The United States, no matter whether any interest like the NRA wants to assert otherwise, has a gun problem. Most other Western countries do not experience anywhere near the level of gun violence that the United State sees. In only the first month of this year, the Gun Violence Archive estimates that over 1,200 Americans have lost their lives to gun violence.
That’s not normal or acceptable.
Concurrent to this, as many concerned interests point out on the occasion of high profile gun violence incidents, the United States has a gun proliferation problem. Guns are in many cases far too easy to obtain, and those guns often end up spread across society in a way that catalyzes incidents of gun violence.
One indication of the disturbingly broad proliferation of guns in the U.S. came earlier this month, when the TSA revealed that a former Governor had been arrested at an airport in Jackson, Mississippi, for having a loaded handgun in the luggage they were attempting to take aboard an aircraft.
Although the TSA did not reveal the identity of the arrested individual, the person at the center of the incident — former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour — has confirmed separately that they were the individual in question.
According to Barbour, he was never put in cuffs and no mug shot photo was taken, but he “did not dispute [TSA Spokesperson Lisa] Farbstein’s use of the word ‘”arrest,'” The Associated Press reports.
Barbour claims that the gun ended up in the bag he was attempting to take aboard a plane through a simple act of “absentmindedness,” saying he “forgot he was carrying the gun, which he had put in his briefcase after an assistant removed it from his car days earlier,” according to the AP.
Barbour was freed and faces a fine potentially in the thousands of dollars range. After his gun was confiscated, he was allowed to board his flight to Washington, D.C.
One wonders how the incident would have unfolded if the person at the center of it was an African American, considering the bias against African Americans on the part of many American police.
The president, of course, refuses to accept this problem, just as so many refuse to acknowledge the concurrent American problems with gun proliferation and gun violence.
Featured Image via Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
