HOW MUCH DOES gun violence cost our country? It’s a question we’ve been looking into at Mother Jones ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 wounded and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims’ families need? What would be the effects on the broader community, and how far out would those costs ripple? As we’ve continued to investigate gun violence, one of our more startling discoveries is that nobody really knows…. [T]here is no definitive assessment of the costs for victims, their families, their employers, and the rest of us—including the major sums associated with criminal justice, long-term health care, and security and prevention. Our media is saturated with gun carnage practically 24/7. So why is the question of what we all pay for it barely part of the conversation?
It should be one of the biggest controversies in America today. Gun violence claims a ridiculous number of innocent Americans each and every year…and yet we know comparatively little about the details of and reasons for the carnage. Why? The simple answer is that the NRA and other Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © fear what might happen if detailed information on gun violence were to reach the masses. They carefully and diligently work to prevent the public from knowing the truth. Part of the reason is that Congress, because they’re too busy figuratively fellating the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun lobby, refuses to fund research on gun violence. Congress has made it illegal to use federal funds for this purpose…and so virtually nothing has been done to study the cost and associated impacts of the public health crisis that is gun violence. Private efforts haven’t gone far due to the significant cost of doing comprehensive research…and the NRA and the gun lobby count on enforced ignorance to stifle debate and thus allow the gun industry to continue profiting off tragedy and bloodshed.
You’d think that something costing each and every American on the order of $700/year would be cause for demanding research into ways to effectively address and reduce the carnage…and you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong…because the NRA and the gun lobby have a vested interest in blocking attempts to increase understanding of issues surrounding gun violence.
In an editorial in the April 7 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, a team of doctors wrote: “It does not matter whether we believe that guns kill people or that people kill people with guns—the result is the same: a public health crisis.”….
A top public health expert describes the chill this way: “Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”
No one researching heart disease, cancer, or HIV/AIDS risks running afoul of a lobby with a vested interest in keeping people scared and stupid. The federal government spends billions on research devoted to these and other public health issues. Gun violence is without a doubt a significant public health crisis, but Congress long ago caved to demands of the NRA and the gun lobby to stifle virtually any research into the costs, causes, and/or potentials means of effective addressing the crisis.
If you’re thinking this represents a very cynical and inhuman elevation of profits over people, you’ve nailed it. The gun industry cares about one thing and one thing only- profit. That profit too often comes at the expense of large numbers of innocent lives cut short…but to Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © it’s little more than a cost of doing business. You can do that when it’s other people burying their loved ones. It’s easy to view those who fall victim to gun violence as abstract concepts which don’t and shouldn’t have any impact on the business philosophy and/or practices of gun manufacturers.
It’s not about people; never has been and never will be…and that’s exactly the problem. When you implicitly believe in sacrificing lives (of other people’s loved ones) in pursuit of profit, you’ve lost any conceivable claim to humanity. You’ve become- by most conventional definitions- a sociopath.
