Is an American Life Worth Less Than a Canadian Life?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/opinion/gun-deaths-suicide-cdc.html

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If the United States had the same rate of gun deaths as Canada, fewer than 8,000 Americans would have died from gunshots last year. If we had the same rate as Germany, about 3,000 would have died. And if we had the same rate as Britain, only about 1,000 Americans would have died.

Instead, almost 40,000 Americans died from guns last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported recently. Last year’s rate was the highest in more than 20 years.

The new data is a reminder that the United States doesn’t take public health — which is to say, the lives of its citizens — as seriously as almost any other affluent country. And that hasn’t always been the case.

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A generation ago, American roads were safer than the roads in Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe. Today, our rate of traffic fatalities is higher than in any of those places. We also tolerate a higher rate of infant mortality than many other countries. The most recent distinctly American public-health scourge is opioid abuse.

Global comparisons often focus on economic factors, like gross domestic product, unemployment or income. I think it’s time we paid more attention to the most fundamental measure of living standards: how long we live. By that measure, the United States is an outlier in the worst possible way. “The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation,” Betsy McKay of The Wall Street Journal has written.

Related: Time Magazine’s Mahita Gajanan explains that suicide deaths are driving the increase in gun deaths. German Lopez of Vox has more details on international gun-death comparisons. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne sees reason for optimism: “The results of the 2018 election will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the gun lobby’s power,” he writes. An example: Yesterday, the Trump administration officially banned bump stocks — a device that makes it easier to fire a semiautomatic weapon more rapidly.

The money trail. Yesterday was another bad day for President Trump, as a federal judge upbraided his former adviser Michael Flynn and the Trump family shut down its foundation amid a separate investigation.

If you’re trying to keep track of all these strands, Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg Opinion is one of the best writers to follow. He wrote a 2005 book that uncovered some of the shady dealings of Trump’s businesses — and enraged Trump.

“The breadth of investigations is so sweeping,” O’Brien wrote in a step-back column earlier this week, “that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention.” He also has a new column on the closing of the foundation.

For more on Flynn, see the Times Editorial Board.

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