A Memorial to the Fallen

©2016 by John LaTorre

In Washington, D.C., there’s a memorial to those who died in the Vietnam War. Designed by Maya Lin, it features a long wall listing the names of those who died or were missing in action during that war.

There are over fifty-eight thousand names on the wall. The wall itself is in two segments forming an obtuse angle; the combined length of the two segments is nearly five hundred feet.

As Abraham Lincoln might have said, it is altogether fitting and proper to create this memorial to those who have fallen in defense of our liberty. I doubt that many readers would disagree with me here.

But here’s where those readers may part company with me. There are many others who have died in defense of our freedom who do not have their own memorial in our nation’s capital. They are the thousands of people who have died by gun violence.

Is this a stretch? Well, all proposals to limit the number of guns, or the people who have access to them, are bitterly resisted by the National Rifle Association and other gun-friendly organizations such as firearm manufacturers and dealers. These entities claim that any limitations of the Second Amendment of the American Constitution would be fatal to the intent of that document. In effect, they say, if a few thousand people or a few hundred thousand people have to die to make that happen, it’s a form of collateral damage that has to be accepted. To do otherwise would be to give up one of our cherished freedoms. And so the laws remain the same, and people continue to die as martyrs to the Second Amendment

Just how much collateral damage are we talking about? According to the FBI, there were over 455,000 homicides due to firearms in the forty years from 1974 to 2013. If you subtract about 7.5% of them as “justifiable homicides” (people killed by police officers in the performance of their duties, and by private citizens in self-defense), you’re left with over 421,000 people. (The vast majority of them were killed by handguns, rather than shotguns or long guns.)

I realize that some of these people would have been killed by other means if handguns weren’t readily available, by knives or blunt objects. But I would venture to say that more of them would have survived the attempt. And I am also beginning to realize that not a few of these “justifiable homicides” by police forces may actually be murders, but for the moment, let’s assume that these wouldn’t skew the figures too much.

Suicides are a troubling subset of the overall homicide rate, because it’s such a big subset … over sixty percent by some recent calculations, up from forty percent a half-century ago. Even the most conservative calculations indicate that, over the last forty years, roughly half of the homicides have been suicides. Admittedly, the argument has been made that they would have chosen some other way to die had they not had easy access to a firearm. But the statistics compiled by insurance companies don’t bear this out; they find a direct correlation between the frequency of suicide and the number of guns in the house. (When the Center for Disease Control published a study showing a similar trend twenty-some years ago, their funding for the study was cut off at the behest of the NRA.) In other words, when the convenience factor is taken away, people are more likely to think twice about suicide, and are more likely to survive a suicide attempt by other methods than by firearms. This correlation can be proved another way: in recent years, the number of murders by gunfire has gone down, but the number of people killed by guns has been holding steady. The increase in suicides accounts for the unchanged total, and this increase seems to parallel the increase in the number of guns in the general population.

So I would say that of the 200,000 or so people who have died by suicidal gunfire, half of them are likely to have been alive today if they had no access to guns. 

And it should be pointed out that not all of those people who died in Vietnam were combat fatalities. Ironically, the first name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall was not a combat fatality; he was shot and killed by another American soldier who had argued with him earlier that day.

If we wanted to build a wall to commemorate these innocents to gunfire, and if we copied the proportions of the Vietnam Memorial, we’d need a wall almost a mile long. That would be just enough for the present number of victims, plus a little space left over for the ones who have died since 2013.

I think that such a wall should be built. And I think it should be paid for by the National Rifle Association, and by the gun manufacturers and dealers, since it was really for the benefit of those agencies that these thousands died.

And if present trends continue, they’d better make it a lot longer than a mile.