Column: It's time to reject the American cult of violence

Content warning: This article contains mention of death and drug use. 

One in 25 American five-year-olds won’t make it to 40, a death rate four times that of most of our peer countries.

America’s life expectancy is considerably lower than that of most of Europe and the global North. In 2020, global life expectancy fell across the globe, however, the U.S. is the only developed country where life expectancy decreased even if you don't count deaths from COVID-19.

Nearly 50,000 Americans are killed in acts of gun violence each year; an additional 42,000 are killed in traffic incidents; 7,500 of which are pedestrians, the highest mark in 40 years; another 80,000 die from opioid overdoses each year. Some researchers estimate more than 45,000 unhoused Americans die every year from a range of causes and others estimate that 68,000 Americans die because of causes related to lacking health insurance. 

The scale of this loss is staggering. Imagine filling the Dean Dome with the corpses of those who were killed in traffic this year. You’d run out of seats before you got halfway through their bodies. 

These deaths are preventable. They’re a policy failure. They’re choices being made by people to maintain the level of carnage, either because it is financially profitable, because they think it is worth it or because making the required changes would just be too much work. 

We don’t need to accept it — the solutions are there. In most cases, they're blindingly obvious. 

We know this because the U.K. has a firearm-related death rate of 0.23 per 100,000 people, 46 times lower than the American rate of 10.72.

We know this because Sweden, after implementing their Vision Zero “safe systems approach” to traffic violence, cut their traffic death rate to just 2.8 per 100,000 people, while America’s is 13.8 and rising as speed is prioritized over safety.

We know that opioid overdoses are preventable because Narcan is 93 percent effective and could be readily available in every building in the country. Naloxone, the generic version of the drug, costs just five cents to make.

We know this because the federal government built 33,000 housing units in just seven years under FDR.

We know this because universal health care would save the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars and the U.K., a country with a GDP per capita lower than Alabama, has managed to afford it.

Over the last few years, UNC has lost students, faculty and staff to gun violence, suicide, traffic casualties and drugs. These are our friends, our coworkers, teachers and loved ones. They had hopes and dreams that will never come true, ideas that would never be developed and wisdom that would never be shared.

It could be you, it could be me, it could be the person you bump into in the line at Lenoir, or the friend you make in class next week. You should be sad, but you should also be angry — we live in one of the most privileged places in the country. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t protect those we’ve lost and it won’t protect you either. 

In the media, we tend to talk about these things either too abstractly or too narrowly, an individual pedestrian death is a tragedy and 42,000 traffic deaths are just a number. We don’t talk about the way each crash is an inevitability because the road design encourages speeding and our cars have steadily gotten bigger.

It is utterly absurd to be living in one of the wealthiest societies in the history of the world and have a life expectancy lower than Albania, the poorest country in Europe with an average income of just $19,000. The American cult of violence is built on our complacency. There are no more excuses, no more “costs of doing business” or “tragic accidents.” We can stem the tide and build a safer, stronger and healthier society if we choose to do so.

@samadran

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com