Crazy might not be the right word. Heartbreaking or heartrending would be better. But even heartrending isn’t strong enough. In these United States, our rate of gun death is 4.42 deaths per 100,000 population, the sixth highest in the world – but many times the rate in other developed nations. Of developed nations, only Greece, Austria, Switzerland and Spain have a significant issue, and their gun death rate is one tenth to one fortieth of ours. Our gun death rates are twenty-five times higher than the average of the other OECD nations, the advanced, industrialized nations of the world.
Many people in the public health world call this an epidemic. They use the tools of public health to study gun and other violence and have shown how violence spreads from person to person and community to community, as if it were carried from person to person like a virus or bacteria, as if violence were an infectious disease.
Still others want to call some of what is happening political violence, as if one party had declared war on the other party and were using murder to advance their political position.
But both views miss the point. Virus and bacteria spread from person to person on their own, without a human being choosing to hurt another human being, without anyone sighting down a barrel or aiming a gun. And though too many people in political life have been murdered, particularly in the last year, these murders have been committed by “lone wolves”, usually disaffected young people who spend too much time on the internet. These murders are murders of politicians, not political murder itself, which we have thus far thankfully avoided. Thus far.
But we can use the tools of public health to measure and track gun violence, you might say. And the murder of politicians will become political murder if we don’t put a stop to it.
While it is true that passing gun control laws seem to have reduced the incidence of gun violence in the states that have passed those laws, our ability to study and impact the frequency of gun deaths doesn’t make this a problem of public health. Passing gun control laws and reducing gun deaths thereby doesn’t mean that we have a deep understanding of the causes of this violence and doesn’t mean we can use the tools of public health – medical care, laboratory science, and communications – to reduce the likelihood of gun death in the US. Indeed, the argument that gun violence is the result of a failed mental health system is itself hard to sustain. True, many gun deaths are the result of suicides, but many of the perpetrators of the recent barbaric political murders and school shootings do not appear to have been mentally ill. Instead, too many seem to be confused young people who live in an internet culture that has created its own reality, and in a political culture that is intensely partisan, disrespectful of dissenting views and dismissive of the people who hold those views, and at the same time has made guns too easily available.
Calling gun violence a public health issue or a mental health issue gets us off the hook too easily. And confusing the murder of politicians with political murder only serves to make our polarization worse.
It’s time we looked at ourselves and the culture we have created. Yes, there is evidence that sensible gun ownership laws may help reduce some gun deaths. But we also need to find ways of building communities and strengthening families, and making sure young people have a sense of their importance, value and purpose. It’s crazy if we don’t start that look at ourselves and our culture now, before this epidemic, if that’s what you want to call it, gets worse.
Find Michael Fine’s commentaries and short stories on https://michaelfinemd.substack.com and on http://www.michaelfinemd.com.
