Maybe
you’ve heard about the “bullet fee” that was supposedly charged to the
families of prisoners executed by gunfire. The fee, which is almost
certainly an urban legend, has been attributed at various times to
Bolshevik revolutionaries and the governments of Iran and China.
But
even if the bullet fee is mythical, there is a very real price to be
paid when a society becomes intoxicated by gunplay. What price have we
paid for the bullets fired at Newtown and in the year since that
tragedy?
The financial estimates only scratch the surface.
The Cost
Researcher
Ted Miller
estimates the direct cost of intentional gun injuries at more than $8
billion per year, and the total societal cost at roughly $174 billion
per year. A more
focused study
that concentrated on medical costs concluded that gun injuries lead to
31,000 hospitalizations each year at an annual cost of approximately
$2.3 billion. More than 80 percent of that cost is
borne by the government through Medicaid and other public assistance programs.
And yet, with all the talk of deficit reduction in Washington, gun control never seems to come up.
Guns are certainly big business. As we
reported last year, “Firearms and ammunition sales rose 45 percent between 2009 and 2010 alone” and gun sales in some markets
soared after the Newtown shooting. The Blackstone Group hedge fund, source of anti-Social Security billionaire Pete Peterson’s wealth,
makes money from the gun business.
Cerberus
Capital, an investment fund, created something it called the “Freedom
Group” to invest in gun manufacturers. That investment became
politically toxic after the Newtown shooting, especially with large
institutional investors like teachers’ pension funds. But then, when you
name your fund after the two-headed dog that is said to guard the gates
of hell, you’re not exactly presenting yourself as a socially
responsible investor.
So far
they haven’t been able to sell it.
And where there’s money, there’s
lobbying. As the Sunlight Foundation reports,
more than half of
the new members of Congress elected last year received NRA funding. The
school shooting didn’t make politicians any more reluctant to attend
gun fundraisers.
People of the Gun
But
that doesn’t begin to get at the heart of the matter – or to the true
extent of the cost. To estimate that, we first need to understand: We
are the People of the Gun. We own more guns per capita than any other
nation on earth. Only Yemen comes close, and Yemenis reportedly have
an ambivalence about their guns that Americans don’t seem to share.
Our
love of the gun is as old as the nation itself. We needed our guns in
the beginning. The long-range accuracy of the Pennsylvania Rifles used
by colonists in the Revolutionary War contributed to a number of
victories against the Redcoats, who carried shorter-range Brown Bess
military muskets. Maybe that helped create the uniquely American algebra
that says that “Guns = freedom.”
A dispersed agrarian people made
up of homesteading farmers and ranchers needed guns – to protect the
livestock from wild animals and themselves from marauders and thieves.
Guns were a tool. We are a people who take pride in our tools, and in
our ability to use them. We take our quotidian tasks and make them sport
– and art, and adventure.
But then, as the railroads and
industrialists and combines began to steal the American dream away from
the farmers and ranchers, the cowboys and settlers, the gun became our
consolation prize, our sublimated revenge, a symbolic instrument of
power to distract us from the real power – the economic power – that had
been taken from us.
It has been a century since the United States
became an urban-majority country, according to the Census Bureau. When a
healthy need or desire lingers too long or gets out of control, it
becomes a fetish.
The Fantasy
The Second
Amendment crowd is misreading the amendment in whose name they struggle,
but they’re not wrong about everything. There
is a cultural
divide over guns. As one who has used guns recreationally off and on for
many years (mostly off in the year since Newtown), and who has lived in
the major capitals of the East and well outside them, I’ve seen that
divide firsthand.
It didn’t happen by accident. Urban Americans
were the first to experience the immediate and devastating impact of gun
violence. And with the passage of the Sullivan Law of 1911, the
“liberal elites” of New York State became the first Americans to live
under some form of gun control. They’ve lived that way for generations
now, and have never experienced the gun culture so common to other parts
of the country.
Much of the rest of the country is still living
out the pioneer fantasy forged in the 1800s – and that fantasy is still
fulfilling the same economic purpose: to distract them from the true
imbalances in power that rob them of agency and economic power. They may
not have money or a good job. But with a well-stocked gun cabinet they
can feel that personal power is, in the words of the Rolling Stones
song, “just a shot away.”
We’re not here to judge them, but there
is a through-line that reaches from their innermost fantasies to the
deaths of children in Newtown. We’ve all been programmed with internal
fantasies, with consequences we can dimly understand at best. But theirs
is an especially deadly fantasy. It fuels Tea Party rage with a violent
individualistic ethos that rejects collective action, even when that
action is in their own interest. And it prevents the kind of legislation
that could prevent future Newtowns.
The architects of this
particular fantasy have been constructing it inside our psyches for
generations. It was projected in the “spectacular” special effects of
Buffalo Bill’s sideshow, which included simulated prairie fires, a
sunset and the cyclone. It has flickered before our eyes at 64 frames
per second for nearly 100 years now, from ”Birth of a Nation” to cowboy
movies, from Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood to the more stylized and
nerd-friendly dogfights of ”Star Wars.”
Sure there’s a solution to your problems, pardner. It’s just a shot away.
The Price
On
my office wall is a framed photograph of Buffalo Bill and his troupe
given to my grandfather when he was a young boy attending Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West Show. The American strain runs in the blood.
What price
have we paid for the many bullets that have been fired in the year
since Newtown? To answer that we need to know: What’s the value of a
human life? What’s the cost to a society for allowing itself to be
distracted from decades of economic plunder? What’s the value of a
child’s lost future, which lies like some subatomic phenomenon in a
field of potentiality? Most of all: What does a society lose when it
values its children’s lives so cheaply?
As of this writing, one
year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
they are interrupting regularly scheduled programming to report on
another school shooting, at Arapahoe High School in Colorado. That’s
shouldn’t surprise anyone. We are the People of the Gun.
The cost of a bullet is the price of a fantasy paid in blood. Let’s hope it isn’t also paid with the price of our souls.
No comments:
Post a Comment