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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Fewer American children died over recent decades, due to everything from Obamacare to medical breakthroughs to targeted investing in families with children, but that changed with the pandemic.
However, Covid itself wasn’t to blame.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accelerating death rates for children and teens actually started the year prior to the pandemic driven by firearm injuries, drug overdoses, and car accidents.
If they lived in Africa or other poverty-stricken areas, scarcity of nutritious food and medical aid would lead the list. Or, if today they are unfortunate enough to live in Gaza, the West Bank, or southern Lebanon – the effects of American-supplied wars.
The difference is that in the United States, the top causes are mostly preventable through political policy. Policies that not only has our government chosen not to pursue but has taken positions that aggravate the underlying reasons.
While 15 years ago, headlines bemoaned preventable midlife problems – diabetes and heart disease, depression, opioids and alcohol – that were limiting life expectancy, survival rates for the young kept improving, with better prenatal and neonatal care, widespread vaccinations, and programs promoting improved safety protocols from bicycle helmets to swimming lessons.
A decade later, child and teen mortality spiked 10% in a single year.
Not from Covid and other deadly diseases but from car accidents (16%), murder (39%) and the doubling of fatal overdoses, primarily from the drug cartels lacing product with fentanyl.
With the rise of social media and cyberbullying in the wake of the Great Recession, adolescent suicides spiked 62% by 2021.
Guns are the epicenter, accounting for half the increase. And the recent cartel-style killing of an insurance CEO may only encourage more mayhem.
Homicides climbed as Covid uncertainty drove a rise in firearms sales and restrictions on access fell.
From 2019 to 2021, 18 and under gun deaths shot up 50%. The numbers of Blacks killed by firearms was five times that for Whites and Hispanics, twelve times that for Asian Americans.
Over six thousand children and teens were shot in 2023, over 1,500 died.
Two young boys in northern California are in critical condition after yet another school shooting. Prayers will never be enough.
But what lies beneath these outrageous statistics?
Partisan politics.
When thirty years ago, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies exposed the rising risk of guns to minors, the National Rifle Association pushed Congress to ban the CDC from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” Funding was cut off and the children of America have suffered the consequences ever since.
Every American leader has overtly or covertly supported the expansion of the U.S. armaments industry that not only spreads death and destruction overseas and contributes to the proliferation of killer weapons here at home, but it also glorifies shoot-em-ups on TV, legitimizes murder and desensitizes people to its horror.
Profits make perfect: The $28 billion gun industry relentlessly promotes the fantasy of the American gunslinger achieving heroic stature by defending his wife and his property from evildoers.
Violence begets violence.
The proliferation of right-to-carry laws has increased violent crime by 20% and, more importantly, increased firearm thefts by 50%, ballooning street availability to the unlicensed and unlicensable.
More than a million weapons were reported stolen in the past five years, pouring easily more than double that into the black market given criminals won’t and even legitimate owners fear punishment for not adequately safekeeping their firearms.
The mass purchasing of weapons during the pandemic has augmented both availability and the pool of untrained and unlicensed people with weapons.
Rightwing judges keep expanding the right to buy and use arms including indiscriminate sales to testosterone-addled teens.
Too often the public health system reacts to personal outrage, not statistics, to prioritize its goals.
Gun deaths? As long as it’s not in your neighborhood or family, blame others and pray.
Drug abuse? My kids? Never!
Meanwhile dad tipples to get through his day while mom indulges in too many martini lunches and both cap off the day with a few brewskies to take the edge off dealing with keeping up with the Joneses.
Accidents? It’s always the other guy’s fault.
We live in a perpetually anxious society. Of loneliness, exhaustion, and stress. We are facing public health crises, international hostilities, and existential terrors such as the escalating threats of bird flu and climate change over which we feel we have no control.
If it’s bad for adults, how much worse it must be for the children?
Kids will always experiment but drug and alcohol use and abuse is driven by despair, bullying, and lack of credible parental guidance and support as well as other addressable issues. If the weight of the government and society is thrown against it.
Americans are dying of illnesses related to alcohol at roughly twice the rate of 25 years ago.
Combine kids, cocktails and cars and that is a perfect trifecta for death and dismemberment.
Teens have always had an urge to speed but, as seatbelt and other laws proved, enforcement of regulations and safety features can make a huge difference. If vehicles are better made and maintained and tax-dollars invested in improving and maintaining roads…
If rules about distractions are strictly enforced for both teen drivers with friends and parents with youngsters in the back seat, multi-taskers on cellphones or shaving or sick and tired, accidents can be avoided.
We don’t want Big Brother micromanaging every aspect of our lives – where’s the joy in that or even the opportunity to learn from mistakes?
But the American people need to insist that its government put their children first and sharply rein in the power of the armaments industry, learning from the many countries that suffer a fraction of our gun deaths.
Encourage a shift to positivity in entertainment and the news spin. Not blissful ignorance but the actions people take on the way to a happier and more fulfilling life.
As communities, we must rally round to protect the innocent from bullying and abuse.
We need to teach better parenting skills, and engage communal involvement to fill the cracks in the social fabric left by nuclear family mobility and the demise of the original multi-generational model, creating families of choice to rebuild those benefits.
Yes, this will take heroic efforts for generations but if we don’t commit urgently – right now – to determinedly taking that path, we are committing our children to a violent and desperately unhappy future.
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
