Price Me

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American Values

I begin this entry by asking how much is human life worth?  Okay, maybe you're saying this is an impossible question to answer.  Life itself is an invaluable, unquantifiable, mysterious, miracle full of potential most of which goes untapped no matter how hard we try.  There is no way that we can we put a price tag on it.  You may feel that the mere suggestion that there is a finite value on life to which currency can be assigned is an insult to God and humankind alike.  But there are others who may dwell on that question a bit longer and begin to assign value to individual functions of human life that may be have concrete dollar worth.  Certainly the professional labor has worth that can be added up over the duration of our careers.  We gain equity through the acquisition of real estate and some of us hope to turn profits on investments in stocks and such.  Certainly the successful bearing and rearing of children that grow to contribute to society has its own dollar worth if you had to think about it.  However, that doesn’t begin to account for all that life is but to the extent that that question can be answered, perhaps these are some ways to think about it and come up with some sort of thoughtful answer.  Still the question is absurd.  Or is it?

Once upon a time we didn’t think so.   In fact throughout human history there have been price tags placed on human beings most explicitly through chattel slavery.  I remind you that in this land it existed for at least 400 years during our colonial and antebellum periods and we’re just one hundred and fifty years removed from that system.  The pricing was pretty cut and dry.  It boiled down to age, gender, physical fitness, ability and maybe in some small way, intelligence to the extent that a relatively bright negro [sic] was an asset and not a threat.  Potential buyers made an offer for a slave based how well they believed that slave could satisfy the needs of his plantation, other business or home and that was it.  That’s what African-American life was worth then. 

Crude? Yes. Cruel? Certainly.  Inhumane? Undoubtedly and let's be clear that I am beyond glad that those times are far behind us.  There are many elements of current American life that I feel blessed to enjoy.  However, I argue that in absence of a numerical value assigned to human life, we have lost all respect for the fact that there is worth there.  So I ask again how much?  But to answer the question, I pose this as a guide: How much does it cost to end life?

I’m not referring to the repercussions of ending life e.g. imprisonment for murder or wrongful death suits.  I am focusing on the act of killing through the most efficient means we have devised yet—guns.  That, my friends has an answer and for the sake of simplicity I’m going to avoid the issue of assault weapons that certain members of Congress are rightly seeking to ban again.  So let’s look at the perfectly legal purchase of handguns.  Firearmspriceguide.com tells me that an all black 9mm Glock with plastic grips, should cost $300 without the ammo.   The ammo—a box of fifty brass rounds--can be bought for as low as $13.00 on luckygunner.com.  As we know, it only takes one bullet to kill so we’ll say that in this instance the price of one human being’s life is a mere $313.25.  That is a semi-automatic, however.  Maybe one wants to kill old school style—not too fancy.  Our fellow citizen entitled to his/her freedoms can purchase a Smith & Wesson 1903 Six-Shot Revolver for $250 and end a life cheaper than he/she could purchase the new iphone 5 for instance.  These are market prices, they only get cheaper when sold second hand at gun shows, or legally out of the backs of trucks in rural and southern states and on the black market in our urban streets.  There in certain areas of our inner cities, one can access a handgun more easily than he can purchase LeBron James’s new sneakers—see the problem there? Buy cheap gun.  Be willing to kill for expensive shoes.  This is one version of crude, cruel and inhumane 21^st century style.

If human life is so invaluable, I ask why is it so cheap to take?  More to my point, I ask, how much should it cost to potentially take a life?  We impulsive humans aren’t so deterred by consequences when desperate and irrational.  The cost can't be felt most acutely in response to the deed.  It needs to be immediate. 
Allow me, if you will, to present this base pricing system:  In the last days of slavery in the United States, the average slave was “worth” $1,658.   Adjusted for inflation in today’s market that is $24,012.43.  In most cases in slaveholding states, if a white citizen were to murder that slave and be proven to have just cause for doing so, he’d still owe the owner the full value of the slave and maybe even additional damages depending on the case.   Of course I am not suggesting that a pay off is in any way admirable or appropriate for taking one’s life but what about a more sizable pay up front—ahead of the killing?  In the 21^st century wouldn't it be a tad more appropriate if it cost at least as much to purchase the most basic, reliably lethal weapons as it was to pay for a life during that dehumanizing chattel slavery system?  I hypothesize that at $24K per pistol there would be far fewer so-called “gun enthusiasts.”  More importantly, folks would probably be forced to find other ways of dealing with their rage, paranoia, depression, etc.  Yes there would continue to be a violent black market for guns but law enforcement will have an easier target to focus on with fewer legal guns being purchased.  With fewer guns purchased—the ones remaining would be easier to track and larger purchases would be even more suspicious and worth investigation.  No one’s rights would be infringed upon just as no one is arguing about their rights when they spend a comparable amount of money for a new car.  If one attempt to purchase a fleet of cars at once, creditors would be alerted and banks would grow suspicious and so on.  Similar hurdles in the purchase of guns would ultimately cause a reduction mass murders, urban warfare, and small scale equally tragic shootings that happen everyday in communities big and small. 

I grant that this, in some respects, sounds ridiculous if not just improbable but we’re talking about murder after all.  What is ridiculous is the concept that one should be able to take a life at any price and that guns are neutral constants in the murder equation.  But if it costs dollars to acquire tools of murder, then shouldn’t it at least be a lot pricier than my smart phone, laptop, or an average domestic flight?  If not then what does that say about how much we value electronics or a plane ticket, for example, versus to the safety, our neighbors, ourselves, the six adults and twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT last week, the nearly 500 dead from homicide in Chicago this year—largely gun deaths, the twelve dead and 58 injured in a Aurora, Colorado movie theater this summer, the six killed at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, WI weeks later, the six dead and thirteen wounded in Tucson, AZ early last year, the 32 murdered and 13 injured at Virginia Tech in April 2007, Columbine in April 1999 etc?  Money talks in this world so I don’t want to hear about how much we value life in our hearts.  The fact is that in a country of 314,970,800 people and counting—living may be expensive but killing is comparatively dirt cheap and that, my friends, is the problem and the reason we keep finding ourselves here mourning a tragedy for as long as mainstream media finds acceptable.