The late 1960’s saw the highest number of automobile fatalities since cars went on the road in the late 1800’s. Every year, as the number of fatalities increased year by year, the American public seemed lethargic about the loss of life.
Automobile manufacturers resisted calls to include safety standards in the industry, fearing the increased cost would turn customers away. But after years of fatalities soaring above 50,000 each year from 1967 – 1973, attitudes among both the public and the auto makers began to change.
You and I are the beneficiaries of those changes. We have seat belts, airbags, safety glass windshields, better gas tanks, state inspection standards, and fewer fatalities on the road. Our individual lives have increased in value, as we are far less likely to be maimed by or die from a car accident.
Likewise, we are the beneficiaries of a multitude of other advances that result in less damage to the population as a whole, and to us as individuals. Advances in the technology and medicine used by my retina specialist, for example, have allowed me to keep sight in both eyes after one was damaged by an occlusion and the other by a detached retina. His waiting room is filled day after day with people who need the same medicine for macular degeneration. Until a few years ago, neither the diagnostic imaging technology nor the medicine existed, and those situations resulted in blindness.
Less damage is being done to our vital organs by building materials, since lead pipes and asbestos insulation are slowly being eliminated. Less damage is being done to our breathing apparatus and our overall health, since the amount of smog and environmental toxicity has been steadily decreasing, thanks to massive efforts on the part of environmental activists. If you need surgery for anything, less damage will be done to your body these days by surgeons who have access to hundreds of advances in laser and robotic technology.
That is one of the ways I frame the present gun debate. How do we do less damage? It’s not the only frame of reference, but is an important way to look at gun control. Every year, if you remove the numbers who use a gun for suicide, over 80,000 people in our country die from gunshots (“Key gun violence statistics,” bradyunited.org). Multiply that figure times the number of family members, friends and communities left with a lifetime of loss, grief, and trauma.
Just as the generations before us worked to improve conditions that were causing too many people to die unnecessarily – think tenement housing conditions, the handling of hazardous materials, occupational safety codes, for example – current generations need to find ways to do less damage, so that the lives that come after us can be fuller, more complete, and of greater value.
In the present climate of citizen weaponry, no one is any safer than anyone else. Whether you own a gun or not, the amount of damage that can be done to you, to your family and friends, and to hundreds of thousands of other people by anyone with a gun who decides to use it, at random, anywhere, is beyond calculating. Every year, our chances of being a victim of gun violence increases.
We need to focus on how to create the same level of attention to the death and destruction currently resulting from guns that we used when we finally became willing to look at automobile safety, or environmental safety, or food safety, or disease control, or radiation safety. The focus needs to be on how to decrease the damage being done to our citizens – our family, our friends, ourselves. We are all in the crosshairs.
There is a foot on our necks at the moment: an administration that either cannot see the harm it is causing, or does not care. A concerted effort is being made to discredit facts and diminish the scientific knowledge base we rely on in such areas as medicine, technology, and environmental stewardship. Public education is being ridiculed. Industry standards for clean air and water are being removed. Trying to move forward seems impossible when we are being dragged backward.
In this era of people-damaging policies, guns are one of many topics that call out for us to find ways to do less damage. We could be working with boys living in fatherless homes (most of our mass shooters have belonged to this category), helping teenagers deal with serious mental health issues, or making innovations in education that help all children across the country. At the very least, we ought to be working to improve our own understanding of issues such as racism, immigration, and mass incarceration.
It’s all part of contributing to a timeless theme in human history: finding ways to do less and less damage to one another. You and I have a responsibility to build on that common legacy. As Robert Kennedy said, “The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”
