Spend money to stop gun violence

How is it that Congress can rush to allocate $8 billion in an overwhelmingly bipartisan manner to fight the Covid-19 virus, which has killed a few dozen people in America, and take no action against an epidemic that kills about 100 people a day and sends three times as many to the hospital? Aside from the cost to the economy from the dead and hospitalized being removed from the workforce, the cost of hospitalization is over $900 million a year, as calculated by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. About half of this cost is paid by the federal government. This figure does not include the cost of follow-up care.

The epidemic of which I write is called gun violence in America. According to Harvard research fellow Thomas Abt, in his book Bleeding Out, $112 million a year would fund programs that could cut community gun violence by half. But what has Congress done besides refuse to pass common sense legislation? Last December it allocated $25 million for gun violence research. I estimate that $112 million will be but a fraction of the $8 billion anti-virus allocation that will be wasted by multiple agencies doing redundant work or simply spending the money because they have it. Congress should let the public health professionals implement their plans for dealing with disease outbreaks, not throw money at a perceived threat, and instead focus on doing something to control a deadly epidemic that has been growing ever more fierce in recent years.

Andrew Danzig Woodbridge