UN urges US to take measures to reduce gun violence
The United Nations has asked the United States to take measures to reduce gun violence following a mass shooting that killed nine people at a college campus in the state of Oregon.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned on Friday about the high death toll that US gun violence is inflicting on American lives.
"The Secretary-General expresses his strong hope that the United States, through the robust democratic process that characterizes it, will be able to take the necessary action to reduce the appalling toll in human life that gun violence is taking on American society," said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric .
The United States has experienced more than one mass shooting a day this year and the fatal shootings at the community college in Oregon were the latest of many gun-related deaths.
The deadly rampage at Umpqua Community College on Thursday is the 294th mass shooting event in 2015, according to statistics collected by the website Shootingtracker.com, which defines a mass shooting where 4 or more people are shot.
Nine people were killed and seven were wounded after a gunman burst into the college and opened fire.
America’s gun violence goes deeper. The number of intentional homicides by guns was 11,208 in 2013, the last year for which US health authorities have statistics.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), firearms are the cause of death for more than 33,000 people in the United States every year, a number that includes accidental discharge, murder and suicides, which are on the increase.
That means firearms kill more people in America every six hours than terrorist attacks did in the entire year of 2014.
Moreover, over 73,000 Americans were treated in hospitals for gun-related injuries in 2010, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
This year is on course to break records. There have been a total of 39,449 gun-related incidents and 9,940 deaths so far in 2015, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Of those, 550 were children under 13.
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