On Thanksgiving Day
2018, Americans couldn’t buy romaine lettuce because of a CDC recall linked to
an E. Coli outbreak.
But even though gun violence is so mundane that a shooting at a mall in Alabama Thursday
evening barely made national news, guns were still freely available at stores
like Walmart across the country.
The Centers for Disease
Control issued a food safety alert on Tuesday afternoon,
urging Americans to refrain from eating, and retailers from selling, any
romaine lettuce, “until we learn more about the outbreak.” Five people died from an E. coli outbreak in
June, and nearly two hundred people got sick.
Food safety is certainly
an important thing to get right, but the number of Americans who die from
foodborne illness every year — 3,000 according to the CDC — is dwarfed by
the 30,000-plus annual fatalities caused by guns
in America.
On Thanksgiving Day,
after the federal government had taken swift action to protect citizens from
pathogen-laden romaine leaves, one male teen suspect in a Birmingham, Alabama
mall allegedly shot and injured two others, including a
12-year-old girl. He was pursued by police, shot, and killed. Those were not
the only casualties caused by guns that day.
“In the United States
and elsewhere, acts of terrorism committed with firearms and other lethal means
have changed the way people live, work, travel, and play,” wrote the authors of a study on global gun
violence in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“In the United States,
armed guards patrol some schools, and some politicians have advocated allowing
teachers to carry guns. Although mass shootings and terrorist attacks are the
most visible form of gun violence, they account for only a small fraction of
the public health burden of firearm-related morbidity and mortality.”
Rep.-elect Lucy McBath
(D-GA) on Friday tweeted a thread on Friday in which she remembered her son who
was killed by a gun exactly six years before. She noted that because she was not
the only person to lose a loved one to gun violence that day, she will be
bringing her son’s legacy to Congress in order to fight for everyone to have
the “basic security of safety.”
While firearm ownership
within the context of a well-regulated militia is protected by the Constitution’s
Second Amendment and there is no constitutional protection for any vegetable,
much less lettuce, the Bill of Rights was written when slow-loading
muskets made the idea of a mass shooting an improbable nightmare.
The technological
upgrades in the almost 250 years since then have allowed carnage to unfold in
emergency rooms across the country.
Shortly after the 2018
election, the NRA picked a fight with the nation’s “self-important anti-gun
doctors” over gun violence, who they warned should “stay in their lane” and not
push for gun control.
Since then,
doctors have been tweeting back photos of the
aftermath of their work on gun violence victims in trauma rooms with hashtags
like “#thisisOURlane.”
Unfortunately, the
ability of the public health sector to study gun violence as a public health
issue has been hamstrung by the gun industry and
their conservative allies in government, who support bans on federally funded research on the
topic. Pathogens like E. coli, however, face no such resistance.