Armed and dangerous
To link Wednesday’s school massacre in Parkland, Florida to yesterday’s armed robbery in Córdoba, which resulted in at least three deaths, would be mixing apples and oranges in many ways. But the two tragedies have guns as the underlying common denominator. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has always been a stock line of defence for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States and the argument has its element of truth but increasingly lethal firearms give psychopaths and the mentally deranged the capacity to inflict infinitely more damage than they could with their fingernails. Guns are a necessary condition for these massacres although it is more complicated than that – film-maker Michael Moore has pointed out for example that Canada has higher per capita gun ownership than its North American neighbour due to a traditional hunting culture, without sharing its grim history of repeated slaughters in schoolyards and elsewhere. We would thus need to explore other aspects of the United States, not least in the states once forming the Southern Confederacy, which not only share Canada’s hunting culture but also have a much darker side with their history of slavery and its sequel of segregation placing guns at the very heart of regional identity. All history perhaps but topics revived by the Donald Trump presidency.
The Parkland horror is being amply covered by the US media with full background on all too many such massacres since Sandy Hook so best leave it to them, apart from pointing out that they are also part of the problem since the intense coverage of these shootings magnifies the copycat factor. Let us relate this topic instead to Argentina, looking at two questions in particular – the sheer quantity of guns (especially unregistered ones) and the more recent factor of “the institutionalisation of violence” (in the words of the headline of a
Times column last week) complicating the climate.
According to an investigation by journalist Federico Poore for Chequeado, there are 1,562,332 registered firearms in Argentina with an equivalent number on the black market according to official estimates, while other sources augment that figure to as high as four million (3.6 million according to a Spanish doctoral student). As with Michael Moore’s USCanada comparison, regional per capita figures are sometimes surprising – Argentina ranks above Brazil and Bolivia but below Uruguay and Chile, countries with more peaceful images. While there are around nine guns for every 100 Argentines, this does not mean that nine percent of the citizenry is armed – ownership is more concentrated with criminal gangs often deploying huge arsenals but also some highly respectable private individuals having dozens of firearms (sometimes registered, sometimes not).
Linking the issue of gun ownership with the ongoing controversy over Buenos Aires provincial policeman Luis Escobar’s slaying of a mugger would also seem to be mixing apples and oranges in some ways but the two questions converge in a potentially dangerous trend. The government’s stubborn and overacted defence of Chocobar should not be confused with a green light for vigilante justice – the state still seeks to retain the monopoly of force and the “licence to kill” – but the Mauricio Macri administration (especially Security Minister Patricia Bullrich but also the president himself) is playing with fire, not least with renewed talk of the death penalty (which can only drive criminals toward a more reckless disregard of all lives including their own).
In his presidential campaign 30 years ago the elder George Bush stated his main aim as making the US “a kinder, gentler country.” Given the events of recent days, that vision seems more remote than ever over there, but also here too.