The well-regulated militia.

[pinboy3niner]

48. Why do you count only gun deaths but not injuries?

There seems to be a tendency to think that the injured recover quickly and are just fine.

As you may know, I was hit by AK fire in Vietnam. The bullet entered midway between my nose and upper lip, blew out half my jaw and teeth, then hit my shoulder. I was peppered with secondary shrapnel that included bullet fragments and fragments of my lower jawbone and teeth.

I was hospitalized for 18 months as I went through many operations. The biggest one was rebuilding my left mandible with an experimental bone graft, but there were others like the one to lower the floor of my mouth. The initial treatment in Vietnam was simply debriding the wound, stitching the exit wound (from the corner of my mouth 6" down my neck), the 2 stitches for my entrance wound, and stitching down my tongue to cover the intraoral wound.

Years later I had to have everything re-done over a couple of years in another series of operations when the original bone graft failed.

There would be no point in my telling you about my combat wounds if the same thing were not happening to ordinary people in America because of both handguns and "assault-style" weapons. Civilian gunshot victims here often are affected just like soldiers wounded in combat.

And the crap about civilian assault weapons being different because they lack a selector switch to fire on automatic is a cruel joke. I got hit by an assault weapon fired in semi-automatic mode.

Fuck the NRA talking points about assault weapons or suicides or anything else. It's all about gun manufacturers making more profits and the victims--both the dead and the injured--paying the terrible price.