Trump and Biden Remind Us America Is Still in Denial Over Guns and COVID

Joe Biden, who was just diagnosed with COVID-19, said a couple weeks ago that he “ended the pandemic.” The same week that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump nearly had his ear blown off by an AR-15, people were giving one away for free outside the Republican National Convention. This is the kind of stuff that made ancient people believe in vengeful gods who punished the hubris of mankind.

COVID-19 emergency department visits are on the rise, and an estimated 17 million adults are struggling with long COVID, while the CDC notes that COVID-19 killed more people in 2022 than strokes or chronic respiratory diseases. Now the President of the United Staes has COVID and is boarding pressurized cabins with other people without wearing a mask. Some end to the pandemic, huh.

The Gun Violence Archive noted there were 72 mass shootings in the month of June, bringing the total for this year to 261 mass shootings. Saying that a mass shooting is just another day in America is factually incorrect, as America is actually averaging 1.4 mass shootings per day through June. This data doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the more anodyne and common gun violence that serves as the background noise to American life.

The United States of America is really good at ignoring systemic crises, and gun violence and the prevalence of a potentially deadly disease we have all just sort of accepted as a normal facet of life may be the two best examples of our astonishing ability to compartmentalize this country’s madness.

Unfortunately, as far as reality is concerned, we can try to memory-hole this stuff as much as we want, but as perhaps the two most famous people in the country have proven in the last week, we cannot run from these problems. COVID is still coursing through the populace, infecting people left and right and creating still relatively unknown long-term damage and leaving some with utterly debilitating symptoms in the wake of supposedly being cured. Letting a disease run through the populace and mutate on its own creates new variants and is a gamble that could lead to a more resistant strain down the line too.

In perhaps the starkest example of this country’s boundless depravity, the American Association of Pediatrics notes that the leading cause of death for children in the United States now is gun violence. Suicide is the most common form of gun death, and in 2021, the most recent year for which complete data was available in Pew’s study from last year, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the United States, and at the start of this year, we were still losing roughly 2,500 people a week to COVID. Our apathy is literally killing us.

Americans generally view ourselves as impenetrable and invincible mavericks discovering mankind’s frontier. We like to believe the normal rules that govern the rest of the world don’t apply to us because we’re so special, but no human alive can outrun a bullet, nor see a virus with the naked eye. We are immensely vulnerable to the repercussions of our own naivete, and the last week reminded us all that if the last two presidents are not safe from gun violence and COVID, then no one is.