Biden is right: US gun violence ‘an international embarrassment’
Thanks to clever, easily digestible rhetoric from the morally and financially bankrupt National Rifle Association, Americans have engaged in years of bickering over whether guns kill people.
I believe they do, in staggeringly large numbers, as evidenced by the thousands upon thousands of Americans pierced by bullets each year. Those bullets are coming from somewhere. It’s not just people throwing them.
Some look at the country’s grim daily death toll and say, “Well, if not for guns, those people would’ve just been killed, or died of suicide, by other means.”
To which I say, “Prove it. Get rid of all the guns and see if the number of murders and suicides goes down. I’ll wait.”
It’s a ludicrous argument, a handy thing politicians and gun manufacturers holler so you don’t notice the blood on their hands.
So I was glad to see President Joe Biden, while announcing limited executive actions aimed at curbing gun violence Thursday, call American’s gruesome loss of life exactly what it is: “Gun violence in this country is an epidemic, and it’s an international embarrassment.”
“Our flag was still flying at halfstaff for the victims of a horrific murder of eight primarily Asian Americans in Georgia when 10 more lives were taken in a mass murder in Colorado,” Biden said. “You probably didn’t hear, but between those two incidents less than one week apart, there were more than 850 additional shootings.”
Step away from the childish “American frontiersman!” worldview that enlivens many gun absolutists and look at what a miserable disgrace we are when it comes to Americans shooting Americans.
In our city alone, from January through March, more than 700 people have been shot in everything from mass shootings at large gatherings to outbursts of road rage.
Nationally this year, as of April 6, the Gun Violence Archive reports there have been 11,430 gun-related deaths, including nearly 6,500 suicides. In 2020, nearly 20,000 Americans died from gunshots, the most in two decades.
There are different drivers of violence and myriad factors that lead a person to shoot a gun at another human being or at themselves. But the one constant in all these shootings is, of course, the gun.
The figures are tragic, but they should also be embarrassing for all of us.
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the United States had 3.9 violent gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2019. That’s about 100 times higher than the rate in the United Kingdom. It’s nearly 200 times higher than the rates in China, Japan and South Korea. Embarrassing.
Our gun ownership rate eclipses that of other industrialized nations, and unless you want to posit that Americans are wildly more violent and murderous than everyone else and that without guns we’d all just be stabbing the bejesus out of each other, the prevalence of guns is the ONLY explanation for the … say it with me … embarrassing number of shooting deaths.
If only there was something we could do, right?
On Thursday, noted unhelpful person Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted: “The right to keep and bear arms is fundamental for preserving our liberty. The answer is not to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, the answer is to go after violent criminals and come down on them like a ton of bricks.”
He’s not wrong about that last part, but everyone knows it’s not good enough. Many of the mass shooters, at churches and schools and concerts, weren’t violent criminals before they started shooting. They were people who never should have had access to guns.
We can preserve people’s liberty just fine while also making sure weapons of war aren’t on the streets and people are thoroughly screened before being armed. We won’t interfere with anyone’s hobby by doing away with high-capacity magazines and assault weapons.
We can do all these things, but we don’t, and that’s embarrassing. Because to anyone with brains enough to rattle, our inaction is staggeringly stupid.
A 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal looked at gun control laws in U.S. states and compared them to gun-related deaths. Surprising absolutely no one, the authors found: “States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states.”
The study showed a “10% increase in gun ownership was associated with an approximately 35% higher rate of mass shootings.” That’s so logical it hurts.
Republicans such as Cruz are only capable of mocking talk of stricter gun laws. But the public strongly favors tougher regulations, probably because “the public” doesn’t have pockets lined by the gun lobby and a reputation built on faux-toughguy tweets.
Frank Newport, a senior scientist at the Gallup polling firm, wrote this month: “The data show strong public support for proposed legislative changes that would do such things as require background checks for all gun purchases, ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, require all privately owned guns to be registered with the police, and require a 30-day waiting period for all gun sales. … More generally, 57% say that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict.”
That’s likely because most Americans can connect two dots with a straight line.
But while Biden was announcing his executive actions and encouraging Congress to do something about gun violence on Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee was signing a bill, opposed by many law enforcement groups, that allows most adults 21 and older to carry handguns without a background check or training.
That’s America, right there. Dumb as dirt when it comes to guns, and deeply, frustratingly embarrassing.