Bullets and Ballots
The real health care crisis has yet to be addressed
2008-02-19
By Monroe Anderson
The tragedy at Northern Illinois University last week where 22 men and women were shot and six killed was news and no news at all. It was also a test to see which of the three major presidential contenders, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, had the political will to tackle one of our nation's greatest ills -– gun violence.
Nobody made the grade.
The campus shooting was the fourth separate mass shooting in the United States in 12 days. In that brief period, six died in a shooting spree at a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb; five died after a SWAT standoff in Los Angeles where a gunman killed three of his relatives and a police officer before the police killed him; and five women died in a Lane Bryant store in suburban Chicago after a botched robbery attempt.
In that brief 12-day period, a total of 19 citizens and three police officers were shot to death.
The first three of this month's four multiple murders were met with a curious code of silence from this year's leading presidential nomination contenders, but when a mentally-ill gunman opened fire on a group of innocent students in an NIU lecture hall on Valentine's Day, remaining mum became a challenge.
Sen. McCain managed to keep quiet, not even giving his name, rank or serial number in addressing the spate of mass shootings. The former prisoner of war, however, had let his actions speak louder than words the day before the NIU slaughter by voting against the senate bill which would have banned torture, particularly waterboarding.
The Arizona senator let his convictions cave to pressure from his party's extreme right. While McCain was the only senator-seeking-the-presidency who was unwilling to speak up, he wasn't the only one unwilling to take a stand.
Illinois Senator Obama went both ways, saying that while he respects the Second Amendment, there is no reason local governments can't initiate gun safety laws to deal with violence in their communities.
New York Senator Clinton did too. Like her Democratic challenger, she defended the right to bear arms while asserting that authorities must keep those arms out of the hands of "criminals, terrorists, gang member and people with mental health problems."
There's only one explanation for why their tongues are tied: the National Rifle Association.
If there is one lobbying organization a politician fears, it's the NRA. President Bill Clinton pushed a ban on assault rifles through Congress back in 1994. The NRA targeted the well-meaning Democrats. Nineteen of the 24 House members the NRA targeted lost their seats in 1994. A decade later the ban was allowed to expire. Any open discussion of gun control had expired long before then.
In the meantime, every day in America, 32 people are murdered with guns. A fourth of those daily deaths are black men between the ages of 15 and 24.
Gun violence is an epidemic in America. If there were eight Mad Cow cases diagnosed daily, the beef industry would find itself under fire. If 32 Americans died daily from bird flu, the nation's politicians would be in a panic to pass legislation that would tamp down the death toll. Thirty-two MRSA cases a day and there would be an outbreak of congressional hearings -– not silence.
Not counting the nearly 12,000 homicides in this nation annually, there are another 70,000 or so annual gunshot victims clogging up hospital emergency rooms from coast-to-coast.
We've got a national health crisis here.
The three presidential candidates stay on message as they engage in a debate over a national health care program. McCain pretends the private sector will take care of it. Clinton claims her universal health care program is the right prescription, while Obama argues that we must take care of the children while letting the adults decide if they want to take care of themselves.
As this war of words wages on all the way to November's general election between McCain and the eventual Democratic party nominee, some 52,000 more Americans will need medical treatment for gunshot wounds and another 9,000 will be shot dead.
Now that's a crime.
Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Follow his blog at http://www.monroeanderson.typepad.com/
