Update:
Tomorrow, April 23, 2013, will be Gun 9-11 Day in the United States. This is the day of the year, every year, when gun-related deaths in our country equal or exceed the number of victims in the September 11, 2001 attacks. This Slate website has been keeping count.
The post that follows was originally posted on December 14. Politically, nothing much has changed since then. The gun-fetish lobby controls the money and the conversation.
In light of the Boston bombings and shootings, maybe the FBI should take another look at the trip that the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre took to that hotbed of Caucasian antipathy to the U.S. government: the state of Texas. LaPierre might have been radicalized there.
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With much sadness I propose a new national day of observance — I call it “Gun 9-11 Day.” This is the day of the year on which U.S. citizens with guns kill the same number of people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The number who died that day is 2,977. Here is a chart of U.S. homicides caused by guns, for the years 2003-2010*:
The solid gray portion of the columns represent the number of people who died as a result of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.** The total height of the columns indicate the number of people murdered by gun-bearing, terror-causing United States citizens.
Gun 9-11 Day in the United States usually occurs around April 9th. That’s right. That is the day of the year, every year, when there are more victims of gun-related murders in the U.S. than were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2010, Gun 9-11 Day was April 19th. We are not powerless to move this date.
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In Bangladesh earlier today, a building that housed several garment factories collapsed, killing at least 70 people, according to The New York Times. Cracks in the structure had been noticed the day before, but workers were ordered to report anyway.
In November, a fire at another Bangladesh garment factory took the lives of 111 people.
Many if not most of these workers were making the minimum wage of 21 cents an hour. The website for the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (whose headquarters are in Pittsburgh) reports that this is the lowest hourly wage in the world, even less than Pakistan’s 37 cents, China’s 93 cents, and Guatemala’s $1.21.
These workers were so desperate to survive that they were willing to work in death traps for 21 cents an hour. Walmart, by comparison, makes a profit of $2.6 million per hour, every hour of the day. Clothing sales account for 13% of Walmart’s income.
It has been said before (what hasn’t been) but many of the cheap things we buy in America are not cheap at all — it just means that someone else is paying the price, either in terms of environmental damage, resource depletion, poor health or even loss of life. We don’t take advantage of other people’s productivity as much as we do their desperation.
In our addiction to cheap, Walmart may be the pusher but we are the users. This is on us. What you do about it is up to you.