What is to be done about gun control in the United States? Given that he will never again put himself up for office, Barack Obama cannot argue that the electorate prevents him from enacting new legislation – not this far from the mid-term elections at any rate. It is suggested that the “fiscal cliff” stand-off with the Republican-controlled Congress will absorb all his negotiating room, but gun control ought not to be a party issue, not if presented smartly.
Nobody suggests that it will be easy. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution declares that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. This clause was inserted 121 years ago last Saturday. The US was a very different place at the beginning of the 1790s when the drive west was getting under way. Over the following thirty years, the population of the country nearly tripled and the proportion living to the west of the Appalachians grew from five percent to twenty-five percent. This was the period when the native American was being systematically driven from his ancestral lands. So the right to bear arms was an unsurprising product of the wild frontier.
Is such a right necessary now? American lawlessness is often proclaimed as one of the nation’s greatest problems. Of course, the unfettered proliferation of deadly weapons itself promotes that lawlessness. For us in Britain, where firearms are much more often seen on the telly than (as it were) in the flesh, travelling in many parts of the world comes as a culture shock, especially in the matter of packing heat. Whether it is police being armed at so many European borders or teenaged soldiers walking the streets and riding the buses toting their TAR-21s in middle-eastern countries or those dinky little signs in suburban American front gardens that warn “armed response”, the mild-mannered Brits might be forgiven for feeling a touch of paranoia when far from home.
In the last five years, two judgments by the US Supreme Court have ratified the Second Amendment, underlining the individual’s right to possess a firearm for the purpose of protecting his property. Some restrictions have lapsed in recent years and polling suggests that support for gun control has waned at the same time, perhaps related to the perceived threat of terrorism.
But is there really anything remotely sensible to be said against rescinding the Second Amendment? I found a site (also styling itself Common Sense) that offers four arguments against gun control, largely attempting to defeat statistical points. Well, I too would rather eschew statistics and instead deploy reason. This site’s arguments are:
1: Thugs ignore gun laws.
2: Thugs prefer unarmed victims and avoid potentially armed citizens.
3: Crime is deviant behaviour.
4: Quotes the Second Amendment as “the Trump Card”.
This last is not an argument at all and cannot be engaged. The so-called “Colonel” who writes the blog (in actuality a children’s illustrator named Mary Dall) calls the Amendment “absolute, unambiguous and supersedes all arguments”. Well, it isn’t and it doesn’t. As for the first three arguments, the real debate is only marginally about crime. Rather, the discussion is about access. Most Americans seem quite convinced by the proposal that Iran having nuclear capacity is not a good idea. But it is no more of a good idea for American individuals even less stable than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to have access to deadly weapons.
The pro-gun lobby always puts forward the old saw that “it isn’t guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people”. I guess it’s not food that feeds people, it’s people that feed people. But you can bet that people with food are more adept at feeding people than people without food. Now make the analogy with guns. Adam Lanza, the Newtown, Connecticut killer, would have achieved many fewer casualties if he had only been able to throttle his victims. Even with a kitchen knife, he couldn’t have killed fleeing children, at least not without risking the loss of his weapon. The guns gave him the capacity to slay twenty-seven. Perhaps if he had had a missile, he could have taken out the whole school from his bedroom window.
Of course criminals will still get their hands on guns. That happens in Britain too. The difference is that practically all of the 0.1-per-1,000 of the UK population who are killed by guns are killed by criminals, whereas a substantial majority of the 3-per-1,000 Americans who die by guns do so in accidental shootings, domestic disputes or rampages by the unhinged. That is the critical difference that derives from easy access to guns.
Moreover, tightening the regulations that govern the licensing of weapons will not make sufficient difference. As we saw in the harrowing incident at Newtown, the mass murderer helped himself to the weapons registered to his mother, who then became his first victim. Indeed, she had taught him to shoot. It might be instructive to learn what proportion of Americans is slain by their own guns.
A lot of Americans – some women as well as men – like to indulge the fantasy of being some dauntless combination of Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill. This fantasy is clung to as an inalienable right and, in consequence, the cold dead hand of Charlton Heston still grips the American legislature. Well, neighbourhood law-enforcement is a profession and a sophisticated one with a good many controls and regulations. It is not the business of amateurs. And hunting ought to be restricted too, both for the sake of the survival of America’s dwindling wildlife and to prevent the kind of accident that so besmirched the otherwise blemishless reputation of former Vice-President Dick Cheney.
It is blindingly obvious – to rational people if not to the National Rifle Association – that fewer guns in private hands will result in fewer deaths by gunshot. Some now argue that the Newtown children might have survived if their teachers had gone to school armed. That presupposes such a lot of elements cohering – that the teachers happened to have their weapons at the ready when Lanza shot his way into the school, that at least one of them would have had no compunction about shooting him in cold blood, that no child or teacher would have been hurt in crossfire, that no kind of a gun battle would have developed, that no curious child was ever able to get their hands on a weapon, that no accident would ever occur in the storing or maintaining of the school’s arsenal, that the school’s security was always so good that it would be impossible that someone wanting to grab a cache of guns could break in.
The answer is not to arm the school but to disarm the Lanza household. Why is this so difficult to grasp? Why are men with small penises allowed to hold sway over rational thought because of their desire to look big with a deadly weapon to hand? People have to be prepared to surrender their pleasures (killing defenceless birds and animals) and their comforts (armed response) for the greater good. And to those who still argue for unfettered gun possession, the best response is simply to begin the litany of names of the children who died at Lanza’s hands. And then those of the teachers. And then those who died at Northern Illinois University, at Virginia Tech, at Nickel Mines Amish School, at Red Lake Senior High, at Columbine …
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