Ecology of Gun Violence

As national mourning and personal grieving continue in the aftermath of the Aurora shootings, there remains a disappointing absence of dialogue on gun violence in the US.  Knee-jerk reactions abound, and gun advocates are quick to pre-emptively dismiss expected critiques regarding the easy availability of firearms in our country.

There is new science, however, that is beginning to form interesting hypotheses on why gun violence is so prevalent in the US (we rank 5th in the world in murders by gun per capita, and account for half of all mass gun shootings.)  I offer up this article from Scientific American, by Eric Michael Johnson, titled The Joker's Wild: On the Ecology of Gun Violence in the America. 

There are several surprising findings in this article and it opens the door to alternative causes of gun violence and some possible remedies.  One of which is to have a society more politically engaged.