Four, Fifteen, Fifty-Eight
Grief to Action: Families of children who were killed in the Newtown massacre arrive in Washington to push for stricter gun control laws. Image by getty images
One of the fundamental roles of a national government is to protect its citizens. The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution reflects that obligation when it describes power coming from “we the people” to a central authority that would “insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty…”
For five awful days in April, that obligation was put to the test in a way that highlights the unconscionable inconsistency in what we expect government to do and what we allow government to do. No government — certainly not the dysfunctional version we have in Washington these days — can ever protect all its citizens from harm. But Americans have grown particularly good at overemphasizing our need for protection in one area, and dramatically ignoring it in others.
This isn’t a theoretical exercise. Lives are at stake. Many of them.
In those five days, three people were killed by the bombs that tore through the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and a campus police officer was gunned down by the alleged terrorists; 170 were injured. During that same week, at least 15 people were killed by a fire and explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, and 200 injured. And in those same five days, at least 58 people were shot and killed by guns. That number comes from Joe Nocera’s excellent blog feature, The Gun Report, on the New York Times website, and relying as it does on news reports from around the country, it’s surely an undercount. Slate’s gun-death tracker, which is compiled by crowdsourcing, shows 76 deaths during the same time period.
Four. Fifteen. Fifty-eight.
The murderers in Boston were swiftly labeled terrorists and the search for them commandeered one of the nation’s oldest, proudest cities, shutting residents in their homes and shuttering most activity. If the aim of terrorism is social, political and economic disruption — well, Boston was terrorized. But we heard little grumbling, few accusations of heavy-handedness. Citizens complied with the extreme demands because they deemed them necessary to provide a common defence against another attack, and to insure a return to some sort of domestic tranquility, whatever that means in a post-Marathon world.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, many Americans have grown complacent about the encroachment of civil liberties, and ever-more demanding that terrorism be prevented wherever possible and severely punished when it happens.
But government’s role in “promoting the general welfare” in workplaces is a different matter. News reports suggest that the fertilizer plant that blew up April 17 and brought death and destruction to West, Texas was operating without sufficient government oversight and with little to no regard for its nearby residential neighbors. Bloomberg reported that the plant was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1985. According to Reuters, the plant was storing 270 tons of highly volatile ammonium nitrate fertilizer that should have been reported to the Department of Homeland Security but was not. The Texas Department of State Health Services was aware of the dangerous chemical but failed to alert DHS, the news agency reported.
The unrelenting pressure to deregulate and to starve the federal government of resources has resulted in fewer and fewer OSHA inspectors for the country’s workplaces. Union leaders and environmentalists warn that the Obama administration, while taking some steps in the right direction, has left thousands of high-risk plants exempt from enhanced safety regulations, with — not surprisingly — no help from Congress.
Why is the government failure to protect workers and homeowners any more acceptable than its failure to prevent potential terrorism?
And then there is the worst failure of all, the failure of Congress to pass even a timid fascimile of gun safety legislation that is supported by the vast majority of Americans. In blind fealty to the ruthless gun lobby, backed by a disingenuous reading of the Second Amendment, senators failed in their simple duty to secure the blessings of liberty. Read Nocera’s list of gun injuries and deaths. A few, just a handful, were the consequence of a homeowner or businessman attacking an intruder in self-defense. Far more were accidents, too many of which resulted in the injury or death of a child.
Fifty-eight — or perhaps 76 — deaths in five days; 3,665 Americans killed by guns since the Newtown massacre was supposed to galvanize the nation to finally treat gun abuse as the public health hazard it is. Why are the Tsarnaev brothers more dangerous than Adam Lanza, James Eagan Holmes, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and the other men whose names have become synonymous with a different kind of terror?
Most of the people who lost their lives in West, Texas were first responders racing into the inferno to rescue their neighbors. Would that federal lawmakers employed a fraction of that courage to help protect their fellow citizens as they are obliged to do in the Constitution that they frequently cite and too often ignore.
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