The other night I was discussing the problem of gun-related deaths and violence with some friends. One declared that he saw no need for gun owners to have fifteen or fifty bullet magazine clips or high caliber long range sniper rifles. The other immediately asked, “How many domestic murders have involved sniper rifles or expensive specialty firearms?” Off-hand, none of us could think of any, although I’m certain that there must be some. Then we wondered about background checks… and something else struck me – the underlying issue behind much of what has polarized the political system.
It’s actually pretty simple… and appalling, and I’ll get to it in a bit, but first, a few observations in the way of background. Two generations ago or so, in the United States, there weren’t near as many abortions as there are now, for several reasons. First, abortion was essentially illegal, as well as morally condemned, and unwed motherhood disgraced both the mother and her family [not the father or his family, for some reason]. But there were a great number of “shotgun” weddings and “premature” births involving recently married couples. Likewise, despite the outbursts and spectacular recent killings, the murder rate is at fifty year low, but accidental deaths from guns tends to track the number of firearms in circulation. For all that, the rate of deaths from firearms in the U.S. is almost twenty times that of the average of other industrialized nations, and the reason is very simple. Most of them simply don’t allow the number and range of personal firearms that the U.S. does. With over 300 million firearms in private hands in the U.S., banning or eliminating them is a practical impossibility. So what else can be done to reduce gun deaths? Stricter background checks? The Newtown shooting wouldn’t have been stopped by that, nor by the checks most are proposing. Nor, most likely, would the Aurora theatre shooting . Far stricter standards would be necessary, standards at which most Americans would balk.
Now… add the issue of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. What has the far right up in arms is what they see as a denial of freedom, the fact that the goal of the ACA is to require everyone to have insurance. Without such insurance more than 30 million people will not have equal access to health care, and quite a number of them will die, or die earlier, from such lack of access [and the rest of us will pay for expensive partial care for those who don’t, but that’s another issue].
There’s a pattern here, and, as I said above, it’s pretty simple… and brutal. The freedom to have guns, to have abortions, and to refuse to require to insist everyone have health insurance – and for other “freedoms” as well – results in a far higher level of deaths in our society than would otherwise be the case.
To maintain the degree of freedom that we apparently insist upon means that we will incur, as a society, a great number of deaths that would not occur if we were less “free.” And the associated question that goes with that is whether those costs are willingly being paid by those who largely incur them – the poor, the uneducated, the innocent victims, often just bystanders, of shootings – or whether those costs are being foisted off on them by those who cite their need for “freedom,” because, like it or not, the freedom to bear arms or have an abortion, or not to have health insurance imposes costs, often in lives lost, on others. So does the “freedom” to hire part-time workers instead of full-timers.
In short, the price of these kinds of freedom is paid in blood, often the blood of innocents, and more often than the price is not paid by those who lobby and tout such freedoms, but by those who don’t have the advantages of those who insist on the need for those freedoms, yet I don’t see this argument being raised, except in the case of abortion. Why not in other matters? Aren’t the lives of those already born as valuable as those of the unborn? Either way, it’s a double standard that continues to go unrecognized.