COVID's Death Milestone And Mass Shootings: Is Mass Death The New Normal?

The number, once unthinkable, is now an irreversible reality in the United States — just like the persistent reality of gun violence that kills tens of thousands of people every year.Americans have always tolerated high rates of death and suffering — among certain segments of society. I think most Americans would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture about these pervasive issues,” says Lincoln, who adds that there is a similar “political vacuum” around COVID-19.The high numbers of deaths from COVID-19, guns and other causes are difficult to fathom and can start to feel like background noise, disconnected from the individuals whose lives were lost and the families whose lives were forever altered.With COVID-19, American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from a preventable cause. Gun violence has persisted as a public health crisis for decades,” she says, noting that an estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 will die.Gun violence is such a part of life in America now that we organize our lives around its inevitability. Do we just kind of live like this for the foreseeable future?”It’s important, she says, to ask what policies are being put forth by elected officials who have the power to “attend to the health and the well-being of their constituents.”“It’s remarkable how that responsibility has been sort of abdicated, is how I would describe it,” Rajan says.The level of concern about deaths often depends on context, says Rajiv Sethi, an economics professor at Barnard College who has written about both gun violence and COVID-19.