Trade masks for body armor?
First news out of California this morning was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake rumbling off the coast about 10 miles south of Malibu Beach:
The fire department “completed a strategic 470 square-mile survey of the City of Los Angeles following the 4.2M earthquake near Malibu. No damage or injuries were reported and normal operational mode has resumed,” it said.
Relax, Southern California. Just another earthquake. Not another mass shooting. The latter will be along presently. You know, “normal operational mode.”
CNN reported on the epidemic mass shootings already this year:
The scenes of agony and horror are increasingly all too familiar in America. In fact, 39 mass shootings have taken place across the country in just the first three weeks of 2023, per the Gun Violence Archive.
Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling while others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.
“A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop.”
But how that happens with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.
As you can see from the graphic above, the reporting cannot keep up with the body count.
When people three years ago started dying of COVID-19 so fast that bodies had to be buried in mass graves and stored in refrigerated trailers, government authorities built field hospitals to handle flood of patients. They conscripted manufacturers to convert production lines to ventilators and protective gear for hospital staff strained to the breaking point. Government authorities and drug makers scrambled to develop and distribute a vaccine to stop the plague.
It helped. But 4,000 people per week are still dying.
There is no vaccine for stopping bullets. Health officials who nearly three years ago insisted people wear surgical masks to stop the spread of the plague might as well recommend we all don body armor now as protection. Maybe they’ll enlist manufacturers to convert production lines to plate armor and helmets.
We know what the “only a good guy with a gun” nuts will buy as protection. Never mind the unarmed hero who wrestled a MAC-10 away from the Monterey Park gunman last week.
Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people younger than 24 in the United States, according to a study published in the December 2022 edition of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2015 through 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18 in the US, according to a report from Everytown. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.
We are the United States of Insanity. Our collective lunacy is unique in the world:
It certainly doesn’t have to be this way. Countries that have introduced laws to reduce gun-related deaths have achieved significant changes, a previous, in-depth CNN analysis found:
Australia. Less than two weeks after Australia’s worst mass shooting, the federal government implemented a new program, banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns, and unifying gun owner licensing and registrations across the country. In the next 10 years gun deaths in Australia fell by more than 50%.
A 2010 study found the government’s 1997 buyback program – part of the overall reform – led to an average drop in firearm suicide rates of 74% in the five years that followed.
South Africa. Gun-related deaths almost halved over a 10-year-period after new gun legislation, the Firearms Control Act of 2000, went into force in July 2004. The new laws made it much more difficult to obtain a firearm.
New Zealand. Gun laws were swiftly amended after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Just 24 hours after the attack, in which 51 people were killed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the law would change.
New Zealand’s parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country’s gun laws less than a month later, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
Britain tightened its gun laws and banned most private handgun ownership after a mass shooting in 1996, a move that saw gun deaths drop by almost a quarter over a decade.
But America’s gun culture is a global outlier. For now, the deadly cycle of violence seems destined to continue.
So for those of us who don’t want to add to the problem by strapping on a sidearm or strutting around with a military-grade rifle as though we live in Mogadishu, it’s body armor, isn’t it?