Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Can We Talk About Guns?

Three dead in a hospital emergency room in Chicago, the gunman a disturbed and disgruntled failed firefighter who legally purchased his weapon. He shoots his ex-girlfriend, an ER doctor, and then a police officer and a pharmacy intern.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the shooter the “face and a consequence of evil.” But that’s too easy. Not a lot is known as I write this, but as with other shootings saying it is the result of evil does nothing to help us understand why these things happen. Calling Juan Lopez, the shooter at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, evil — or calling Robert Bowers, who assassinated 11 in the Tree of Life Synagoge in Pittsburgh in October, evil — allows us to feel as though we have no responsibility, lets us off the hook for the underlying issues in play.

Consider that on the same day as the Chicago shooting, Nov. 19, one man was killed and four wounded in Denver by a shooting near Coors Field. A week earlier, in Globe, Ariz., three were killed by a gunman who entered a bar and opened fire. The next day, Tuesday, Nov. 20, police in Springfield, Ky., thwarted what they said could have been a mass shooting at a local factory.

Add Bowers and Gregory Bush, the alleged Kroger shooter who killed two and had allegedly attempted to enter an African American church, and it might seem like evil has consumed us.

It’s not evil, though. It’s guns. It’s guns and an inadequate mental health system. It’s guns and our continuing problems with domestic violence and abuse. It’s guns and white supremacy, and guns and crime, and guns and racism and the police.The causes behind American gun deaths are varied. But each case has a single common denominator: Guns.

During an average month in the United States, 96 people die and another 246 are injured by guns, according to the Brady Campaign (http://www.bradycampaign.org). This is far higher than nearly every industrialized nation.

As NPR reported last year, the countries that have the “top indicators of socioeconomic success — income per person and average education level, for instance” — tend to have the lowest rates of gun deaths. And while the United States ranks ninth by this measure, its rate of gun deaths dwarfs that of what might be considered its peer nations. At “3.85 deaths due to gun violence per 100,000 people in 2016,” the US gun death rate “was eight times higher than the rate in Canada, which had 0.48 deaths per 100,000 people — and 27 times higher than the one in Denmark, which had 0.14 deaths per 100,000.”

Guns are not the only cause — we have to address mental health, drug abuse and domestic violence, as well. But they are the common denominator. According to the Small Arms Study, a Swiss-based study, Americans own more guns per capita — 88 per 100 people, or 34 more guns per 100 people than Yemen.

And USA Today reports that half all guns in the United States are owned by just 3% of the people.

Addressing these numbers will not be easy. The pro-gun interpretation of the Second Amendment that protects as a right the notion of gun ownership, our history of romanticizing guns and the notion of self-defense, and numerous other factors have rendered considered debate nearly impossible.

But we have to have this debate. We have to talk about these numbers — both the number of gun deaths and the number of guns in circulation — and ask why they are so high. We have to ask why gun ownership is a right, whether there are limits to this right, and what those limits might be. Where do we drawn the line between what is protected and what is not?

Let’s start with the questions. Let’s get answers. And then we can move forward with reforms.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist from New Jersey. Find him online at medium.com/@newspoet41; tumblr at hankkalet.tumblr.com; Instagram @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; and Twitter @newspoet41 or @kaletjournalism. His email is hankkalet@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

Populist.com