The other pandemic

This is what greeted me at the One Stop Market when I went to pick up the paper this morning.  It’s what’s called in the newspaper business a “banner headline,” which is to say, a headline that runs margin to margin across the top of the paper.  You know why the New York Times a ran banner headline this morning?  Because someone woke up.  Maybe it was the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet.  Maybe it was the national editor.  Maybe it was the weekend editor, in charge of the Saturday and Sunday newspapers.  But someone at the New York Times woke up and realized that gun violence in this country is a pandemic that needs to be covered in this way, with banner headlines that emphasize the size and seriousness of the problem. 

Read the box below the headline and you get a hint of the reason why.  The Times, using figures from the Gun Violence Archive, says there have been 11 mass murders so far this year, “mass murders” being defined as an incident where four or more victims are killed.  The list begins with the latest mass murder in Indianapolis on April 15 with eight dead and goes through the familiar killings in Atlanta (eight dead), Boulder (10 dead), down to the first mass murder of the year in Evanston, Illinois, where five were killed on January 9.

There were others, in Rock Hill, South Carolina; Allen, Texas; Orange, California; Essex, Maryland; Muskogee, Oklahoma; and two more in Indianapolis.  Sixty-four killed by 11 shooters in the first 107 days of 2021.

What the Times does not tell you in its Page One box is how many mass shootings there have been this year.  That number, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured, is 148.

Going back to 2020, the numbers are worse.  There were more than 600 mass shootings last year.  The year before, there were 417 mass shootings.  The year before that, there were 337.  The numbers keep going up.  We are on track for another year with 600 or more mass shootings this year if things keep going the way they’re going so far.

The number of people killed by firearms in incidents that were not suicides is even worse:  Over 19,000 killed last year; 15,208 in 2019; 14,798 in 2018; 5,473 so far this year.  That indicates 22,000 Americans will die of gun violence unrelated to suicide this year if the killings keep up.

The New York Times could have run a banner headline any time they wanted last year, or the year before that, or the year before that.  They could have run a banner headline because of mass murders, or mass shootings, or for the total number of deaths due to gun violence. They could have run a banner headline reading: “Congress Dithers as Gun Manufacturers Profit and People Die,” and it would have been as accurate as the one they ran this morning.

The dictionary defines “pandemic” as a disease prevalent over a whole country or the world. By any measure, gun violence in this country is a pandemic of major proportions.  But it’s an old pandemic. It is a disease we have brought on ourselves.  It didn’t come from another country, like COVID or SARS or any of the other recent pandemics that have ravaged the world.  It’s entirely home-grown.  We manufacture the guns – not all of them, but by far the largest number of them – and we buy the guns and we shoot the guns and kill each other. 

Gun sales set a record last year.  More than 17 million background checks were conducted in 2020 on sales of nearly 40 million guns.  More than five million people bought guns for the first time, according to a so-called “trade group” called the National Shooting Sports Foundation.  This year, four million guns were sold in January alone.  More than four million background checks were conducted in March, indicating as many as eight million firearms were probably sold that month. 

I’ve done this before.  Less than a month ago I ran down a list of statistics for deaths by gun violence and gun sales and all the rest of it.  I could do it every month this year.  If I had a newspaper rather than a mere newsletter, I could probably run a banner headline a month and not be exaggerating the problem of guns in America.

I grew up around guns.  I was trained to use guns safely and shoot them as a boy, and I was trained again in the same way in the Army.  But that puts me in a minority in this country.  I saw a figure the other day that less than 40 percent of gun owners have had any training in safety or shooting of firearms.  That means there are a whole lot of guns owned by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing with them.  We see stories about this all the time – the three year old in a Walmart who pulled a loaded handgun from her mother’s purse and shot and killed her.  The three year old who picked up a loaded gun lying around the house and killed his 18 month old brother.  Both of those guns were owned by adults who either didn’t know anything about gun safety or didn’t care about it.  Two more statistics for the Gun Violence Archive.  Two more deaths in the pandemic of gun violence we have been enduring for decades.

You want to talk about American exceptionalism?  We are exceptionally violent, exceptionally stupid, and exceptionally dead.