America will never get better if we refuse to diagnose and treat its problems
Anation is a body. For the whole body to function smoothly, each part must do its job. You’ll know from your own body that each part does not need to be perfect to get you through the day. You’ll know that a disabled body can be perfect once you understand what it needs and adjust accordingly. A nation, too, can have some body parts that break down and need help from other, stronger parts. The problems in a body start when some parts break, but instead of compensating for those parts and allowing them time to heal, the rest of the body ignores them.
The body, this nation, insists that it must keep moving. The problems grow as the body becomes more and more stressed. Finally, in the worst cases, the body starts attacking itself. America today is a body being attacked from within; living here feels like living inside a huge autoimmune response. The system we once used to protect ourselves has gone haywire, and now it attacks us.
I’m using these metaphors, nations as bodies and gun violence as an autoimmune response, because I can’t bear to write about the literal bodies of small children shot to death in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. Someone with a gun killed 19 children and two adults at Robb elementary school; others were injured and remain in hospitals around the state. America’s latest mass shooting is at once familiar and impossible – a lone gunman, multiple weapons, little children, helpless teachers, terrified families waiting to hear the worst news imaginable and pure desolation for an entire community.
Less than two weeks ago, another gunman shot 10 people dead in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. A different man with different motives; the same terror of shots fired on yet another community. Elderly ladies buying
groceries, small children excited about their summer break – these people are precious, and they are vulnerable, yet they are targets now. Across the country, we listen to distraught relatives cry out. Their grief, and our collective horror, weigh heavily on our minds and hearts.
When the leader of besieged Ukraine makes time to send us his sympathies, we know our trouble is deep. “I would like to express my condolences to all of the relatives and family members of the children who were killed in an awful shooting in Texas in a school,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said when he appeared virtually at a conference during the World Economic Forum in Davos. “This is terrible – to have victims of shooters in peaceful times,” he said.
It is terrible. On average, almost 53 people are killed each day by a gun in the US. The BBC collated data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and reported that 45,222 people in America died from gun-related injuries in 2020, the last year for which complete data is available. More than half of those deaths were suicides; 43% of the deaths – amounting to 19,384 people – were murders. In the intervening pandemic years, gun sales have only risen. The BBC also cites figures from the Small Arms
Survey – a Swiss-based research project – that show that the US has a ratio of 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents, up from 88 for every 100 in 2011, far surpassing other countries. There are more guns here than in most comparable countries; guns are relatively easy to get hold of legally and illegally. The evidence points to an almost complete failure to stop dangerous people from buying and using guns to kill and hurt other people and themselves.
As a body, the American nation is still a relatively young one, just a couple centuries old now. This body has many broken parts – easy access to deadly weapons, toxic masculinity, racism, blood money in politics and warped ideologies built around the constitutionally enshrined right to bear arms. Instead of treating these broken parts, we keep going and haul these damaged parts with us. There are no mysteries here. We have the answers to the questions about how this has been allowed to happen and why it will continue to happen. The question now is this – how can we survive in a body that attacks itself ?
Maeve Higgins is a Guardian US columnist and the author of the book Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them