We know the cause. Why won’t we act?
The US can’t wait for yet another gun tragedy. It should join the rest of the civilised world and disarm, argues Eugene Robinson.
We all know what instruments snuffed out 18 innocent lives in two mass shootings within the space of a week. We all know what tools Americans used to kill more than 43,000 people, whether others or themselves, last year. We just refuse to do anything about it.
The problem is that the nation is cursed with an absurdly and tragically vast oversupply of guns. There are ragefilled people, drug dealers and people suffering from depression in Britain, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Spain – in every country in the world. But those nations have only a tiny fraction of the gun violence we experience in the United States. Why might that be? Because they have far fewer guns.
The US is the only nation where there are more guns in civilian hands than there are civilians, according to the Small Arms Survey, conducted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. As of the most recent report, in 2018, we had about 120 privately owned guns per 100 citizens. The nation in second place, with about 53 guns per 100 people, was Yemen – which at least had civil war as an explanation.
France and Germany both had about 20 firearms in private hands for every 100 citizens. Japan had fewer than one, and gun deaths there are exceedingly rare. Last year the US saw an average of more than 100 gun deaths a day.
In 2020, we had a respite from the kinds of mass shootings we saw this month in Atlanta and in Boulder, Colorado – shocking events that dominate the news, summon presidential expressions of sorrow, and kick off yet another round of congressional debate over gun laws that ultimately goes nowhere.
But there was a sharp increase in what we must shamefully call garden-variety gun violence, with about 19,380 homicides by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive, up from an average of about 15,000 in recent years.
This is in addition to about 24,000 gun suicides last year. In total, then, more than 43,000 Americans were killed by guns.
If guns were not so ubiquitous, of course, some people would have found other ways to kill themselves or others. But it is ridiculous to think the toll would be anywhere near as high. Imagine the suspect in the Boulder supermarket killings armed with a knife, or even a sword, rather than a Ruger AR-556, a gun that functions like a rifle, but is legally classified as a pistol, which means it is regulated in different ways.
The suspect in the Atlanta killings bought a gun earlier that day. The Boulder suspect bought his days before. Perhaps a nationwide system of meaningful background checks for gun purchases would have prevented one or both tragedies. Perhaps some sort of mandatory waiting period to buy a gun might have made them abandon their alleged plans or impulses.
But perhaps not. With more than 390 million firearms already in private hands in the US, according to the Small Arms Survey, those determined to get their hands on guns are almost surely going to succeed.
By all means, Congress should approve universal background checks, a gunpurchase waiting period, a national firearms registry and an assault weapons ban. Such measures would help. But even if they were possible to enact – and, let’s be honest, at the moment they are not – there would still be enough firearms in circulation to keep our level of gun violence shockingly high.
We need to get the guns not just off our streets but out of our homes. People who buy guns for ‘‘self-defence’’ aren’t likely to use them that way and, if they do, they’re more likely to be injured in the encounter.
The Second Amendment protects a right – but it does not impose an obligation to own guns, or to have our lives ruled by them. I suppose there could be some deadly rampage so shocking that we collectively decide to join the rest of the civilised world and disarm. I just can’t imagine how horrible the epiphany would have to be. –