It seems to be my destiny to have a callus on my thumb. For years, it was the left thumb, and the callus was the result of playing the cello for three or four hours every day. This week, it’s the right thumb, and it came about when I decided to compile a list of 33.050 randomly generated names, representing the 33,050 genuine (and nameless, officially speaking…) people who in 2010 died as a result of a gunshot wound.
There was a time about ten years ago when I was a computer idiot—in fact, I had a theory that my own electric-magnetic field collided with any electronic device, especially computers. The moment, it seemed, I tried to use one, it crashed, almost always fatally. So it was a big event, the day I announced to Mr. Fernández and doña Taí that I had done a copy / paste. Their eyes rolled like a drunken sailor at sea.
Well, on a Mac laptop, the only or at least the best way to copy / paste is with the thumb. And the list, which took over ten hours to create, took massive copy / pasting.
So what did I learn from the experience?
Here goes, in random order:
· The list is in size 12 font (20 for the state), single space and occupies 724 pages.
· California has the most gun deaths—slightly above Texas, which has, however, ten million more people.
· There’s a huge range in mortality rate—lowest is Hawaii at 3.3, the highest in the fifty states (hear something coming up?) is Arizona at 20.3.
· Puerto Rico lo hace mejor is the official tourist slogan assures us, but if we do it better, we don’t do it the best. Yes, with a gun mortality rate of 24.3, we’re pretty high. But unbelievably, the US Virgin Islands has a gun mortality rate of 59.7.
“Why are you doing this,” asked John with genuine curiosity.
And it is bizarre. Look, it is statistically more dangerous to send your kid to sleep over in a friend’s house if the parents have a swimming pool as opposed to a gun. Death by gunshot is about number fifteen on the list of leading causes of death—more people die of pneumonia that gunshot, so why aren’t I out protesting against Staph aureus? As well, there are more suicides by gunshot than homicides—though death is death, no matter who pulls the trigger.
And though the attention always goes to the crazy people with semiautomatic weapons, the reality is that most deaths by gunshot occur by handguns—the very weapons that we are earnestly (and ineffectively) reassuring the NRA we would never, never even THINK about banning.
So why spend all this time and energy—reading thirty thousand names in public?
Is it that guns are such a potently masculine symbol? Am I still, at the age of 56, dealing with being a man?
Or is it the randomness of the act? But wait, most victims know their assailant, and anyway a Staph infection is also random.
If we were going to be honest, we would be forced to admit—seeking a ban on semiautomatic weapons probably isn’t going to do much good. Every gun fanatic has gotten his hands on one or more now, and it’s the handgun that kills more often. So really we should be talking about increasing mental health funding and figuring out a way to reduce handgun deaths.
“So why are you doing this,” asked my brother. And here’s my question—at the end of reading 30,000 names, will I have found the answer?
