Many people say that guns are bad for Americans’ health

I really dislike the “many people are saying” rhetorical meme, especially because it’s used to such ill effect so often by a former president running for president.

The thing that they are supposedly saying is often wrong, but he can tout one conspiracy theory or another by claiming it as simply the common wisdom. “A lot of people are saying they had spies in my campaign,” he said of Democratic operatives back in 2018, and yet never turned anyone up who filled that bill. But if they had, “it would make any political event, ever, look like small potatoes.”

Uh-huh.

And I really, really dislike most any dictum at all issuing from the Chinese government, a mendacious dictatorship built on thought control the likes of which a former president with totalitarian tendencies can only dream.

So it hurts that a painful joke the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made last year hits so close to home.

“Many people are saying,” the ministry said in a release, “it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the U.S.”

I had seen that quote before, but it doubly hit home when I read the statistics surrounding it in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times by David Wallace-Wells.

Headlined “Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?,” the column begins with the shattering news that the land of the free, home of the brave is suffering an unprecedented plunge in relative life expectancy in recent years, after many previous decades of improvement.

Our numbers used to be in the pack with “our wealthy peers” around the globe, he writes.

Now, American life expectancy is below those in Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka and Algeria — though it is still just ahead of Panama, Turkey and Lebanon.

Drug overdose deaths and ill health in our big nation’s vast poverty belts are big parts of the grim statistics. In 2020, the last year numbers were available, for instance, there were about 5,800 drug overdose deaths in the European Union, population 440 million. In the U.S., population 330 million in 2022, the number was 107,000.

But for someone like me, who finds our dangerously commonplace gun ownership incomprehensible and the result of a deliberate misreading of the Second Amendment, the real gut punch is in the numbers that show how we are simply shooting our friends, enemies, family members and selves to death.

Wallace-Wells shows how our average life expectancy is just getting murdered: “there are 22 times as many gun-related homicides in the United States as in the countries of the European Union,” he writes. “Between 2019 and 2021, total U.S. gun deaths — including suicides and accidents — grew 23 percent, to 48,830 such deaths in 2021.” About 7,000 European Union residents a year die at the barrel of a gun. Some 15% of their gun deaths are homicides; 43% of ours are.

I realize that for many Americans, guns are a hobby, involving target shooting and hunting. We have too many deer out there, and lots of hunger — fire away, if your aim is good. But if my hobby, surfing, killed tens of thousands of people a year, I might look for something safer — rock climbing, maybe, or skateboarding.

And I realize that, er, many people own guns because it makes them feel safer, conveniently ignoring the tragic statistics showing that having guns in the house is much more likely to end up in a shot loved one than a shot bad guy.

The numbers just make me mourn for the missing countrymen who should still be here. Can someone run for president with the campaign slogan: “Make Americans live again”?

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.