When you have 10,009 people killed by guns and another 7,568 injured by shooting in just 88 days, whether the MAGAt Republicans admit it or not, you are in a war zone. And, as this report lays out, the negative psychological effects of that reality have become a major trend in this country. The data is irrefutable.
Gunshot wounded teenager on a stretcher
The regularity of mass shootings is razing Americans’ mental health—heightening stress and dulling compassion in ways that demand broader concern, engagement, and change.
As mass shootings repeatedly erupt in schools, grocery stores, and other establishments we visit every week, Americans are living in fear. For children and teens, whose mental health is already in crisis, the ongoing backdrop of violence is steadily eroding the sense of well-being, safety, and efficacy known to be essential for healthy development.
On top of recent surges in depression, anxiety, and suicides, a majority of teens now say they worry about a shooting happening at their school (Pew Research Center, 2018). Those concerns have been linked with elevated anxiety levels and fear among students (O’Brien, C., & Taku, K., Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 186, 2022). Meanwhile, clinical psychologists, including Erika Felix, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, say the young people they treat are on high alert, constantly planning their escape route if violence breaks out in […]
Here is more evidence about what I have come to see as the second effect of gun violence in the United States, one that is altering in a negative way the entire culture of American society. The gun violence issue is about guns. Today I have been listening to and reading Republican after Republican step in front of a microphone to say gun violence is not about guns it is about race, evil, transsexuality, education, yadda...yadda...yadda. It is all a Republican attempt to fog reality. Gun violence is about guns. Other countries have race issues, evil issues, education issues, transsexual issues, etc. But none of them have the kind of gun violence going on in the United States, where an average of 120 people a day die from being shot by guns. Why the difference? Because no other country has more guns than people, and easy access to military weapons designed to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
The trauma of gun violence doesn’t end when the shooting stops. Across the country, people from all walks of life have been impacted by this public health epidemic: in a national poll, 58 percent of adults reported that they or someone they care for have experienced gun violence in their lifetime.2 More people die from gun violence by early February in the United States than during an entire calendar year in other high-income countries.3 In addition, millions more in the United States are shot and wounded, threatened with a gun, or witness an act of gun violence in their lifetime.4 For this reason, Everytown for Gun Safety marks National Gun Violence Survivors Week annually in February.
Experiencing gun violence has lasting emotional, physical, legal, and financial impacts on survivors as well as their communities. The breadth and diversity of the survivor experience is directly related to the wide-ranging nature of America’s gun violence crisis. Gun violence can take many forms, including gun suicides and suicide […]
I wrote this essay because day after day as I do the research for SR I see reports on children not getting enough to eat, whole cities that are having water issues, and cities filled with what amount to homeless barrios of impoverished people. All of it screams to me that our values as a country are completely screwed up. Guns are more important to Americans, or at least American politicians and the corporations who rent them, than children. Our healthcare is verging on third world. Wealth inequality is medieval, with a wealth aristocracy, and a peasantry living paycheck to paycheck.
Food and water, are the two essentials for life itself. One might think that while food and water insecurity might be a problem in some third world country, like Afghanistan or Somalia, it could hardly be much of an issue in a country as rich as the United States. And yet, irrefutably, it is. And there is a linkage between food and water insecurity and scarcity and homelessness that needs to be much better understood. The basic processes I am going to describe are taking place all over the world; but here I am going to focus on the United States. According to a Gallup Organization 2019 study: “55% of Americans worry a great deal about hunger and homelessness.”1 That’s 183,700, 000 Americans, and matters have only gotten worse, as the numbers have gone up during the Covid Pandemic. Recognizing and under- standing the linkage between water and food insecurity and homeless- ness, I suggest, have become critically important to social wellbeing of American society. The president’s Council of Economic Advisers reported in 2019: “Due to decades of misguided and faulty policies, homelessness is a serious problem. Over half a million […]
Aaron Zitner, Reporter and Editor - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
By every measure I can find the American people are in a crisis that is creating two countries. Here is the latest rigorously done poll. The only common interest we seem to share is an interest in making money because it is the only thing that matters. A very sad business and I do not see how we go on like this.
To read and download the full research paper upon which this article is based see: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ_NORC_ToplineMarc_2023.pdf
Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans, a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds.
The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, also finds the country sharply divided by political party over social trends such as the push for racial diversity in businesses and the use of gender-neutral pronouns.
Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.
The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.
Bill McInturff, a pollster who worked on a previous Journal survey that measured these attitudesalong with NBC News, said […]
Lindsay Beyerstein, Editorial Board Member - AlterNet
Stephan:
I really don't see how a fertile woman can live comfortably in Idaho. This is a state where at least one hospital as a result of the laws Republicans in the state legislature have passed has simply stopped providing obstetrical care. This is a state where OB/GYN doctors are leaving in droves because they feel under threat. And now this. I certainly wouldn't want to be a woman who got pregnant in Idaho; my life could be at risk, and getting medical treatment if something went wrong might not be possible.
Idaho’s Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin speaks at a GOP campaign event on March 19, 2022 in Shelly, Idaho. McGeachin, who had received an endorsement from Donald Trump, is challenging the current governor Brad Little. If successful, McGeachin plans to stimulate Idaho’s economy by offering incentives for increased production of firearms and ammunition in Idaho. Credit: Natalie Behring / Getty
“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” exclaims a disgruntled philosopher in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The philosophers had banded together to protest the advancement of computer science, which they believed was imposing entirely too much clarity on the existential mysteries that gave them job.
The Idaho GOP and a coalition of antichoice groups in the state are taking a similar tack regarding the state’s murky and punitive abortion law.
This session, two Republican state legislators introduced a bill that would clarify key concepts in the state’s felony abortion ban. These include defining when an abortion is necessary to save the life of the pregnant person, and confirming once and for all that it’s […]
