Of automobiles, guns and our children's lives

There are a lot of vexing and seemingly insoluble problems that confront elected leaders in 2023 North Carolina – problems with which states and nations across the globe are struggling.

• How can we manage rapid population and economic growth without wrecking our already sorely burdened natural environment beyond repair?
• How can we continue to grow good, high-paying jobs during a time in which the very nature of work seems to be changing by the day?
• How can we cope with the intense political and psychological pressures and conflicts that come with an increasingly crowded world that features mass, instant communication, and widespread misinformation?

The list goes on.

But then, happily, there are also problems for which doable and affordable solutions are readily available – solutions that enhance human wellbeing and freedom.

Consider the issue of motor vehicle deaths.

In 1969, in a nation of roughly 200 million people, 53,543 Americans were killed in car accidents. The fatality rate was a stunning 26.42 per 100,000 people.

The carnage was so horrific that leaders finally stepped in over a period of several years and passed laws to require safer cars, mandate seatbelt use and combat impaired driving.

The result: a sharp decline in auto fatalities. By 2019, the number of deaths had plunged to 36,355 in a nation of 328 million people. The fatality rate had dropped to 10.99 per 100,000 – still a sobering figure, but only around 40% of where it stood a half-century before.

As anyone who traverses the roads of North Carolina today knows, the current situation is not the byproduct of people being forced to sacrifice their freedom. If anything, average speeds, and daredevil driving have been on the rise in recent years and mobility is at an all-time high. Things could be made safer still.

All that said, it’s also clear that millions of people have been able to lead happy and healthy lives over the last few decades that would have otherwise been cut short because of the law and policy changes the nation adopted around auto safety.

Indeed, the success in curbing traffic deaths has been so striking that you’d think decision makers would see it as a testament to the power of intentional public solutions and a model for numerous other realms.

Unfortunately, and maddeningly, that has frequently not been the case.

Take firearm safety. As residents of the Triangle were reminded for the umpteenth horrific time last week when five-year-old Khloe Fennel of Durham was shot and killed, the nation’s gun violence crisis is almost the precise inverse mirror image of its auto safety situation.

During the years that auto accident deaths declined, gun violence deaths steadily rose. In 2021, the U.S. experienced a record number of gun murders and suicides (more than 47,000) – well over twice the level of a half-century prior.

And it’s no mystery why this happened. As we see on the road each day, people haven’t changed that much. What has changed, however, is that thanks to policies championed by the political right, Americans have accumulated more and more increasingly lethal guns. Polls indicate that a huge percentage of American children say they can obtain a loaded firearm in minutes or hours. It’s as if the nation had responded to the auto safety issue by allowing car companies to churn out nothing but hot rods with built-in beer taps and no seatbelts.

And so it goes in several other areas – particularly with respect to policies that impact our most vulnerable and innocent residents: children. As the 2023 Child Health Report Card released in April by researchers at the nonprofit NC Child serves to highlight, there are numerous doable, affordable, and proven strategies that North Carolina could employ to reduce child deaths and dramatically enhance child wellbeing.

Guns are on the list – the Report Card notes that child deaths from firearms in North Carolina soared by 40% between 2019 and 2021 – but that’s hardly the only subject where the state gets a failing grade.

North Carolina also received an “F” for its “birth outcomes” numbers, as well as its performance with respect to “school health,” “mental health” and “housing and economic security.”

None of these problems can be solved overnight, but as with auto safety, there are plenty of models out there with which states and nations have had great success over time – most that involve sustained investments in public solutions like expanding access to affordable healthcare and housing and employing more school nurses and counselors.

Unfortunately, as with gun safety (where our dreadful situation is the exception to the global norm), such solutions tend to run afoul of modern right-wing ideology. And so it is that our children continue to suffer and die unnecessarily.

The bottom line: The world can never be made a perfectly risk-free place for children (or adults). But we have it well within our power to make life vastly safer, better, and freer for millions by employing strategies and policies that have worked here and elsewhere for decades.

That politicians of the right continue to stand in the way is one of the great and inexplicable tragedies of our time.