There were 32,637 suicides in the country in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available. That year, the collective homicidal mayhem caused by domestic abusers, violent criminals, gang fights, drug wars, break-ins, shootouts with cops, accidental gun discharges and cold, premeditated murder produced 18,538 deaths......He writes "Even the risk of terrorism doesn't begin to come close to the risk of suicide." The terrorist event in the United States most available to memory killed some 3000 people on 9/11. That was seven years ago, leading to an assumed risk of death by terrorism here of something over 400 per year.
Only a tiny fraction of the 400,000 suicide attempts that bring Americans into emergency rooms each year involve guns. But because guns are so lethal, 17,002 of all suicides in 2005 -- 52 percent -- involved people shooting themselves.
Why is it that the Bush administration has not declared a war on suicide rather than a war on terrorism?
2 comments:
Excellent question! I believe the answers is found in the defense spending budget. Afterall Bush won't get $500 plus billion to fight suicide. The same question can be asked regarding crime (which is also a much larger problem than terrorism).
Something that truly helps to put the 9/11 attacks in perspective with crime overall is that between 1965 and 2001, 64,246 Americans were murdered by other Americans in New York alone (Disaster Center, 2006). That constitutes an annual average of 2,471 Americans murdered every single year, by other Americans, in New York alone for the 26 years prior to and including 2001. When we compare this to the 2,752 people killed in the 9/11 attacks (Hirschkorn, 2003), it neither justifies nor minimizes the attacks; but it does put them in perspective. One conservative web site reports that “on average-there are close to 20,000 murders of innocent people in America each year” (Boycottliberalism.com, 2005). This may well be an accurate estimation. A more reliable source (U.S. Dept. Of Justice, 2006) reports that in 2005, there were 16,692 murders reported in America. This figure is up 3.4% from 2004. When one accounts for the unreported murders, the actual number may be close to 20,000 per year. The point to be made is that crime is an infinitely greater and more persistent challenge in America than terrorism.
Yet, on August 5, 2004, “President Bush signed a $417.5 billion defense appropriations bill for the fiscal year 2005,” with an additional $82 billion to supplement military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (this is relevant because we are supposedly in Afghanistan and Iraq to fight terrorism). Charles Pena (2005) argues that not only is this vast military spending “unnecessary,” it’s money misspent:
The military's role in the war on terrorism will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the Al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.
When one compares the $499.5 billion that Bush applies toward fighting terrorism with the $3.3 billion annual budget of the struggling New York City Police Department (NYPD), one sees a serious imbalance (Weissenstein, 2003). As we’ve already addressed, fighting crime in this country is an infinitely greater and persistent challenge than fighting terrorism is. Yet President Bush’s strategy is to spend a tremendous amount more on terrorism. But, is President Bush’s $500 billion solution working?
Thanks for the comment John!
It occurs to me that U.S. foreign policy can usually be seen as some kind of compromise between pragmatic self interest and idealism (American exceptionalism). While it seems clear that the Bush administration was trying to cloak its real objectives in going to war against Iraq under the guise of a patriotic war on terrorism and effort to advance democracy, I still find it hard to understand what Bush and company thought they would really accomplish with the war and occupation.
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