The statistics do not lie. And it is not just homicides, although Lord knows there are enough of them. Bob Herbert, in a column entitled A Culture Soaked in Blood, will recount them - the famous ones like the recent Craig's List killing, or the murder for which Phil Spector was convicted, or the two involved in the DC sniper case that terrorized the national Capital area where I reside.
I will get to the statistics. I questioned if I should write this. I know people here who will attack me for this. But consider just this, not a statistic, but a cogent observation from Herbert:
We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.
No background checks at gun shows. None in private sales. And the people keep getting shot, in murders, in accidents in suicides.
I think this is connected with so much else wrong in our society. I will explore that as well.
But first the statistics.
You can read Herbert's words. I am not going to blockquote large sections, but I will repeat the statistics he offers.
Of the 16-17,000 Americans murdered each year, more than 12,000 are with firearms
over 30,000 Americans a years die from gunshots
12,000+ from murders
17,000 suicides
almost 800 in accidental shootings
over 300 by police (who in many cases are shooting those with guns)
70,000 per year shot but who do not die:
48,000 criminally attacked
4.200 surviving an attempted suicide
15,000+ shot accidentally
1,000+ shot by police - again, many of these with guns in their possession
over 100,000 Americans are shot each year
Cost of treating gunshots - over $2,000,000,000 / years
gunshots are the leading cause of unisured hospital stays
As a teacher, the next set of statistics particularly hit home: it is about children
3.000+ shot to death
1,900+ murdered
800+ suicides
170 or so accidental
20 or so killed by police
And another 17,000 are shot but survive
We are a violent culture. We are a blood-soaked culture.
It is hard for me to believe that this culture of violence, so much of which derives from our particular culture of guns, does not have other impacts which we seem unwilling to consider. While we react to the occasions of mass killings - Columbine or Texas Tower or Virginia Tech - or the actions of the famous - Phil Spector - or the crime that becomes infamous - Craig's List - it is almost as if we are inured by the commonality of every day violence that plagues our nation. And even in the gross cases cited, we ooh and ah and talk about it, and then get back to business.
That scares me. Several of my recent diaries have been about the torture done under the auspices of the previous administration. I wonder if, despite all the protestations we now know were offered, it was somewhat easier for those who carried out the gross actions to do so because our culture is so steeped in blood and violence? I cannot prove this, and do not have statistics to reinforce this concern. I know others will offer cases of torture in other cultures that are not as imbued with the obsession with guns that permeates much of this country. Still others will point out that the violence of Rwanda was largely done with machetes.
So what? Why is it that we are unwilling to address the cost we pay as a people for the level of gun violence? Are some lives simply that expendable, perhaps because they are poor, people of color, people "not like us?"
Herbert says we are not willing to think about the cost:
If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.
One might respond that there are some who are unwilling to have us think about it, or discuss it in any serious way. They will raise their voices and attempt to drown out the discussion. That includes the current and recent leadership of the NRA. It includes far too many people who are otherwise reasonable but incredibly shortsighted: they view any discussion about our gun violence as a threat on their personal ownership of guns.
Herbert is not in this column doing anything but informing us of the cost of how we currently implement our gun culture, or if you prefer, our almost unfettered obsession with guns. Many gun advocates may not parse his words that carefully. Even if they do, the final paragraph will certainly cause them to see red:
This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.
we should be committed for not stopping them - some will read that as a threat to their ownership of guns. It does not have to be read that way. However one reads it, one should recognize that if we don't find a way of restructuring our gun culture, we may be forced to confront something more drastic.
May 13, 1996. It was a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. A man walked into the school with 3 handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition. By the time he committed suicide, Thomas Watt Hamilton had fired 109 times, killing 12 children and an adult. Hamilton was a legal owner of the firearms used in the killing. Because he was, and because the shooter in 1987 in Hungerford, who killed 16 and wounded 17 more before he killed himself was also a legal owner, public sentiment in the UK was such that very retrictive laws on handguns were enacted.
Could that happen here? Which part, the mass killings by a legal owner of guns, or the restrictions enacted in response?
When I wrote about Columbine, some people worried that the way we remembered might cause copycats. Dunblane had a copycat half a world a way, in Tasmania, where one month later in Port Arthur a man went on a killing spree killing 35 and wounding 21 more.
This Wikipedia article lists sixteen notable occasions of spree killings worldwide. How many of these occurred in the US? Let me list them, using the info from Wiki entry:
Notably large spree killings in history include:
* University of Texas massacre (United States, 1966): Charles Whitman, 14 people and wounded 31 others as part of a shooting rampage from the observation deck of the University's 32-story administrative building. He had already murdered his wife and mother, and was shot to death by a policema
* Gang Lu shootings (Iowa City, 1991): Gang Lu, a grad student at U of Iowa used a handgun to kill five people and seriously wound a sixth, then killed himself
* Columbine High School Massacre (United States, 1999): Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and one teacher and injured 24 in one hour before commiting suicide
* Red Lake High School massacre (United States, 2005): Jeff Weise. Shot and killed his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend, both police officers. He then proceeded to a local high school and shot and killed a security guard. Once inside the school Weise shot and killed five students and a teacher before committing suicide. Weise killed 9 and injured 15.
* Virginia Tech massacre (United States, 2007): Seung-Hui Cho, using two pistols, killed 32 in two separate events and then himself in the course of about three hours.
* 2009 Alabama spree killing (United States, 2009): Michael McLendon using SKS rifle, Bushmaster AR-15, and .38-caliber handgun killed 10 on 10 March and before shooting himself.
Five of the sixteen listed were from this nation. Our nation. And that is such an incomplete list - if the standard is only killing of 5, think how many additional cases could be listed from the US just from school shootings, from those "going Postal."
We are supposed to be a highly civilized nation. At times I wonder about so classifying us. After all, we do poorly in providing health care for such a large portion of our population. We have levels of economic disparity that are approaching those of some banana Republics. We proudly point at a tradition of self-reliance, but we insist on that mainly for the poor who are without political influence, while the wealthy and powerful get government bailouts and tax breaks paid for by the rest of us.
Most of all, we tolerate an insane level of death and destruction by guns.
It is interesting that some will insist upon their absolutist rendering of the 2nd Amendment but willingly ignore other parts of our Constitution if they think it will somehow impinge upon their freedom. They are willing to deny 1st Amendment rights to many with unpopular politics views or religious orientation. They see nothing wrong with such an approach of denial, some even quoting from Justice Robert Jackson's words from his dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949):
This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
But if one wants to refer to Jackson about the Constitution not being a suicide pact, then surely the level of deaths - including the 17,000 suicides by gun each year - would meet Jackson's test of where some restriction of Constitutionally guaranteed rights is appropriate.
I do not see to end all private ownership of handguns. I do think it time we have a serious discussion about all the dimensions of our national obsession with guns. The consequences of an unwillingness to have such a discussion is an unacceptable level of deaths and damage. Go back and reread the figures I extracted from herbert's piece.
Our entire culture is too accepting of violence in too many ways. We glorify it - in sport, in video games, in real ways that contribute to the coarseness of our society. Our young people are not stupid. They see our glorifying of violence, including in national policy, and some will apply it to their own lives: they want the baddest firearm they can find so they can be "the meanest motherfucker in the valley" as the line goes from the famous perversion of the 23rd Psalm.
I have to wonder if we would have so many willing to attempt to justify and rationalize torture were we not so completely imbued with violence? And it is clear that our fascination with guns contributes in a major way to our fascination with guns: we have a fascination with the image of the quickdraw gunman of the legendary American west - how many times will we have to refilm the Gunfight at the OK Corral, or its modern fabulous (as in fable) more recent parallels, real or imagined? After all, justification of going beyond the law in the names of saving lives was not thrust into American popular culture by Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer: those of my generation clearly remember Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. Or other movies of that general era in which the use of violence, especially with guns, was glorified: think of Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish.
We cannot afford to continue to look the other way at the costs to our society of the level of gun violence we are apparently willing to tolerate. Looking the other way is acquiescing in the death and damage. It is no different than looking the other way when we hear about torture.
If we do not wish to see at some future date an incident which will dwarf Virginia Tech, if we honestly do not want the level of gun violence to expand even beyond the levels it has already reached, should we not be willing to more honestly and openly examine the dimensions of what we have allowed to exist?
If nothing else, think of the children: 17,000 per year die from guns.
What limits and restrictions do we need to save those lives? Or do they simply not matter?
Update I have an error in a number of my comments where I was typing too fast, and did not go back to check my data. Having made it, I repeated it, now know I misstated, but cannot correct in comments.
the number of chidren KILLED by guns each year is 3,000
the number shot is 20,000
the figure of 17,000 is the number shot who survive
My argument that even 3,000 is too many is unfortunately not really weakened because I used the wrong number in a number of contents written in a relatively brief period of time where I was trying to catch up with comments and was somewhat distracted. I do apologize for the error. Substitute 3,000 for each time in the comments I said 17,000. It is still far too many. But it is not 4 times the number that died on 9-11, nor equal to 1/3 of the deaths in Vietnam. For some reason I got 17,000 stuck on my brain.
One further comment, before I have to go on to other things. I have read through all the comments to this point, even if I have not responded as much as I may like. My position has been misinterpreted. So let me state it clearly.
- I am NOT opposed to private ownership of firearms.
- I have always been willing to read a constitutional right to own in 9th, rather than then 2nd, and note that 4 of the 9 Justices did not read as did the majority in Heller. Nevertheless, that decision is currently binding in DC (not YET applied to the states, although I am sure absent a change in the Court it will be).
- The Heller decision in no way prevents states, or even DC, from imposing some restrictions on gun ownership, and certainly does not interfere with the idea of reasonable checks before someone is allowed to purchase a gun.
- I think our society as a whole is overly violent.
- I think our culture with respect to guns has put us in a situation where discussion of reasonable changes to close the current loopholes is almost impossible.
- I think the cost we are paying in lives and damage is too great, especially given that there are things we can do to reduce that death and destruction, which has the impact of making some people harsher towards any gun rights that they ought to be. Remember that the UK reacted strongly precisely because the Dunblane shooting was the second mass shooting involving a person who legally owned the firearms used.
- A refusal to discuss because of the actions of SOME on the other side of the issue is always wrong. Not all gun owners are irresponsible, and not all who want to keep guns from the hands of violent people, children, and the metnally disturbed are opposed to all private ownership of guns. Demonizing the other side accomplishes little except poisoning the environment, making the saving of lives more difficult.
- In general, the calling of people who disagree with you names and refusing to see if any common ground is possible is not helpful in solving any kind of problem.
And now, let me end with this thought, which is mine alone. I do not pretend to speak for anyone else. I am reminded that King looked forward to a day when his children would be judged not by the color of the their skins but rather by the content of their character. We have unfortunately not yet reached that day, but we have learned that we need to adjust how we try to get their as our culture changes. I know that often those making education policy see things almost exclusively through the lens of their own experience. Thus many of the nostrums we prescribe simply do not fit in the more rural and remote parts of this nation. In education policy we need to ensure that all viewpoints are heard, and that all feel they will be able to express their feelings without being demeaned or denigrated.
So should it be in all policy discussions. No one part of American society has a right to dictate policy, even if they may hold temporary majorities in legislative bodies. But no one's rights are totally absolute - the nature of any social contract implies some restriction on the absolute application of individual rights lest they impose on the rights of others and/or lead to disorder and destruction of the social comity. Unless we are willing to have discussions with those with whom we disagree, to validly hear their concerns, and to try to find what common ground possible, then the entire political process is almost pointless, beyond getting to 50% + 1 and shoving the viewpoints of that temporary majority down the throats of everyone else.
When people die as a result, it is unnecessary.
Peace.