Guns, guns

News items in the last week include the killing of six in Kalamazoo, Michigan, by an Uber driver, a workplace shooting in Kansas, which killed three and wounded fourteen, and the killing of a family in rural Washington state--four family members plus the shooter died, a teenage girl was wounded.

And in Arlington County, Virginia, residents are upset about a gun store opening up in the Lyon Park neighborhood across from Fort Myer ("Gun store faces opposition in Arlington," Washington Post.

WRT this matter, apparently gun stores are a matter of right use in Arlington County's zoning ordinance, even though Arlington County is fully urbanized.  In my opinion, rather than being considered a "matter of right" retail use, it's reasonable to not allow gun sales in cities/urban areas, from the standpoint of the New Urban Transect and land use context, gun use should be de-prioritized, particularly in T4-T6 urban zones.

It's also one of the fallouts of "mixed use" commercial and residential districts being created juxtaposed with existing single family residential, where what we might term "noxious" uses are legal and are one of the unintended consequences of more intense urbanism.

According to an article on the Washington state shooting:

Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than people in other developed nations, according to a study released earlier this month.

Overall the death rate involving guns in the United States is 10 times higher than 22 other high-income countries, researchers from the University of Nevada-Reno and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found.

-- "Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-income OECD Countries, 2010, American Journal of Medicine, 129:3, March 2016.

Also see "Americans are much, much more likely to be killed by guns than people in other countries," Washington Post, and "U.S. gun violence: The story in charts and graphs," CNN.