guardian | So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American
city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background
check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing
guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost
darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die
needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun
violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist
attacks).
What makes US gun violence so particularly
horrifying is how routine and mundane it has become. After the massacre
of 20 kindergartners in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut,
millions of Americans began to take greater notice of the threat from
gun violence. Yet since then, the daily carnage that guns produce has
continued unabated and often unnoticed.
The same day of the
marathon bombing in Boston, 11 Americans were murdered by guns. The
pregnant Breshauna Jackson was killed in Dallas, allegedly by her
boyfriend. In Richmond, California, James Tucker III was shot and killed
while riding his bicycle – assailants unknown. Nigel Hardy, a
13-year-old boy in Palmdale, California, who was being bullied in
school, took his own life. He used the gun that his father kept at home.
And in Brooklyn, New York, an off-duty police officer used her department-issued Glock 9mm handgun to kill herself, her boyfriend and her one-year old child.
At
the same time that investigators were in the midst of a high-profile
manhunt for the marathon bombers that ended on Friday evening, 38 more
Americans – with little fanfare – died from gun violence. One was a
22-year old resident of Boston. They are a tiny percentage of the 3,531
Americans killed by guns in the past four months – a total that
surpasses the number of Americans who died on 9/11 and is one fewer than
the number of US soldiers who lost their lives in combat operations in
Iraq. Yet, none of this daily violence was considered urgent enough to
motivate Congress to impose a mild, commonsense restriction on gun
purchasers.
It's not just firearms that produce such legislative inaction. Last week, a fertiliser plant in
West, Texas, which hasn't been inspected by federal regulators since
1985, exploded, killing 14 people and injuring countless others. Yet
many Republicans want to cut further the funding for the agency (OSHA)
that is responsible for such reviews. The vast majority of Americans die
from one of four ailments – cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes
and chronic lung disease – and yet Republicans have held three dozen
votes to repeal Obamacare, which expands healthcare coverage to 30
million Americans.
It is a surreal and difficult-to-explain
dynamic. Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that
is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on "others" – jihadists,
terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the
guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every
single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of
freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans
dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got
those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.
