AMERICA’S SUICIDE PACT JONATHAN KAY ON THE SELF-MYTHOLOGIZING FIREARMS FUNDAMENTALISTS.
THE TURBOCHARGING OF AMERICA’S GUN LUST
Last year, Texas passed a state law permitting licensed handgun owners to carry concealed weapons on university campuses. By Canadian standards, it was a shocking development: If a student showed up at, say, UBC or McGill with a loaded handgun, it would probably make the national news. But for Americans, it was just another great day for # freedom. “Today I am proud to expand liberty in the Lone Star State,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott when he signed the campus-carry bill into law. “Texans can be assured that their Second Amendment rights will be stronger and more secure than ever before.”
But for gun- rights purists, it wasn’t enough. Last month, the activist group Students For Concealed Carry complained publicly that college administrators might find ways to limit the law’s reach. In particular, they worried that students could be prevented from preloading their pistols’ firing chambers before coming to class. “Being forced to draw one’s weapon and then load the first round — a procedure that typically takes both hands — is a serious impediment to being able to quickly and cleanly present to the target,” they wrote. “At close contact, having an empty chamber can essentially render the defender’s handgun useless.”
This is just one of many regional gun- control battles that have unfolded across the United States in recent years. But Texas’ campuscarry law offers a perfect microcosm of how the debate plays out nationally. At the forefront are grandstanding politicians, who pander shamelessly to gun- loving voters. Meanwhile, at the grassroots level, Second Amendment fundamentalists conjure actionmovie scenarios to discredit even the mildest forms of gun control.
How realistic is it that a student armed with a handgun ( bullet in chamber, or otherwise) could thwart an intruder intent on performing a mass killing in a college setting? Five years ago, ABC News and the Bethlehem, Pa., Police De- partment performed a series of experiments to find out.
The six tested students were equipped with a handgun and a magazine full of “simunition” paint bullets, along with several hours of firearms training. Then they were dispatched to a circular lecture hall full of fake students. The test subjects knew that an actor playing the role of an armed intruder would enter the classroom and attempt to perform a mock mass shooting. But they weren’t told precisely when this would happen.
First up was Joey, a cheerful teenager with a mop of brown hair. Joey told ABC News that he loved action movies and guns, and thought he’d do well in the test. You can watch his actual performance on YouTube: When the gunman enters the classroom, Joey fumbles for his weapon while everyone around him is methodically gunned down.
A second subject, Danielle, manages to draw her weapon — but takes a hit to the head before she can score a lethal shot. A third, Brian, simply freezes in his seat as he is peppered with bullets. Another subject, Chris Lamb, is a huge gun enthusiast who’s spent hundreds of hours on the range shooting every conceivable kind of civilian-accessible firearm. Yet he, too, freezes in place — and is mock-executed at close range.
When pro-gun activists and politicians make their case, they often regress into adolescent fantasy worlds — where ordinary Joes and Janes are transformed into heroic commandos. In real life, ordinary people faced with a mass- shooter situation are more likely to wet their pants.
In his emotional speech about gun violence this week, Barack Obama read out a partial roll call of massacres that have taken place on his watch: “Fort Hood, Binghamton, Aurora, Oak Creek, Newtown, the Navy Yard, Santa Barbara, Charleston, San Bernardino.” Of all these, it is Newtown that stands out most clearly — not just because most of Adam Lanza’s victims at Sandy Hook Elementary were small children, but also because the reaction from the country’s gun-rights lobby so perfectly reflected the tragicomic delusion that the disease of gun violence can be cured with more guns.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” declared National Rifle Association executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre. “The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day.” The NRA’s proposed solution was to deploy a massive corps of “patriotic” gun- wielding Americans at schools across the country.
If you’re looking for the real source of America’s addiction to guns — the reason why percapita firearm deaths are an order of magnitude higher in the United States than in the rest of the Western world — you will find it contained in these words. What LaPierre was sketching out was not just a defence of gun culture specifically, but also the profoundly Manichean worldview that fuels it.
The America of the NRA’s imagination is a mythic, death-match arena populated by “good guys” and “bad guys,” “monsters” and “patriots.” As in a video game or superhero comic book, everyone apparently falls into one category or the other. And since the patriots are more numerous, the theory goes, life is arithmetically safest when Americans are all armed to the teeth, ready to rake others with gunfire at the slightest provocation.
In reality, whether you are a “monster,” or a “patriot,” or ( like most of us) something in between, having a gun in your home makes you more likely to die.
THE TRUTH IS OUR SOCIETY IS POPULATED BY GENUINE MONSTERS.
In particular, it makes you more likely to die by suicide: A leading 2013 report in the American Journal of Epidemiology supported the hypothesis that “firearms in the home impose suicide risk above and beyond the baseline risk, and help explain why, year after year, several thousand more Americans die by suicide in states with higher than average household f i rearm ownership compared with states with lower than average firearm ownership.” About 50 Americans per day use a gun to kill themselves. By the NRA’s Manichean analysis, they are “good guy” and “bad guy” all rolled into one.
And yet, in 2014, 63 per cent of Americans told Gallup that “a gun in the house makes it a safer place to be.” Despite all the new data that’s emerged over the last two decades, that number is actually going up: In 2006, the figure was 47 per cent. In 2000, it was just 35 per cent. On the question of guns, it seems Americans are literally getting more stupid with every passing year. Perhaps this is why Obama often sounds so utterly exasperated when he speaks about it. All in all, more than 30,000 Americans are killed with firearms every year — roughly one 9/11 every month.
If this were about logic, or statistics, then Obama wouldn’t have much problem getting the better of gun- rights fundamentalists. Indeed, he argues circles around them all the time. (“Right now, people on the no- fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun,” he declared last month, in one his many memorable riffs on gun nuttery. “That is insane. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun.”) But America’s deadly gun fixation isn’t rooted in rationality. As the facts above plainly tell us, it can’t be.
Instead, it always has made more sense to understand the good-versus-evil apocalyptic narrative peddled by NRA types as a self- destructive cultural holdover from the American revolutionary experience. The Evangelical Christian world view that increasingly dominates the culture of the Republican Party (especially among older white voters) also plays a strong role: As Alan Noble has argued in The Atlantic, a dominant theme in modern Evangelical thought in the United States is the idea that Christianity is under perpetual attack from a militantly secularist society in general, and Barack Obama’s Democratic administration in particular. Without guns, how will Christians keep the horned beasts at bay?
Or as Republican Iowa caucuses frontrunner Ted Cruz puts it: “The federal government wages a daily assault on life, on marriage, on religious liberty. It’s because Christians are not standing up for our values.” This week, on Cruz’s web site, his campaign team posted an ominous- looking photo of the President in SWAT gear, alongside the slogan “Obama wants your guns” — and, for good measure, a second gigantic image of Obama’s head looking demonic and totalitarian. According to Cruz, the right to bear arms is about more than hunting target practice: It is “the ultimate check against government tyranny.”
Such attitudes are old news, of course. As historian Kevin Phillips demonstrated in his excellent book, 1775: A Good Year For Revolution, hostility to gun control was a defining American quality even before the United States came to exist as a nation. But fear of ISIL terror attacks and Syrian refugees, coupled with conspiracy theories about Obama’s alleged plans to steal Ameri cans’ guns, have turbocharged red- state American gun-lust to a level previously unseen in my lifetime.
“I’ ve always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in,” Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. told a crowd of 10,000 students in Virginia last week. One gun- shop owner told NPR that his sales went up 50 per cent after the San Bernardino shootings. There are now over 10 million guns being manufactured in the United States every year — more than double the level of just a decade ago. Guns are now more numerous in the United States than adults. And every time some hatemonger shoots up a mall or office building, the cry goes out for more.
The tip of a privately owned gun has become the great singularity of American cultural and political life — a nexus for all the country’s sour neuroses about government, liberty, religion, crime, race and action- movie virility. While Canada and the United States grew more culturally similar in many ways during the Harper years, this is the one issue where we will forever remain worlds apart: Even my most conservative Canadian friends and relatives — the ones who parrot Fox News talking points on virtually every other subject — grow strangely silent on the subject of guns.
From our side of the border, America’s gun cult looks like a sort of collective suicide pact. Barack Obama, we Canadians feel your pain.