Over 43,000 dead. Why don’t we act? Why?

OAMaINTTON » We all know what instruments snuffed out 18 innocent lives in two mass shootings within the space of a week. We all know what tools Americans used to kill more than 43,000 people, whether others or themselves, last year. The answer is obvious. We just refuse to do anything about it.

The problem is that the nation is cursed with an absurdly and tragically vast oversupply of guns. And, as a society, we refuse to even talk about the kind of comprehensive disarmament that could prevent the next massacre by someone full of entitlement and rage, the next drive-by killing by a homicidal drug dealer or the next gun suicide by someone in unbearable pain from depression. We would rather live with the carnage than seriously try to end it.

There are rage-filled people, drug dealers and people suffering from depression in Britain, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Spain — in every country in the world. But those nations have only a tiny fraction of the gun violence we experience in the United States. Why might that be? Because they have far fewer guns to use to do violence.

The United States is the only nation on the planet where there are more guns in civilian hands than there are civilians, according to the authoritative global Small Arms Survey, conducted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. As of the most recent report, in 2018, we had about 120 privately owned guns per 100 citizens. The nation in second place, with about 53 guns in private hands per 100 people, was Yemen — which at least had its raging civil war as an explanation.

France and Germany, by contrast, both had around 20 firearms in private hands for every 100 citizens. Japan had fewer than one privately owned gun for every 100 people, and gun deaths there are exceedingly rare.

Last year, by contrast, the United States saw an average of more than 100 gun deaths per day.

In 2020, we had a respite from the kinds of mass shootings we saw this month in metropolitan Atlanta and Boulder, Colo. — shocking events that dominate the news, summon presidential expressions of sorrow and kick off yet another round of congressional debate over gun laws that ultimately goes nowhere. But there was a sharp increase in what we must shamefully call garden-variety gun violence, with about 19,380 homicides by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive, up from an average of around 15,000 such deaths annually in recent years.

This is in addition to about 24,000 gun suicides last year. In total, then, more than 43,000 Americans were killed by guns.

If guns were not so ubiquitous, of course, some people would have found other ways to kill themselves or others. But it is ridiculous to think the toll would be anywhere near as high. Imagine the suspect in the Boulder supermarket killings armed with a knife, or even a sword, rather than a Ruger AR-556, a gun that functions like a rifle, in that it uses faster and more damaging ammunition, but is legally classified as a pistol, which means it is regulated in different ways.

The suspect in the Atlanta killings bought a gun earlier that day. The Boulder suspect bought a Ruger pistol days before the killings. Perhaps a nationwide system of meaningful background checks for gun purchases would have prevented one or both tragedies. Perhaps some sort of mandatory waiting period to buy a gun might have made them abandon their alleged plans or impulses.

The Second Amendment protects a right — but it does not impose an obligation to own guns, or to have our lives ruled by them. I suppose there could be some deadly rampage so shocking that we collectively decide to join the rest of the civilized world and disarm. But after Newtown? After Las Vegas? I can’t imagine how horrible the epiphany would have to be.