just the 12,000 that die per year [as if they were not enough], it is the impacts with which those who survive must deal. It is the impacts that society as a whole must absorb. In a time when each and every state, city, and town focuses on reducing their budgets, reducing their staffs deaths by firearms stands as an obstacle, stands as a reminder that we must spend more on law enforcement and prisons and emergency rooms because of gun violence.

In the time-frame of just 50 days at least 1475 people have died from gunfire and politicians and lobbyists have spent thousands of hours on the air, on the internet talking about gun violence – talking. The chasm between the two sides is as deep and wide as a grave to hold those 1475 people. And nobody wants to concede even an inch, to move toward compromise that solves problems.

In that 50 days 108 children and teens have been murdered with firearms. Their ages from ONE to 19 with an average age of 13 years, 10 months and they lived in 31 states.

We hear about the big ones, the ones that made national attention like the 15-year-old gifted student in Chicago who had just performed at President Obama’s inauguration and was caught in the crossfire of gang activity. We hear about the 12-year-old girl in Kentucky who was just in the wrong place when her cousin’s ex-boyfriend shot and killed her, her cousin and her uncle with a handgun he had only bought hours before. We hear about the teen in New Mexico who took his father’s AR-15 and killed his three siblings, aged two, five, and nine along with his parents.

But the other 103 teens and children remain local stories, stories that don’t make national news, stories that only stick with the families for the rest of their lives.

Slate has taken on the gruesome task of maintaining these tallies [in the hour I have been writing this the tally moved from 1468 to 1475]. If you download their spreadsheet you will see a link to media coverage of each and very murder that has occurred.

Politicians look at the big murders, the large body counts that allow them to posture for the media. They focus on the assault weapons which account for some but not nearly a majority of the deaths and they focus on grand gestures rather than the much more mundane, yet more effective regulations to insure that guns aren’t picked up by kids, that guns aren’t stolen and dumped into the illegal market, that criminal elements are stopped from buying guns without a background check.

It is those politicians that need to see this ever growing list, see it each and every day.

McAllister is a life long liberal, environmentalist, Eagle Scout, and even gun owner – born in Harlan, Kentucky and has lived in Southern California, New York City and now resided in Lexington, Kentucky as a Systems Analyst.

You can read more of McAllister’s observations and opinions at Shoot From the Left Hip.

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