Gun violence is proxy war on American public: Colorado Newsline

NEW YORK, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The nature of gun violence in the United States has amounted to a proxy war, with school children targeted as unwitting infantry and grocery store shoppers conscripted as cannon fodder, while attackers armed as if for military engagement and backed by Second Amendment fanatics are deployed in public to kill unsuspecting innocents, reported Colorado Newsline on Thursday.

"This is a hot war. We know which side is the aggressor. Gun extremists aren't just political misfits. They are belligerents," said the report.

"As the riot of gun violence in America produces fresh massacres by the day, firearm fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge the blood on their hands, and their suicidal stance in the face of escalating carnage is that more guns are the answer," it noted.

In the almost 232 years since the ratification of the Second Amendment, individual gun owners have had no substantial or sustained occasion to take up arms against the federal government. Yet guns are involved in almost 49,000 annual deaths in the United States, it said.

"Anyone who has studied the matter arrives at the simple conclusion that more guns mean more death, and the gun-permissive U.S. is an extreme outlier in the developed world," it added.