some kitchen table policy for Pi Day

Happy Pi Day!

Yup, it's 3.14, or Pi day, also the birthday of Albert Einstein, and the deathday of Stephen Hawking, two of our greatest and most beloved thinkers.  As a cook and policy wonk I love pie, pie charts, bar graphs and any other visual aid that helps to make complex issues easy to understand. Or as Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

In honor of Pi Day and National School Walkout Day, an event organized by students to protest gun violence a month after 17 were killed at a high school in Florida, the latest in a continuing series of mass shootings, I made some key lime pie charts to explain a few of the major issues

At 4.4 percent, America has barely a sliver of the world's population. 








But we have nearly half (around 42%) of the civilian-owned guns around the world. 

We have more than 300 million guns, more than one per person!   Why? Largely because our gun control policies are weaker than in most other countries, and the NRA and its allies have emphasized gun ownership as an American right, and our central means of self-defense.









Other countries have experienced mass shootings, but they've taken action to curtail them. In 1996, a young man in Australia opened fire on a crowd, killing 35 people. Soon after, Australia instituted a flat-out ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and introduced a mandatory buyback, in which they paid guns' owners a fair price for every gun that had just been declared illegal.

Here are the number of deaths by mass shootings in Australia since the law took effect:

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In 2012, a gunman killed 27: 20  children between the ages of 6 and 7 years old, 6 adults and himself - at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT.  Despite the extraordinary activism of families of the victims since then, no significant change occurred at the federal level and most states. Since Sandy Hook, there have been more than 1,800 deaths as a result of mass shootings.

(each strawberry slice = 100 people!)

Research shows that most of us are not motivated to actively fight for change unless something affects us or someone we know. That's why we have car safety laws and so much money poured into cancer research; it's why there's national movements to address the dramatic increase in opioid addiction and flooding disasters. Most of us fortunately don't know anyone effected by mass shootings, but at this rate we eventually will...

Anyway you slice it, gun violence is a major issue and will continue to be one until we implement and enforce legislation to regulate, limit and ban weapons. So bravo to the students, the families, the millions of others demanding change so that next year or some year soon Pi Day can be the quirky and pun-filled celebration it's meant to be.