By Mark Mamerow
Originally Published August 18, 2020
Artwork by Micheal DiMilo
“Freedom Isn’t Free!” It’s a potent bumper sticker, conjuring up images of GIs slogging ashore through heavy machine gun fire at Normandy, saving our American freedoms from the fascists. Freedom sets America apart from other nations: freedom of thought and expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to worship, freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances. And that’s just the First Amendment! Freedom of thought is hardwired into the American political ad social system. It’s not an afterthought that was bolted on after assembly.
We take our freedoms seriously. But there’s another important sense in which “freedom” isn’t free. Our freedoms come with serious consequences and, at times, collateral damage. As a direct result of the unique personal freedoms of American citizens, the US is far and away the world leader in two dubious categories: gun massacres and COVID-19 deaths.
The most unique of American freedoms, written into the Bill of Rights and subsequently fleshed out by legislation and courts, is the virtually unfettered right to own and bear firearms. It took the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision to sever individual gun rights from our nation’s need for a “well regulated militia”. Not that it mattered! Americans have been buying and accumulating firearms at astonishing rates since the 1980s.
While gun ownership has held steady at 40-45% of households since the early 1970s, the sheer number of firearms floating around out there has increased astronomically. As of 2018, the 393 million civilian-owned guns in the US were enough to arm every person in the country, with 67 million guns left over! The US, home to 4% of world population, owns a staggering 46% of the world’s stock of civilian arms. (Statistics from Washington Post, June 19, 2018.)
What else is unique about America besides the number of guns? The sheer volume of mass shootings. No other country comes close to our continual barrage of multi-victim shootings. Since 2005, 651 Americans have died in mass shootings. From churches to shopping malls to concerts to theaters, there’s no longer a space safe from unexpected gun violence.
I won’t waste ink analyzing the root cause of those shootings. It’s clear to anyone who pays attention that the prevalence of guns in the US is the direct cause of our mass shooting problem. No other Western industrialized nation has our number of guns, and no other nation experiences even close to our level of gun massacre violence.
So, are we as Americans willing to take on the problem of mass gun violence? The answer is, pretty clearly, no. It would require us to greatly diminish that unique American freedom — the freedom to own and carry a gun. To cut down on massacres, we would need to impose strict limits on the number of guns in society. The casual gun owner as we know it would no longer exist. Heavy regulation or high taxation on so-called assault weapons would squeeze them out of the market. Hunters would need to register their weapons and possibly even store them in safe location not in their domicile… Does this sound like a set of rules that coud pass Congress in any universe that you’re familiar with? It doesn’t to me.
Similarly, with simple, direct government action, we could bring the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States to its knees. We could start with a strictly enforced, universal mask mandate. Next, as epidemiologists are calling for, we could institute a 6-week economic shutdown, similar to what what the US did in March and April, but this time not undermined by early reopenings. No bars, no restaurants, no movies, no recreational travel. It would be a massive economic hit.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t afford it. As the richest nation in the history of the world, we have the money to keep our citizens afloat through a shutdown. The US Treasury can currently borrow money for 10-year terms at a rate of .71% — less than one percent! We could shut down today and keep the economy afloat for weeks on our nation’s credit and tax revenues.
But I think we all know that another shutdown isn’t going to happen. Citizens are demanding their right to go to bars, restaurants, gyms, and soon, college football games. Our individual rights to commerce and recreation clearly overrides any need to stop the virus. As President Trump has stated repeatedly, and as we are apparently depending upon, “It will go away.”
In the cases of both COVID-19 and gun massacres, we have a clear path of simple and effective action open to us. But these are not paths of least resistance. They come with considerable collateral damage… There’s just no way that Americans will accept these curtailments of our freedoms.
“Find the cost of freedom,” goes the Stephen Stills song, “buried in the ground.” Those soaring harmonies tell our story. Our freedoms will continue to lead to dozens of gun massacre deaths per year, and a rate of 1000+ COVID-19 deaths per day, for the foreseeable future. The funny thing is, once you tote up the costs, you have to ask yourself. Is it really freedom? Or just another form of tyranny?