Idiot America

"Grudgingly, we learn to live our lives with the specter of gun violence hanging over us everywhere — when we walk into a Walmart, when we send our children to school, when we worship. Each time tragedy strikes, it feels both inevitable and completely avoidable."

"When we worship"

When morons suck up to their Magic Jeebus Man with their moron friends.

"gun violence hanging over us"

Mike Bloomberg was going to fix the problem but the fucktard Democrats didn't vote for him because billionaires make them cry.

Here is the entire New York Times article. It's about Idiot America.

Opinion

Open States, Lots of Guns. America Is Paying a Heavy Price for Freedom.

This country seems resigned to preventable firearm deaths. It appears that the same is starting to happen with fatalities from the pandemic.

By Charlie Warzel
Opinion Writer at Large

May 5, 2020

The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying.

I first saw it on Twitter. “Someone poke holes in this scenario,” a tweet from Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, read. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”

This hit me like a ton of bricks because of just how plausible it seemed. The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus. And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?

Such loss of life is hard to comprehend when it’s not happening in front of your own two eyes. Add to it that humans are adaptable creatures, no matter how nightmarish the scenario, and it seems understandable that our outrage would dull over time. Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale, we get used to it.

There’s also a national precedent for Mr. Nelson’s hypothetical: America’s response to gun violence and school shootings.

As a country, we seem resigned to preventable firearm deaths. Each year, 36,000 Americans are killed by guns — roughly 100 per day, most from suicide, according to data from the Giffords Law Center. Similarly, the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund calculates that there have been 583 “incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2013. In the first eight months of 2019, there were at least 38 mass shootings, The Times reported. Last August, 53 Americans died in mass shootings — at work, at bars, while shopping with their children.

Some of these tragedies make national headlines; many don’t. The bigger school shootings and hate-crime massacres can ignite genuine moral outrage and revive familiar debates: over safe storage practices, gun show loopholes, red flag laws, bump stocks, comprehensive background checks, stringent licensing systems and, of course, the accessibility of endlessly customizable semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s.

In every case, the death tolls climb but we fail to act. There are occasional marches and protests but mostly we continue on with our lives.

Changing our gun laws is politically untenable, we’re told. Gun lobbies are too strong and politicians’ hands are tied. Rather than address the root of the problem, we flounder to work around it, which is how we end up with high schools with hiding places and curved corridors to “reduce a gunman’s range.” Grudgingly, we learn to live our lives with the specter of gun violence hanging over us everywhere — when we walk into a Walmart, when we send our children to school, when we worship. Each time tragedy strikes, it feels both inevitable and completely avoidable.

The coronavirus pandemic and gun violence are by no means perfectly analogous calamities. The federal government, which has the power to pass stricter gun laws, has more limited powers to control states’ public health responses to Covid-19. And while other countries have curtailed gun violence, most are struggling to contain the virus.

But unlike many Western and Asian countries that are moving slowly to reopen and telling their citizens hard truths about the months ahead, the United States seems fixated on returning to normal, despite warnings from public health experts that it is too soon. As with gun violence, the data medical professionals and governments are relying on during the pandemic is piecemeal. And, as with gun violence, we throw up our hands and deem it intractable.

The federal government could have moved swiftly like some in Europe to “freeze” the economy and commit to paying at least part of workers’ salaries if their companies don’t lay them off. Instead, our economic stimulus has been scattershot and underwhelming. And the Trump administration has largely pushed responsibility onto states, offering an amorphous plan for reopening barely rooted in reality of our testing and tracing capacities. Rather than provide cautious guidance to states, President Trump has encouraged far-right protests to pressure governors in political battleground states like Michigan.

Left to their own devices, states are opening up — many anxiously and with little idea as to how it’ll play out. The White House could lean on governors to slow the reopening process or urge caution until we can fully establish test and trace strategies that have worked in countries like South Korea.

Instead, the administration seems to be cheering on the reopening while internally preparing for a substantial increase of loss of lives. An internal document based on modeling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by The Times projects that the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, a 70 percent increase from the May 1 number of about 1,750.

Along the same lines, on April 30, the day after Mr. Trump told Americans the virus was “going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated,” NBC News reported that the federal government had recently ordered more than 100,000 body bags. Mr. Trump has since predicted that the death toll from Covid-19 could be as high as double his earlier estimate, but that hasn’t stopped the administration from encouraging reopening.

Last summer, before touring the sites of two mass shootings that killed 31 people in 24 hours, Mr. Trump argued that there was “no political appetite” for a ban on assault weapons, though a majority of Americans support one.

Those remarks bear resemblance to the president’s March comments that the coronavirus lockdowns were perhaps too onerous and that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” His “LIBERATE” tweets in support of the lockdown protesters suggested a similar lack of appetite to do the hard thing, even as national polls revealed that Americans are deeply concerned about their safety and worried about reopening.

For Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and Brown University professor who works on gun violence prevention, the dynamics of the lockdown protesters are familiar.

“This group has moved the reopening debate from a conversation about health and science to a conversation about liberty,” Dr. Ranney told me. “They’ve redefined the debate so it’s no longer about weighing risks and benefits and instead it’s this politicized narrative. It’s like taking a nuanced conversation about gun injury and turning it into an argument about gun rights. It shuts the conversation down.”

“Most of us in firearm injury prevention are not trying to ban guns, but the debate gets twisted by a small group of fringe extremists,” she added. “Most gun owners are smart and responsible and safety-conscious — just like most Americans want to do what’s right for public health. But the small minority dominates the conversation.”

As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms. But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.

This idea of freedom is also an excuse to serve one’s self before others and a shield to hide from responsibility. In the gun rights fight, that freedom manifests in firearms falling into unstable hands. During a pandemic, that freedom manifests in rejections of masks, despite evidence to suggest they protect both the wearers and the people around them. It manifests in a rejection of public health by those who don’t believe their actions affect others.

In this narrow worldview, freedom has a price, in the form of an “acceptable” number of human lives lost. It’s a price that will be calculated and then set by a select few. The rest of us merely pay it.

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Charlie Warzel, a New York Times Opinion writer at large, covers technology, media, politics and online extremism. He welcomes your tips and feedback: charlie.warzel@nytimes.com | @cwarzel

A version of this article appears in print on May 6, 2020, Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Will We Get Used to the Dying?.

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