©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.
