By Staff Reporter 

A TOP American businessman, Paul Graham, has likened his country’s rise in cases of mass shootings to Zimbabwe’s yesteryear trillion-dollar bills.

Speaking on Twitter, Graham described the scourge as freakish, before equating it to bills printed during Zimbabwe’s hyper-inflationary period, then under President Robert Mugabe.

A seemingly never-ending economic crisis saw the then Gideon Gono led Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) printing notes with value up to ZW$100 trillion in a futile attempt at fighting inflation and stabilising the economy.

Graham’s comments, however, follow the fatal shooting by a patient of his doctor, another doctor, a receptionist, and a visitor at a Tulsa medical facility.

They also come in the wake of an 18-year-old shooting and killing 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school before being shot dead by police.

“To the rest of the world, it seems not just unfortunate that America takes mass shootings for granted, but dysfunctional to the point of freakishness, like Zimbabwe’s trillion-dollar bills,” said Graham.

Paul Graham is an investor. In 1995, alongside Robert Morris, he started Viaweb, his first software service company, before selling it to Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store.

His Y Combinator, a startup incubator, has funded over 3 000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit since its formation 2005.

Graham’s view is forming part of growing calls for abolishment of gun rights against those arguing the move will disenfranchise them in times where they require to protect themselves, their loved ones, or their property.

The scourge has been described as too common to make it in newspapers by New York Times’ David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick.

There have been 18 shootings in so far, in 2022.