The "official" death toll in Iraq/Afghanistan lurches toward 2,000 now, and people in the know (such as nurses at Landstuhl) say that it's already much, much higher than that. Estimates of civilian dead are all over the map, and indeed it's hard to figure out which leg goes with which torso, which arm, etc., after a shelling with a mortar, artillery, tank, or what have you. As a B-2 bomber pilot remarked, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Shit, they didn't even know we were coming. If you watch the tape, they're just shooting blindly up into the air. They didn't know when we were coming, and they didn't know when we left." Indeed.
But this isn't about Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran.
The pictures of the aftermath of a violent injury to anyone - [
Caution! Extremely graphic!]
the real pictures - would make some people violently ill, and that's a normal reaction to the unspeakable obscenity performed on a human body by pieces of metal, wood, concrete, or other people entering a human body at what, 100 mph? 500? 1000? It's the reason why soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen receive a purple heart no matter how small the injury: that spinning piece of jagged metal could have just as easily sliced your carotid artery or blinded you, instead of just leaving a scar that your grandchildren will want you to tell about.
But I know a place where the death rate is much, much higher than for all our troops in this shitty little war, or even Vietnam. It's called "America."
If you look at the FBI statistics for 2002, things were getting better in the mid to late 90s, and worsened almost immediately when Bush took over the reins, but then leveled off, and began to decrease ever so slightly.
Sadly, some of the stereotypes do hold true. It is Black males who are killed the most often, although not by much in sheer numbers. But homicide as a whole tends not to be one group on another. That is, while there are "incidents" between say, Hispanic and Black gangs, mostly it's Black-on-Black, White-on-White, Hispanic-on-Hispanic, etc. My guess is that it happens between the people you are most likely to hang out with or live close to.
The mean age group is 20-24, or about the same group most likely to kill themselves and passengers in a car "accident." If you make it to 25, you get a break on car insurance.
White men and Black men are killed in about the same number; White women and Black women about half as much.
You can just scroll down to read the tables on the cited FBI page in detail, but in the last decade or so, murders have ranged from 14,000 to 20,000, which would be more than 10 times our war casualties each year, every year. (Car crashes are even more deadly, but that's for another place.)
I'm not sure if we're the most murderous country per capita, but it doesn't take a genius to figure that we're the most steadily productive corpse generator in the Western world. Of course, I'm leaving out the incredible brutality between tribes in Africa, death and disfigurement by machete, etc. That's for another place.
My hometown holds about 20,000 people. Imagine driving down Main Street and trying to avoid the corpses on the pavement. They're everywhere; on porches, in living rooms, in bed, in the bars and restaurants, everyone dead, and mostly dead by gunshot wounds.
The "Homeland Security" thermometer would rise to 100, then pop, just like a cartoon. News crews would feature live stories while being kept in a "freedom zone" cage, while hazmat teams search for clues as to why the whole town went mad. Could it be like that French town that tripped out in the 1700's on some baker's hallucinogenic yeast? But of course, the cry of "terrorist bastards!" would fill the air, while the usual Rad Rights would decry the ingratitude and impugn the patriotism of those who might say, "well, let's wait until we get some evidence collected before we go attack someone." Like hitting Iran with tactical nukes.
But no; we're killing ourselves, or perhaps I should say each other, at a prodigious rate, and I just want to know why. What the fuck is wrong with us that we kill each other so much? Driving from Detroit to Ontario across the world's ugliest major bridge, you can feel the tension leave your shoulders. People are sane and sensible there. Driving 100 mph on the 401 is not legal, but it certainly is the de facto standard. Canadians certainly have guns, which they use for hunting deer, mainly. I don't believe there's an NRA equivalent in Canada. Maybe.
Canada has about 30,000,000 people, I've heard, and much - well, probably most - of their territory is too harsh for comfortable living. Toronto (or "Tronno") is a crowded city, people are pushing onward and upward, and yet, it's strangely peaceful. You don't need to smoke dope, because the American viciousness (Trump and Stewart; need I say more?) just isn't there, peeking under the edges of the psyche. So, what's different? A fundamental respect for human life? A belief in rational debate that fends off violence? Common courtesy that has somehow survived since the days of Mother England?
So, what's different here? We have much more stuff than we can use: food, cars, stereos, money (for some); just tons of stuff. We don't have to kill to survive, although killing could land you three squares and a cot for the rest of your life.
What to do? How do you stop 14,000,000 murders each year? Proposed solutions "vary widely," as they say. On the far left: ban all guns; if not all, then all assault weapons at least. On the far right: arm every citizen, because that clown is going to think twice before trying to rob Granny. And the definition of "assault weapon" is too fuzzy to be meaningful. Furthermore, the Constitution doesn't specify the type of weapon I can purchase, so if Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were to get ticked off, they could buy their own F-22's or MiG 25's and have at it.
I went through a "gun safety course" where I had to look at pictures of hunters who had tried doing stupid things like climbing a fence with a loaded gun. Stupidity meant they died when the gun discharged. I got my hunting license but never used it. The pictures didn't do it; I just didn't want to kill anything.
Why are we so quick to kill? The counter guy at my local BP station was killed over less than $100. The video camera taping the crime was in full view, and there were two eyewitnesses with an unobstructed view. The tape by the door gave his exact height. He took off in a lavender Continental sedan with gold "spinners." Not exactly an unobtrusive getaway car. A rational person wouldn't be so stupid, would he? This guy must have been nuts. But he wasn't, just stupid.
Do we kill out of stupidity? I'll bet a lot do, but far from the majority. Are these crimes of passion, and a gun just happened to be handy? I read that Gig Young had something like 50 guns stashed in "secret compartments" in his apartment, and about 600 rounds of ammo. Yup, there would always be a gun handy there, but it's pretty plain he was paranoid.
Are we nuts? Does it take mental imbalance to cause or enable one to murder? The insanity defense works very rarely, less than 1% of the time. A little above the Twinkie ® and "Beavis and Butthead" defenses. Almost every person who kills in this country is sane and rational. Yet murder is the most irrational thing I can think of. Murder destroys families, and causes untold suffering.
What about the most evil scenario, the murder planned in advance? Note that "premeditation" doesn't mean that you have to draw a map and meet with Lefty and Rocco the night before. In Florida, at least, it means you picked up a weapon, used some amount of time to understand that you meant to kill, then acted on that understanding. And we've all seen the husband kills wife or vice versa by slow poisoning in the tabloids or on junk TV. And of course, there's the wickedly naughty Hitchcock version of the little old lady who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, then served it up to the inspector and bobbie. It's okay to laugh; no one's done it for real (have they?). If we can laugh at the NAZI Sgt. Schultz in a POW camp, surely we can relax a little.
But why are we so quick to kill? People who go to church kill. Republicans kill. Apparently all races and creeds in the US kill. Could it be a Poisson distribution, where any other place is just as likely to be hit as another with each throw of the deadly dice? We would expect gang territory to contain a "violence cluster" of deaths and injuries, but what if it turned up in Long Island? By the way, Nassau and Suffolk county members: you're golden. Lowest crime rate in the nation. However, breast cancer rates for Jewish women there, huge. No one knows why.
I remember schoolyard fights, but no one was packin' heat. It was unthinkable, just not part of the known universe. Like a real Ferrari driving around our town, instead of just glistening on a magazine page. Drive-by's meant a real estate agent would take you slowly past a potential purchase.
Do you have an answer? I sure don't. I'm a homicide survivor.