Gun violence has created a large-scale cycle of trauma and fear that’s damaging Americans’ mental health, making children fearful of going to school and adults of going to public places, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in announcing a public health crisis Tuesday.
Murthy’s report cites the mental health toll beyond direct victims in making the case to Congress to pass legislation to stop gun violence. Murthy pointed to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the 2022 law Congress passed after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, as evidence that lawmakers can work together on the issue. The law, signed by President Joe Biden, strengthened background checks and provided federal funding for mental health interventions.
Even so, “a deep sense of fear” now pervades American society, Murthy told POLITICO, tying it to high-profile mass shootings. “We think about where many of these mass shootings are taking place — in schools, at parades, at concerts, in houses of worship — these are part of the fundamental components of our day-to-day life.”
While mass-shooting deaths account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities, they play an outsize role in how safe Americans are feeling, Murthy said.
Easy and widespread access to guns plus no functioning mental (or otherwise) healthcare system is as lovely a combo as projectile vomiting plus explosive diarrhea.
You’re gonna have a bad time.
Plus socioeconomic inequality, racism, etc. fueling gang violence, which is a far larger part of gun violence and other violent crime than the “random” mass shooter.
While mass-shooting deaths account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities, they play an outsize role in how safe Americans are feeling, Murthy said.
Yeah, no shit. And this is even worse when you consider that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings–which are defined by the gov’t as four or more people shot (not necessarily killed), not including the shooter–are gang violence or ordinary crime (robbery, etc.). So the kind of mass shootings that people worry about are, statistically speaking, relative to the number of people that live in the US, *very, very rare. When you look at the kind of targeted, mass-casualty events that happen annually in the US, you’re looking at odds that are similar to winning a jackpot in the lottery.
It’s not that mass shootings are realistically a problem that most people will have to face, but people freak out about them because they’re on the news all the time–if it bleeds, it leads–and because it feels more random than, say, a serious car accident. Despite serious car accidents being more common by multiple orders of magnitude.
It’s fundamentally a perception issue.
Sorry, pocket comment.
