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CHAPTER 1
NOT IN THE STATS
The Collateral Damage of 393 Million Guns
ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE DIE from gun violence every day in the United States. Some fifty children and teens are shot each day. Nearly forty thousand people died at the barrels of revolvers and other firearms in 2017. Since 1979, more Americans have been killed by guns in our cities and towns than all service members slain on the battlefields of all our wars since 1775.
Three hundred and ninety-three million: that is the current estimate as to how many guns we have in the United States. That's more than one gun for every man, woman, and child. There are 120.5 guns for every hundred residents of the United States — almost twice the firearm ownership rate of the next-highest country, Yemen, with about 52 guns per hundred residents. In 2016, U.S. gun companies manufactured a record 11 million firearms, up from the approximate 6.5 million firearms manufactured in 2011. That is an estimated 69 percent increase in firearms manufactured in the United States within the last five years. We imported another 5.1 million firearms in 2016, a 30 percent increase from 2015.
The number of firearms in the United States has risen sharply (see figure 1). One needn't be a statistician to predict that in a few short years we will have a half billion guns in the country. Nor does it require clairvoyance to realize these vast numbers of firearms will inevitably result in more suicides, homicides, murder-suicides, suicides by cop, incidents of domestic violence, police shootings, school shootings, mall shootings, cases of children shooting children, accidental shootings, shootings during the commission of a crime, and gang-related shootings. What category am I missing?
Let's be clear: other than a starter pistol for track and field, most guns are made to kill. Gun aficionados may claim other exceptions, such as personalized shotguns for skeet shooting or other sport shooting firearms. But any gun can maim or kill when a human being becomes a target. Hundreds of millions of guns, capable of taking a human life in an instant, put our entire country at risk. If it is true that each gun is made to kill, these statistics suggest they are doing their job quite well.
A steady rise in suicides involving firearms has pushed the rate of gun deaths in the United States to its highest in more than twenty years. In 2017, according to new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 39,773 people in the United States lost their lives at the point of a gun. When adjusted for age fluctuations, "that represents a total of 12 deaths per 100,000 people — up from 10.1 in 2010. ... What that bare statistic represents in terms of human tragedy is most starkly reflected when set alongside those of other countries." According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that "compares with rates of 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people in Japan, 0.3 in the United Kingdom, 0.9 in Germany, and 2.1 in Canada."
Whenever there is a mass shooting in the United States, those who die get the headlines. But the family members, friends, and acquaintances left behind are long-term victims. Like a pebble dropped into a quiet pond, death ripples outward, expanding to the farthest shore. Those ripples reach not only dozens but hundreds and even thousands of others. For the rest of their lives, the survivors must deal with broken hearts. The deceased had parents, siblings, children, cousins, and aunts and uncles and grandparents who loved them. There are friends and business colleagues, church friends, neighbors, and the crew who met for bowling every Thursday night. Their lives will never be the same.
Death leaves a hole that can never be filled, even by a multitude of other relationships. Each victim was a valued member of a community. If she belonged to a church, the congregation knows where she sat. His Sunday school class is not the same anymore. If he coached a Little League baseball team or attended basketball camp or read to the visually impaired, or if she played in a band or chaired the board of a local nonprofit or was part of a book club: the loss of this person affects hundreds of people. The survivors cannot forget how one of their own was murdered. Office colleagues are reminded daily of the violence that took away one of their coworkers. Teachers remember the child who wanted to be a teacher or a doctor or a basketball player. When the one killed was the breadwinner for a household, the financial losses pile on top of the emotional ones. Survivors of each victim miss the one whose life was snuffed out, and they think about how the person died. And they often wonder if they might face a similar fate.
Guns, gunshots, and gun deaths are becoming a way of life for millions of us. You could write a book about each victim of gun violence — but you would have to write forty thousand books in one year. You could write a book that summarizes the stories of all these victims, outlining in its pages the life of each person killed by gun violence in one year. That would be a massive tome.
But here's the thing: those who are killed or maimed by guns aren't the only victims. We must confront not only the indiscriminate killing of infants, toddlers, youth, and adults but also the collateral damage in terms of the indescribable heartaches of the families and friends whose loved ones have been killed, injured, or simply shot at. The primary focus of Collateral Damageis the byproduct of living in the presence of 393 million guns. We must talk about those who died, and also about their loved ones and friends who face great trauma.
If you were a reporter investigating a nuclear meltdown, you would likely try to get to ground zero. You would go as close as possible to the scene of the atomic reactor and report on the devastation you'd find at the epicenter. But you'd also want to visit those living within a radius of several hundred miles. You'd want to report on the fallout for all those impacted by the explosion, whether near or close at hand. Some of the consequences of the fallout would be immediately visible; some might be invisible, at least for a time. When an area has been affected by a nuclear disaster, you don't assume only those killed were affected. You assume there has been collateral damage for everyone, near and far.
Collateral damage is "the unintended detrimental consequences of any action or decision." Living in a society with more guns than people is a bit like living in an area where there has been a nuclear meltdown: the damage extends for miles around and stretches out for years into the future. Far more civilians die on our own streets than soldiers in combat. Our nation is in disaster mode.
List of casualties
The collateral damage of gun violence begins when people purchase a firearm, believing that they can now protect themselves and their loved ones from dangerous people. These guns, purchased for protection, are the very ones that often take the lives of those whom the purchasers most wanted to protect. Reputable research reveals that a gun bought to protect one's home from intruders is twelve times more likely to be used, intentionally or by accident, against a family member or other member of the household than to be used to stop an intruder. That figure doesn't include other gun injuries or deaths, including suicides and criminal homicides involving stolen guns.
When one of God's children is killed, it is the end of that person's earthly life. Collateral damage is what happens next. Collateral damage is felt intensely by those closest to the victim. They face incalculable pain now that a precious loved one has been ripped away from their family circle and community. The loved one's place at the dinner table is now and forevermore an empty chair; their smile no longer lights up the room; they offer no more hugs and kisses; the tender "Good nights" are no more. We cannot place a monetary value on the loss of that one human life. It is beyond measure and beyond price. And while the victim's life may end in an instant, the victim's survivors will experience the loss forever. Yet these survivors of gun violence don't appear on any list of casualties.
Collateral damage also includes the profound sense of guilt that parents or caregivers feel when a loved one is assaulted or killed. They often repeatedly second-guess themselves. The questions keep recurring: "What could I have done differently?" "What if I had refused her permission to go to the party?" "Why didn't I tell him to come right home after the game?" Said one parent, "There are days when I struggle to get out of bed. It takes all my strength just to get up." As Claudius says to Gertrude in Hamlet, "When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions."
The death of a child has long-term, life-changing effects on parents. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology found that these effects include "more depressive symptoms, poorer well-being, and more health problems." Given the unbelievable emotional toll of losing a child to gun violence, the strength displayed by parents who are immediately thrust into the public eye, and who are henceforth known as "activists," is immense.
But not all activists survive. Jeremy Richman fought the good fight for six years after his beautiful first-grade daughter, Avielle, was murdered along with twenty other children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He and his wife established a foundation in their daughter's memory to promote research into the brain pathologies that lead to violence. Richman, a neuroscientist, was nationally known for his advocacy on mental health issues, and in 2015 he was given an appointment as a lecturer at Yale Medical School. But his psychological trauma was too great, and he took his own life in March 2019. He was forty-nine years old. How would you describe his early death? I must call it collateral damage.
Those present at shootings, whether injured or not, must live with some level of trauma and indescribable pain. At the one-year commemoration of the tragedy at Parkland, Florida, two high school students who survived the initial killing spree could no longer deal with their despair, and took their own lives. Not only our bodies but our minds bear the scars of confrontations with killing machines.
Pediatrician Dorothy Novick, in an editorial for the Washington Post, comments, "Therapies help enormously. Support from loved ones, grief counseling and teen support groups help enormously. But nothing can take away what has been seen, heard, and lost. Nothing can return a child's mind, heart and body to their original states."
One of my young friends, Colin Goddard, was shot four times in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. He fought valiantly for his life in intensive care for weeks and won the battle. He recovered to become a powerful messenger for sensible gun laws throughout the country. His body, however, carried four bullets that resulted in a severe case of lead poisoning ten years later. One of the bullets was lodged in his pelvis and required surgeons to break his hip to remove what was poisoning his blood. That meant another long and expensive period of recovery before Colin could walk normally again. He was shot ten years earlier, but the attack lingered on in his body as well as in his mind. More collateral damage.
Lisa Hamp, another survivor of that 2007 mass shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia, is preoccupied about her safety everywhere she goes. She consciously chooses which seat in a coffee shop or restaurant would provide the best escape route. Her eyes scan everyone around her in a crowd as she looks for unusual behavior, and she can hear a pin drop.
"There are thousands like me, as well as law enforcement officers and medics," she writes. "These people may think for a long time that they weren't affected because the media doesn't mention them. They may have escaped gun wounds, but the mental wounds run deep. They walk around wounded for months, sometimes years before realizing the impact the shooting has had on them. It's a long road to recovery for everyone. When is enough, enough?"
Children and youth may escape getting shot, but they cannot escape the lasting, poisonous effects of gun violence in their schools and neighborhoods. Nor can those living in many communities ignore the psychological trauma that comes from listening to gunshots in their neighborhood before they go to sleep at night or from hearing another story of an unarmed Black person being shot by police.
Epidemiologists tell us that the very presence of thousands of guns in a community has a detrimental effect on all its citizens. If there are guns around, sooner or later they will likely fire, on purpose or accidentally. The collateral damage will be immense and unmeasurable, and much of it will unfold over time.
We have known for some time that children and youth who live closest to acts of neighborhood violence have greater stress, longer bouts of depression, and a harder time learning than those who live in neighborhoods less plagued by gun violence. In Chicago, school choice policies enable students from many different neighborhoods to attend a single school. This prompted Julia Burdick-Will, a sociologist from Johns Hopkins University, to examine the effects of gun violence on students who live in a variety of neighborhoods. Her research revealed that any classmate's exposure to violence had a detrimental effect on everyone in the classroom, even those who lived a considerable distance away from the violence. Schools are increasingly recognizing trauma as a factor that derails the learning process to significant degrees. Such trauma enforces the idea for these young people that the world is not a safe place. The effects are cumulative. Some children have trouble eating, others spend a lot of time in nurses' offices complaining of stomachaches and headaches.
Still others know the collateral damage from guns without a shot ever being fired. The daughter of a colleague of mine was mugged and had her car stolen by a gun-wielding assailant when she was a college student. Fifteen years have passed, but nightmares regularly stalk her sleep, especially after a mass shooting anywhere in the country. She continually relives that awful moment when she was accosted and forced to look down the barrel of a gun that could easily have taken her life. What do you call such fear? I call it collateral damage.
The American Psychological Association continually warns parents that the gunfights, murders, and explosions that our children watch daily on television and in video games and movies have an adverse effect on them. Current scholarship verifies the link between violent media and the development of aggressive behavior in all age groups. The sheer number of guns in our country increases incivility, a trust in violence, fear, and anxiety.
Despair and thoughts and prayers
One of the most frightening things about all this collateral damage — from the immediate losses suffered by families of victims to the generalized damage to culture at large — is that there's no sign of it abating anytime soon. Our laws are designed to protect the sale of more guns rather than protect the safety of our people. No other developed country in the world permits such carnage. But unless our citizens demand a change, the collateral damage brought on by ever-increasing numbers of firearms will only multiply.
In decades past, the faith community has responded to that reality by giving in to despair — a temptation for many. Some shake their heads and say, "All we can do is pray." And as we lament the latest mass shooting, we timidly assure the victims' families that they are "in our thoughts and prayers."
Having been deeply involved with fainthearted churches for more than four decades, I know well that kind of despair. But as a Christian, I refuse to live in what John Bunyan, in The Pilgrim's Progress, called "the Slough of Despond." On our Christian journeys, each of us has spent some time in that awful place, but by the grace of God we do not have to stay there. God does not call us to acquiesce to the power of evil but gives us a spirit of power to do battle against the forces of evil in our world (see Ephesians 6:10-17).
Violence in any form is an affront to God and all that is good in any society. I say unequivocally: It is not God's will that one hundred of God's children are shot or killed every day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Collateral Damage"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Herald Press.
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