Satire Essay On Gun Violence

NEVER AGAIN!

I am so tired of the sickly platitudes: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” And I am sick to death of the rationalizations: “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

On the other hand I am lucky: no one in my immediate family has been killed or maimed by a gunman. But I am far from complacent, because at this time and place in America, especially in a state with liberal gun laws like Pennsylvania, no one is truly safe from the threat of gun violence.

Thirty years of medical practice have brought me into close contact with the living victims of gun violence: young men languishing in LTACS or nursing homes, some on ventilators, quadriplegics in motorized wheelchairs operated with sip-and-puff controllers; mothers and grandmothers initially grieving and then deeply depressed and sickened over their loss. What I have to offer these victims is not much: antibiotics to treat recurrent infections, dressings to cover the inexorable emergence of pressure ulcers, antidepressants and anxiolytics to assuage the fear, the guilt, the anxiety and the abiding dysphoria that result from lives ruined by gun violence.

I can’t help but notice the convergence of two societal trends: the so-called opioid epidemic and the gun massacre crisis.

More Americans are killed annually from opioid overdose deaths or from gun violence than from car crashes, and this in a nation with a not-great record of automotive safety. Are we to conflate guns and opioids with automobiles? Yes, cars can kill people, but these are what we call accidents. Opioids can cause respiratory arrest and death, but these are “accidental” overdoses. What are we to call deaths at the hands of gunmen? “People killing people”, or “the lack of a good man with a gun negating the effect of a bad man with a

gun?”
No. Make no mistake. These are murders of the most heinous, devastating type. Murders by guns.
The opioid epidemic has led to broad-based efforts at stopping the senseless loss of lives through overdose deaths. Root cause blame has been aimed at physicians for injudicious prescribing, lawsuits have been filed against the pharmaceutical industry; and in response, a national effort at education for prescribers, Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) training has been in effect for several years with – perhaps – some small improvement in the numbers of prescription opioid overdose deaths. Yet, persons with Substance Use Disorder and, sometimes, their bystander friends continue to access lethal opioids through illegal, nonprescription sources, e.g., veterinary grade fentanyl, and they sometimes die at their own hands; opioids don’t kill people, opioid overdoses kill people.
Gun massacre is an evil of a VERY different type. Victims of gun violence, with the exception of suicides, never sought the bullets that killed or severely injured them. A gun delivered those bullets. A GUN, and too often, a semi-automatic assault rifle, a weapon of mass destruction designed for mass murder.
Where are the lawsuits against the NRA, the gun lobby, the politicians who support this carnage through failure to interpret the Second Amendment, meant to uphold the right to personal safety? Where is the call for risk evaluation and mitigation, i.e., laws prohibiting possession of WMDs?
The time for thoughts and prayers is past. It is time to act.