There’s Something Missing in the Public Health Discussion About Gun Violence.

I have just finished rereading the remarkable book by Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, which was published in 1972 and correctly predicted our Vietnam collapse the following year. Fitzgerald’s thesis is that we failed in Vietnam because we tried to take our definition for government and apply it to a country whose political culture was not only wholly different but had been developed and solidified over several thousand (not hundred) years.

I believe that a variation on Fitzgerald’s argument happens to explain our inability to do anything tangible to reduce what has become an endemic condition called gun violence which has cost us between 30,000 and 40,000 lives each year for the past thirty or more years.

And it also should be noted that since we have no idea how many people each year survive a gunshot wound but in many cases then experience a shortened lifespan, our understanding of the true dimensions of this problem is what Grandpa would call ‘nisht tachlis’ (read: not understood.)

One of the few things we do know about gun violence is that blacks are victims of fatal shootings ten times more frequently than whites. In fact, for all the talk about how the United States has a violent crime rate which is 7 to 20 times higher than any other OECD…