Guns & poses
By clinging to their 18th-century constitutional “right to bear arms”, Americans show themselves to be happy with their country as it is.
By clinging to their 18th-century constitutional “right to bear arms”, Americans show themselves to be happy with their country as it is.
It has been said of the US that it’s the first country in history to proceed from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilisation. Like virtually every arch pronouncement in the English language, it’s routinely attributed to Oscar Wilde. It has also been credited to George Bernard Shaw, writer John O’Hara and Georges Clémenceau, who led France in World War I. In fact, the construct seems to have originated in a 19th-century French history text in which it was applied to Russia.
In the wake of the massacre in Las Vegas, a particularly horrifying example of American carnage that President Donald Trump, in his inauguration address, vowed would stop “right here, right now”, it’s tempting to believe the US is reverting to barbarism. A man wheels 10 suitcases packed with firearms and ammunition into a 32nd-floor hotel suite, knocks out two windows and pumps thousands of rounds into a crowd of concertgoers below, killing 58 and wounding nearly 500.
His motives for doing so were unknown at the time of writing. In all likelihood, he was responding to the urges of a deformed nature: no one of sound mind and with a core of humanity would for a moment contemplate such wickedness. Yet when the issue of America’s notoriously and increasingly lax gun laws is raised, the depressing – and all the more depressing for being utterly predictable – response from the White House is that now is not the time to have that discussion.
Some conservative politicians and commentators went further, accusing those who raised the issue of disrespecting the victims and seeking to exploit the tragedy to advance their agendas. The implication that a meaningful discussion can be engaged in after a decent interval is spurious since recent history suggests that, before the decent interval has elapsed, there will be another mass shooting requiring another decent interval.
With any other tragedy involving significant loss of life, the immediate focus is on preventability: how do we stop this happening again or, if that’s not possible, what can be done to reduce the number of casualties next time? But when mass shootings occur in the US, the gun community’s unwavering focus is on ensuring the preservation of the virtually unrestricted right to own, indeed stockpile, instruments specifically designed to kill lots of human beings in a short space of time.
OUT OF CONTROL
In an excerpt from his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire posted on Salon, Kurt Andersen traces the gun lobby’s growing militancy in recent decades and the Republican Party’s consequent eagerness to enact pro-gun legislation. The upshot is a virtual abandonment of controls around gun availability and ownership and an acceptance of firearms in public settings that not so long ago was unthinkable. In some states, for instance, it’s legal to carry guns in churches, bars and parts of airports and police are forbidden from asking guntoters to produce their permits. During the recent confrontation in Charlottesville, the military-style hardware brandished by rightwing militias caused demonstrators and even police to assume they were Swat teams. Last time I was in the US, the believe-it-ornot story in the New York Times concerned a restaurant in Rifle, Colorado, where the waitresses were armed.
Andersen argues this development is largely due to relentless scaremongering and political activism by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the lobbying organisation that boasts 5 million members and spent more than US$30 million ($43 million) installing a self-styled “true friend and champion” in the White House. One of Trump’s first acts was to undo an Obama Administration regulation making it harder for mentally ill people to buy guns.
As Andersen demonstrates, the NRA’s strategy has been to inflame US conservatism’s traditional distrust of the federal Government and exploit its belief that a
The claim that “if the good guys had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened” is trotted out after every mass shooting.
gun-owning citizenry is the ultimate defence against tyranny by claiming “they” are hellbent on taking away the people’s guns. According to Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice-president and propagandistin-chief, “they” are the “jackbooted thugs” of federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “They” are also the “tyrants and dictators at the United Nations who will stop at nothing” to confiscate law-abiding Americans’ guns. And no roll-call of “they” would be complete without godless communism: last year, LaPierre warned of a “gathering of forces willing to use violence against us – anarchists, Marxists, communists and the whole rest of the left-wing socialist brigade”.
This strategy is reinforced by endless repetition of folksy homilies that are readily adopted by those whose relationship with reality is hampered by ignorance and a lack of common sense. The claim that “if the good guys had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened” is trotted out after every mass shooting. Andersen points out, however, that Justice Department statistics show only one in 6000 crime victims fire a weapon in self-defence. The notion that someone who has never been under fire and whose experience of firearms is limited to target practice will react like a Navy Seal if caught up in a Las Vegas-type situation is a pernicious, Walter Mittyesque fantasy.
The most ludicrous of these homilies is “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”. Even at its most literal, this isn’t true. In 2015, 23 children were shot in America every day; almost 1500 of them died as a result. Few, if any, were victims of sandbox shoot-outs. They were accident victims, such as four-yearold Yanelly Zoller, who was killed in Tampa, Florida, last month when her little fingers alighted on a loaded gun as she rummaged in her grandmother’s handbag in search of candy. On a Facebook page set up to raise funds for her funeral, a mourner posted, “the death of a child … leaves the unanswered question of why? The only answer that halfway makes sense is that Heaven needed another angel.” A mundane answer that makes far more sense is that guns kill people. Depending on categorisation, somewhere between 600 and 2000 of America’s 33,000-odd annual gun deaths are accidents. (About 12,000 are homicides and the rest – the majority – are suicides.)
REACHING FOR THE ACCELERANT
In the wider sense, this absurd mantra ignores fundamental questions: what are guns for? What do they do? Why do people possess them? What effect do guns have on those who own and carry them?
The gun is an accelerant, a multiplier, capable of turning fleeting despair into suicide and domestic spats, simmering grudges, road rage incidents and routine heists into bloodbaths. Guns can turn losers into annihilators, can make the weak omnipotent, can ensure ignored or despised outsiders are noticed and never forgotten. Guns can be, and all too often are, a transformative tool for those who harbour vengeful fantasies of transformation.
The NRA’s attempts to deflect blame onto Hollywood are widely derided but here, perhaps, it has the vestige of a point. Is the claim that “Hollywood makes billions promoting and glorifying gun violence”, made post-Las Vegas by an NRA operative, entirely baseless? To take an example, in the two instalments of the massively profitable John Wick franchise, starring Keanu Reeves as a “retired” hitman whose default setting is overkill, the protagonist kills 205 people, most by gunfire, in 223 minutes of screen time. And as I’ve argued before ( Listener, July 1), Hollywood often panders to the conspiracist notion of the federal Government as the enemy within, an NRA staple, and alt-right paranoia over the Deep State.
But everything proceeds from the Second Amendment. Ratified in 1791, it says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the securing of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.” Not a single invader has set foot on mainland US soil since the Anglo-American war of 181215, in the course of which the British torched a fair swathe of Washington DC, including the White House. Furthermore, the fact that the US possesses the mightiest military machine ever assembled would seem to obviate the need for an armed citizenry.
Although many conservatives would happily revisit some aspects of the constitution on the basis of that was then and this is now – for instance, the 14th Amendment, which guarantees US citizenship for anyone born in the country, regardless of circumstances and parentage – it won’t abide any tampering with the right to bear arms.
Not only that, the NRA and many Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have embraced an extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment that holds virtually any attempt to restrict or regulate firearms – banning magazines that hold 100 rounds, for instance – to be unconstitutional. Thus, a measure enacted in the era of the musket and the citizen-soldier on the basis of what was appropriate for a small, scattered, mainly rural society without a standing army now enables Ordinary Joes in a highly urbanised, heavily policed country of 323 million to equip themselves with a similar level of firepower to special-forces commandos operating in a war zone.
Barack Obama said the June 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people died, provided a “further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school or in a house of worship or in a movie theatre or in a nightclub. We have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”
After a decent interval, the people who run the US will do nothing, thereby reaffirming their decision that a country in which virtually anyone can easily and legally acquire the means to shoot hundreds of people in a matter of minutes is the kind of country they want to be.
The gun can turn a fleeting despair into suicide and domestic spats, simmering grudges, road rage incidents and routine heists into bloodbaths.