Our New Normal

On this day, May 29, 2023 we Americans observe Memorial Day, the day we honor the men and women of our armed services who gave their lives in the service of our country. It is right and just that we do this. We must never forget them and their sacrifice. 

During my childhood, my family had a tradition of visiting the graves of our deceased family members on Memorial Day, whether they were veterans or not. It was right and just that we did that too.

Last Memorial Day came directly on the heels of the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine, inspiring me to dedicate my last Memorial Day post to "the people who through no fault of their own, get caught up in war." I then went on to liken Ukrainians and civilians in war zones all over the world, killed while going about their everyday lives, to people in this country going about their daily lives who are killed in gun violence. 

It is also right and just to do this.

Because perhaps every Memorial Day from now on, we will be reminded of two specific days of infamy in our own country, the anniversaries of two American massacres that occurred just before the holiday last year, to be exact: May 14, 2022, at a Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo, New York, and May 24, 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

Yet another truly horrifying and repulsive thing is this: in our day there are more mass shootings in the United States in one year than there are days in a year, so one can mark the anniversary of a mass shooting practically every day of the year. Worse still, the number of mass shooting victims is a small fraction of the total number of victims of gun violence in this country.

In 2022, according to the web site The Trace, 20,138 gun deaths, (not including suicides), occurred in the United States. That number was a slight decrease from the previous record-setting year.

Now consider this: inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, there are 58,318 names of all the U.S. service men and women who either died or were MIA during that conflict which for us lasted between 1955 and 1975. 

You do the math.

This is our new normal. There are so many gun tragedies in our country that unless they are particularly horrific in terms of the number or age of the victims, or the reasons why they were killed, we hardly notice anymore.

It's tempting to find a single culprit for these horrible statistics, but there are many. According to this Wikipedia chart which is quite out of date, for every 100 people in the United States, there were 120 guns.  That number is significantly higher today. Number two on the list is Serbia with a paltry 37.2 guns for every 100 people followed by Canada, with 34.7 guns for every 100 people, and Finland with 32.4.  If you remove the U.S. from that equation, it is obvious that the number of guns per person in a country, does not necessarily correlate with a high gun-murder rate.

The countries with the highest gun-murder rates in the world are concentrated in one geographical area, Central America and parts of South America, with Venezuela and El Salvador far and away leading the pack with 36.75 and 36.34 gun related deaths per 100,000 people respectively, according to a recent web site from World Popluation Review. According to that site, those numbers are attributable to "the prevalence of criminal gangs and a vibrant drug trafficking industry." In El Salvador, at least according to the older Wikipedia list, there were only 5.8 guns per 100 people in 2015. By contrast, Serbia, Finland and Canada all with about seven times the number of guns-per-capita, had 4.8, 2.9 and 2.3 gun-=murders per 100K people respectively.

From the World Population Review list, the United States experienced 10.89 firearm related deaths per 100K in the past year, a rate comparable to those of Uruguay, Paraguay and Panama.

If one only looks at these numbers, gun rights advocates have a point when they say limiting the number of guns available to the general public is not going to eliminate gun violence.

But what do we make of the off-the-charts number of guns in this country? Remember, there are almost four times as many guns-per-capita in the States than in Serbia, the country second place in that category the world.

My take is that with all those guns available, it is stupid easy to get your hands on one in this country, be you a responsible gun owner, a run-of-the-mill criminal, or a sociopath. And with few meaningful restrictions on the sale, manufacture, possession and the carrying of firearms in many U.S. states, and even more lax restrictions on the way, it's only going to become more stupidly easy in the future. 

True, the U.S. is not in the top twenty in the world in terms of gun-murder rate, it's number 22, according to the WPR list. That's hardly a bragging right.

But as far as public mass shootings go, along with per-capita gun ownership, we are in a class all by ourselves. 

The connection may be purely anecdotal, but I don't think so. Gun rights activists claim other culprits for the preponderance of mass shootings in this country, mental health being number one. 

I don't buy it. As far as I know, there are people with mental health issues everywhere in the world, not just in the States. I'm not even convinced that all perpetrators of mass shootings are indeed mentally ill. There are certainly millions of people in this country and elsewhere with mental health issues who would not harm anyone, let alone commit mass murder. I'm all in on making mental health a priority in this nation. But the emphasis on mental illness being a major cause of violence is no more than a smokescreen from the issue of gun legislation and an excuse to stigmatize and marginalize yet another group of people. 

Regardless, the one thing we have that nobody else does here in the good ol' U.S.A., along with a mass shooting or two every day, is unfettered access to guns. 

What IS sick are politicians looking for gun lobby money and a few extra votes, people who could make a difference to save at least some lives, wearing lapel pins in the likeness of AR-15 assault rifles, the preferred weapon of mass shooters. 

What a slap in the face to the people who lost loved ones to those weapons of mass destruction. 

They may as well piss on the graves of our fallen soldiers, seamen, airmen and women. I have no doubt that in exchange for money and a vote or two, they would do just that.