BBC: In America--Guns in America
9 a.m. and 8 p.m. on the News Station
Just days before the Newtown shooting, there was a different attack, all the way across the nation in Oregon. A young man shot two people at the Clackamas Town Center - a Portland shopping mall - Then the man shot himself. Oregon filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald began a quest to understand the heated gun debate in Oregon following Newtown and the shooting at Clackamas Town Center. He soon found opinions divided over gun control by geography. Cities are for restrictions – the countryside against.
More Americans die by suicide than by homicide each year, by about three to one. In 2010, more than half of all suicides were committed by firearm. Many people don’t talk much about suicide. The stigma is too great. Whatever the statistics - suicide by gun is always a story in two parts: mental anguish, and deadly force.
A study in 2010 by the Violence Policy Center estimated that, on average, more than 100 drive-by shootings occur in the U.S. every month … claiming about 25 lives each month. And a 2012 University of California study found nearly a third of the victims of stray bullets, are children.