The Coronavirus of Gun Violence

Thursday, March 5, 2020

One popular website seems to have accelerated its rate of pop-up ads. On March 2, for instance, two brief squares flipped up with an unintended warning. “Adopt a child. You’ll never guess the rewards.” / “70 percent of children know where the guns in their house are hidden.”

This collage prompted several questions. I am wondering, for instance, if the survey investigated a role reversal that would generate an outlier asterisk, i.e., one tenth of one percent of parents don’t know where their children have hidden their guns. They don’t even know, in fact, that their children have guns. Instead, their heart-to-heart conversations include asking their offspring for suggestions about where to cache the parents’ ammunition.

As fears of the coronavirus pandemic have exponentially accelerated, one wonders why there is not a proportionate response to gun violence, which is far more likely to kill a person in her or his prime. Instead, we have courts and corporations declaring that the “original intent” of the “Founding Fathers” was the creation and maintenance of a Mortality Casino in which the house odds give you a better chance of survival at the flu table than at the Second Amendment table.

The “panic” about this pandemic is in part a distraction mechanism. The political reality is that the people in charge of corporate healthcare are primarily worried about an image virus. If hospitals were in the United States overwhelmed, and stories got out about people being billed and going bankrupt during the course of this outbreak, then it might in unexpected ways fuel the “Medicare for All” movement. The test Trump faces is one of delaying any subversion of the image of American health care as anything less than fully capable. Otherwise, don’t kid yourself. Your life remains an object on the sniper range of gun production profits, and this “crisis” in public health is merely a convenient smoke screen.