Is mass death the US norm?
A million Covid deaths add to toll from guns, drugs
After mass shootings killed and wounded people grocery shopping, going to church and simply living their lives last weekend, America marked 1 million Covid-19 deaths.
The number, once unthinkable, is now an irreversible reality in the United States — just like the persistent reality of gun violence that kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Americans have always tolerated high rates of death and suffering — among certain segments of society. But the sheer numbers of deaths from preventable causes, and the apparent acceptance that no policy change is on the horizon, raises the question: Has mass death become accepted in America?
“We will tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering and death in the US, because we have over the past two years. We have over our history,” says Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and Yale professor who earlier was a leading member of the Aids advocacy group ACT UP.
“If I thought the Aids epidemic was bad, the American response to Covid19 has sort of . . . it’s a form of the American grotesque, right?” Gonsalves says. “Really — a million people are dead? And you’re going to talk to me about your need to get back to normal, when for the most part most of us have been living pretty reasonable lives for the past six months?”
Certain communities have always borne the brunt of higher death rates in the US. There are profound racial and class inequalities in the US, and our tolerance of death is partly based on who is at risk, says Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies mortality.
“Some people’s deaths matter a lot more than others,” she laments. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing in this really brutal way with this coincidence of timing.”
In Buffalo, the alleged shooter was a racist bent on killing as many Black people as he could, according to authorities. The family of 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, one of 10 people killed in an attack on a grocery store that served the African American community, channelled the grief and frustration of millions as they demanded action, including passage of a hate crime bill and accountability for those who spread hateful rhetoric.
“You expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again — forgive and forget,” said her son, former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield jnr. “While people
We will tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering and death in the US.
Gregg Gonsalves
we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal.”
That sense — that politicians have done little even as the violence repeats itself — is shared by many Americans.
Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said
“I don’t think that most Americans feel good about it. I think most Americans would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture about these pervasive issues.”
The high numbers of deaths from Covid, guns and other causes can start to feel disconnected from the individuals whose lives were lost and the families whose lives were altered.
With Covid, American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from a preventable cause. In a recent guest column in the Advocate newspaper, pediatrician Dr Mark W. Kline pointed out that more than 1500 children have died from Covid-19, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the “myth” it is harmless for children.
There are many parallels between the US response to Covid and the gun violence epidemic, says Sonali Rajan, a professor at Columbia University who researches school violence.
“We have long normalised mass death in this country. Gun violence has persisted as a public health crisis for decades,” she says, noting an estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 will die.
Gun violence is such a part of US life that we organise our lives around its inevitability. Children do lockdown drills at school. And in about half the states, Rajan says, teachers can carry firearms.
In the current response to Covid, she sees similar dynamics. Americans, she says, “deserve to be able to commute to work without getting sick, or work somewhere without getting sick, or send their kids to school without them getting sick.”
It’s important, she says, to ask what policies are being put forth by elected officials who have the power to “attend to the health and the wellbeing of their constituents.”
“It’s remarkable how that responsibility has been sort of abdicated, is how I would describe it,” Rajan says.
The level of concern about deaths often depends on context, says Rajiv Sethi, an economics professor at Barnard College who has written about both gun violence and Covid. He points to a rare but dramatic event such as an airplane crash or an accident at a nuclear power plant, which do seem to matter to people.
By contrast, something like traffic deaths gets less attention. The Government last week said nearly 43,000 people had died on the nation’s roads last year, the highest level in 16 years. The federal government has unveiled a national strategy to combat the problem.
Even when talking about gun violence, the Buffalo shooting has got a lot of attention, but mass shootings represent a small number of the gun deaths that happen in the United States every year, Sethi says. For example, there are an estimated 24,000 gun suicides compared with 19,000 homicides. But even though there are policy proposals that could help within the bounds of the Second Amendment, he says, the debate on guns is politically entrenched.
“The result is that nothing is done,” Sethi says. “The result is paralysis.”
Dr Megan Ranney of Brown University’s School of Public Health calls it a frustrating “learned helplessness.”
“There’s been almost a sustained narrative created by some that tells people these things are inevitable,” says Ranney, an ER doctor who did gun violence research before Covid19 hit.
She wonders if people understand the sheer numbers of people dying from guns, from Covid and opioids. The CDC said this month that more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, setting a record.