­2015: A very violent year

There are many possible labels we could put on the time capsule for the year 2015, but one undeniable title would be “A Very Violent Year.” This is not because of a few highly profiled terrorist attacks. It is because of the mass killings we did to ourselves, a total of 353  multiple-victim shootings that left 12,223 dead people across our bloody urban, small town and rural landscape. This total included 62 attacks on schools, supposedly the safest places in our society.
Sonoma County was not immune. We suffered and witnessed a domestic double homicide, a transient stabbing, a gang-related garage ambush, a marijuana grow house invasion, a wild car chase with a fatal ending and another pot robbery gone violently bad. (A partial list.)
The statistics are staggering and can not be denied. We are an extremely violent culture where we own 300 million guns, a total that exceeds the entire adult population of our country. We are such a violent society that we remain the world’s largest exporter of weaponry to other countries, last year selling $36.2 billion in guns, war technology and other killing machines. (Russia, the second largest weapons exporter had $10.2 billion in sales.)
And, what is our response to all this gun violence and killings? When this many Americans used to die in violent car wrecks we made cars safer, tightened DUI laws, restricted youth driving permits and launched a nationwide public relations campaign to change our habits and culture.
Now that it is guns that do the killing (more than 90,000 since the 2012 mass shootings at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut) we have a different response. We want our Second Amendment “right to bear arms” protected. We point to foreign terrorists and a few “lone wolf” shooters as the bigger problem. We blame ISIS, inner city gangs, a lack of mental health facilities and even the Obama Administration — but we never blame ourselves.
This Christmas, the same replica AK-47 that Andy Lopez was playing with when a deputy sheriff tragically and mistakenly shot and killed him, was still on sale in local stores. We buy toy guns for our children, not Daisy Red Ryder replicas, but copies of high-powered assault weapons like the ones soldiers (and terrorists) shoot in our unending wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever our $36.2 billion arsenal just got delivered. What kind of games do children play with toy AK-47s? King of the Drug Lords? Grand Theft Auto for real? Iraqi War Avengers or drive-by gang busters? The horror of it.
From 1968 to 2011, 1.4 million Americans have died in domestic gun violence incidents. That is more deaths than all our nation’s war dead since the Revolutionary War (1.2 million.) 
Last year’s killings included the race-hatred slaughter at a South Carolina church, a single gunman attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a AR-15 armed student’s rampage at a Roseburg, Oregon community college, the more recent San Bernardino shootings and 349 other mass fatal gun attacks.
Averaging almost one mass shooting a day, where will today’s or tomorrow’s storm of bullets fall? A lot of fear is being spread across America these days. We’re being told to fear all Muslims, especially child-aged Syrian refugees. We’re told to fear more gun control laws that would weaken our Constitution. We’re told to fear anyone who might suggest making guns and their use safer the same way we did for cars or tobacco.
Tragically, there is no reason to believe that 2016 will not be another violent year. Right now in Sonoma County there is a small child playing with his toy AK-47. Right now, the rest of us must think that is OK, so long as he doesn’t pretend to be a terrorist.
— Rollie Atkinson