Party Platforms Strangely Silent: Gun violence gets attention, though toll lower than vehicle violence

Party platforms ignore highway deaths Gun violence gets a lot of attention, though its toll is lower than vehicle violence

By James R. Hood, July 13, 2016, ConsumerAffairs

[ConsumerAffairs’ founder and former editor, Jim Hood formerly headed Associated Press Broadcast News, directing coverage of major news events worldwide. He also served as Senior Vice President of United Press International and was the founder and editor of Zapnews, a newswire service for radio and television.]

There are quite a few things that can kill you. Take guns, for example. They kill 33,000 people in the United States each year. Traffic accidents can kill you too. They kill 35,000 people each year and permanently disable many more.

About 200 people survive gunshot wounds each day while twice that many survive car crashes, often with serious and life-changing injuries.

Politicians and their handlers talk endlessly about guns. Some are for them, some against. They don’t have much to say about traffic deaths though, and highway safety advocates think that’s — as the FBI recently said about one Presidential candidate — careless though not quite criminal.

“Like all dads, I worry about my girls’ safety all the time,” President Obama said at in his weekly radio address on Father’s Day. “Especially when we see preventable violence in places our sons and daughters go every day – their schools and houses of worship, movie theaters, nightclubs, as they get older.”

This puzzles safety advocates like Louis V. Lombardo, an auto safety researcher and retired government scientist.

“So why does the President, that I voted for twice, continue to miss talking about vehicle violence after nearly 250,000 vehicle deaths and 1 million serious vehicle injuries under his administration?” Lombardo asked recently in his Care for Crash Victims blog. “We need an end to this strange indifference to vehicle violence.” . .

Thanks for drawing attention to this frustrating blockade to progress in highway safety.

Here’s what President Obama said about crash fatalities: Obama (6/1/16): “We used to have really bad auto fatality rates. . .” And we don’t NOW?!

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