Some facts are conveniently ignored in the gun debate [sic]
Don’t Trust Your News Feed, part 1
Unless you do a little digging, it would be easy to believe that the United States is the gun death capital of the world. Clickbait headlines, news feed posts, and conversations based on emotion distract from the fact that the U.S. has the 32nd-highest rate of deaths from gun violence in the world: 3.96 deaths per 100,000 people.
In 2019, there were 37,200 reported deaths by firearm in the Land of the Free™. Is that 37,200 too many? Of course, it is. Is it comparable to, say, Guatemala, Venezuela, or El Salvador? I suppose that depends on your definition of “comparable,” but the rate per 100,000 in El Salvador is 36.78.
Don’t Trust Your News Feed, part 2
A small number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. can be chalked up to accidents, law enforcement incidents, and other undetermined circumstances. Roughly four in ten gun-related deaths are murders. Wait… what? Yep, when we get the numbers recited to us in the name of headlines and fear-mongering, a pretty important detail is always left out: 60 percent of annual gun-related deaths are suicides. About 24,000 per year — out of about 45,000 overall per year. Let that sink in.
Please allow me to address the statistical manipulation at work. If you subtract gun deaths related to suicide and accidents, the annual gun-related murder rate drops to about 13,000 per year. Is that 13,000 too many? Of course, it is. Is it anywhere near the death rates of cancer or heart disease? Nope.
Why are we fixated on guns when, for example, medical error is at least the third leading cause of death in the U.S. — taking anywhere from 250,000 to one million lives per year?
Fact: Doctors are far, far more dangerous than any AR-15.
A Culture in Crisis
If “we’re all in this together,” why do we patently ignore the rising suicide rate? While we squabble over which lives matter or not, suicide is now the twelfth leading cause of death in the U.S.
For those between the ages of 35 and 54, it is the fourth leading cause. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among individuals between 10 and 34. Suicides outnumber homicides in the U.S. by more than 2 to 1. Since 2001, the suicide rate in America has increased by 31 percent.
Gun control won’t stop this trend. Gene therapies disguised as vaccinations won’t protect us from a culture steeped in despair and division. Marches and protests remain as impotent as ever.
We like to pretend that “our way of life” is so exemplary. Meanwhile, more and more of us are choosing death over it.
The solutions must be more foundational and compassionate than the so-called debates we’ve been programmed to embrace.
Collectively, we are a culture in crisis and our problems run far deeper than the current discussions allow. It’s long overdue that we recognize the desperate imperative to do much more than “win” a Twitter debate.
Let’s choose to connect rather than compete.
Your concluding sentences are right on the mark.
From extensive and dismal experience arguing with gun control advocates, most are too wrapped up in panicky availability heuristics to grasp the suicide issue. Maybe they care on some level, but they always trope back to the same authoritarian responses. There's a lot of overlap between them and cruise missile liberals.
If we dismiss most politicians who don't do anything but talk and no action and collect massive wages, and dismiss all the doctors that have injected patients with poison, educating new ones with knowledge of food and herbal treatments, we would be way better off. We might have to wait until Musk has colonized a new planet though.