by Ross Bishop
The toll of gun violence in America, especially amongst our children, is growing. The leading cause of death to American children today is not from an automobile accident or disease, but rather from a bullet. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent in 2020 to a total of 4,368.
And yet while the misery of gun massacres mounts, nothing changes; leaving Americans with little more to do than keep lists of deaths that treat events like Uvalde as just another morbid statistic. And as the legacy of American shooting deaths continues to climb, we must, at some point, stop and ask ourselves simply, “Why?” Nations who have banned guns do not experience this problem. What is unique to the American condition that creates this dilemma? The answer is multi-faceted.
In the society as a whole, 40,000 American’s will die from gunshots this year. 25,000 of those will be suicides and another 15,000 will be homicide victims. And when you consider that 82,000,000 (82 million) Americans own guns, meaning that guns are in 44% of all American households, that is a guaranteed recipe for trouble. Another way to put it is that there are 400,000,000 guns in America (that is 400 million!), and 393,000,000 of those guns are in civilian hands.
In defense of gun owners, only .01% of all guns will ever be involved in some sort of shooting. But in the ghettos of America, gun violence is rampant. Black men ages 15 to 34, compose just 2% of the population but were fatalities in 37% of all gun homicides in 2019, a death rate 20 times higher than that of comparable white males. As just one example: since 2015, more than 10,000 people have been shot in Philadelphia and three out of four were Black males, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The media accounts paint a portrait of a city where guns are an everyday fact of life, with the reasons young men carry them including showing off, personal protection, and retaliation. Thornton-Cruz is a retired street gang member who says, “. . . is full of violence and guns. It’s not one person you’re gonna come across that don’t own a gun. Especially if he’s in the streets.” He has no hope that gun violence will abate and the streets will become safer anytime soon. “These boys are out here protecting themselves,” he says.
And yet, Black men, who some would argue have more justification for being angry, do not go around shooting up schools or super markets. As Kwame Sarfo-Mensah points out in his article, “Why Don’t Black Boys Shoot Up Schools,” “ . . if any subgroup of people has a more than justified reason to shoot up a school, it’s Black boys. . . There are many issues that could potentially trigger us into John Q mode, namely the perpetual loss of Black life via police violence, the rise of gentrification and food insecurity in our neighborhoods, the prevalence of anti-Black racism in academic and professional spaces, etc. In spite of all these challenges, we still manage to figure out a way to keep it moving.”
So the meaningful solution is 1. to eliminate automatic and semi-automatic weapons and large magazines. 2. To implement a much more rigorous “red flag” system to keep guns out of undesirable hands and 3. To start caring for our angry and disenfranchised population. Other than street violence in Chicago, Brooklyn or LA, trying to identify potential homicidal killers from the several million angry and depressed (not mentally ill) white men, who could someday shoot up a school or a super market, is virtually impossible. Plus, we just don’t give a damn about these troubled people, anyway. We don’t even try and help them, largely because they are not productive members of society. We relegate them to the scrap heap under freeway underpasses. And then we wonder why they react as they do! As George Bernard Shaw said, “Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.” And that is the biggest reason that America has the problem that it does.
Ultimately what we need is a culture that holds violent behavior of this kind to be completely out of bounds – as much of the rest of the world already does. How else do you explain why school shootings, for example, do not occur in Italy, Japan, Germany or even in nearby Canada? Why don’t those societies develop the ranks of violently angry white men that America does? After all, they have their mentally ill too! It is primarily because those other societies care about their people in pain and work to ameliorate it. Have a rough time in Italy or Portugal or Sweden and someone, often the police, is there saying, “Tell me what is bothering you, what you need, we will get you help.” Talk to an Italian policeman or woman and he or she will tell you that an important part of their daily routine is providing what we in America call “social services” – homeless shelters, counseling, meals, drug treatment, etc. for the disenfranchised. And it’s pretty difficult to give an outlet to violent, festering rage when the society is essentially standing in front of you saying, “We care about you and your pain, and what happens to you!”
In the first place, no civilian should ever be in possession of an assault weapon, period. There is just no excuse for that type of weapon to be in civilian hands. You can’t deter burglars with it and it is certainly not a weapon for hunting. And we need to put an end to the stupid notion held by fear mongering, militant White Supremacist wanna-bees that they might, “someday take the country back.”
It is the coupling of a twisted and troubled, rage and hate filled young man with an automatic or semi-automatic weapon that presents a danger to society. Each, by itself, is volatile, but it is the combination of the two that makes for a lethally explosive situation. Without a gun, a troubled and hate filled person is just that – someone venting his spleen on social media. But put an assault weapon in his hands and you give lethal power to his demented rantings.
Considering the other side of the equation, we are around dangerous and volatile substances all the time. Go into your local railroad yard and you’ll find tanker cars full of incredibly dangerous substances, but we manage those so that they pose a minimal risk to the community. Your local gas station is a sitting potential bomb, that we carefully engineer so as to limit the risk of harm to the public. So ask yourself, “Why can’t we do the same with incredibly dangerous assault weapons?” Isn’t a school full of children more important than a gas station? We go to extensive lengths to insure that car drivers are not a threat – driver’s license exams, vehicle inspections, speed limits, DUI laws, driver’s ed. classes, insurance requirements, etc., etc. . . . We require that people drive 15 miles an hour in school zones – why? Is it not logical to create even more protections regarding incredibly dangerous weapons of mass destruction?
And caring for troubled people would cost a good deal of money, just like any other “socialist” program. But conservative influences in the American government cannot seem to see their way past the immediate cost, even though most other nations do that every day. After all, what are the 15 to 20,000 people we will loose to homicides this year worth? Or, put a price on that classroom full of third graders.
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