Saturday was Armond Latimore's birthday. "I'm just glad I can say I made it to see 17," he posted on Facebook that day. About an hour later, he was dead, shot outside a north St. Louis restaurant. Police aren't yet talking about possible suspects or motives.
The heartbreaking notion of a 17-year-old marveling at having lived that long prompts the question of what kind of danger he thought he was in. Was there gang involvement? Was it related to the bullying that his mother told the Post-Dispatch he'd written about? Of course, in America, utterly random violence is always a possibility.
One thing we can say with certainty: Whatever trouble Armond ran into would far less likely have been fatal had it happened in any other industrialized nation in the world. Among advanced societies today, the specter of daily street shooting deaths is a uniquely American one.
As horrific mass shootings dominate the headlines, we forget that they are only a sliver of the problem. Our country's tragic addiction to firearms is mapped with milepost markers like "Columbine," "Sandy Hook" and "Parkland," but the biggest mass shooting is the one that is unfolding day by day, victim by victim, in homes and bars and on sidewalks and streets all around us.
Firearms kill 30,000-40,000 Americans annually. About two-thirds of those are suicides or accidents. The other roughly one-third are homicides. In nations with strong gun restrictions, there are far fewer gun deaths. If America's tidal wave of annual firearms killings isn't the result of a cause-and-effect between those two factors, how exactly does the National Rifle Association explain it? Are we just a naturally more violent people?
Gun-rights advocates claim, correctly, that illegal guns are a big part of the problem — which they then
