This post is part of a series “Healing in the Wake of Community Violence: Lessons from Newtown and Beyond,” based on an event of the same name hosted at Harvard Law School in April 2017. Background on the series and links to other blog posts are here.
By Wendy E. Parmet
No man is an island
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main
—John Donne, 1624
Like John Donne’s famous Meditation XVII, Newtown, Kim Snyder’s documentary about the aftermath of the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, forces us to reflect on the inter-connectedness of human life. As Newtown shows with power and poignancy, the victims of that awful massacre were not islands. They were a part of a continent comprised of their families, friends, community, and indeed, all who recall the awful day they were killed.
This inescapable reality, that our lives and deaths can affect and even traumatize others, is perhaps sufficient to proclaim that gun violence is a public health problem. None of the over 30,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence (most by suicide), are islands. Nor are any of the over 78,000 Americans who are injured by firearms. All are part of the continent. Gun violence affects us all.
But gun violence is a public health problem for another, equally important reason. As with other public health problems, from obesity to HIV/AIDS, the risk that individuals face with respect to firearms is influenced significantly by factors that lie outside their own control. This is not simply because the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre did nothing, and could do nothing, to cause their own death. It is also because different populations face different levels of risk. Race, age, income, gender, geography and a host of other variables determine one’s risk of dying or being injured by firearms. Read More
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