Small, scary steps to a more violent society

Dear John, Thank you, Mr Price, for lifting the directive to arm your police force in Christchurch last week. You may have heard a collective sigh over Christchurch when you made the announcement. Many of us felt, I guess, a little safer after that.

It’s a funny thing how this happens; your decision as Canterbury district commander to allow frontline police officers to carry pistols was meant to protect us and your staff from some dangerous guy on the run. But it wasn’t him, on the other side of town, that I had been scared of.

When I stood at my kitchen sink listening to the radio and learned about the shooting incident, I just accepted it as another piece of local news. It wasn’t until the next sentence on the airwaves that reported police would carry guns ‘‘until further notice’’ that the hairs on the back of my neck straightened like the back of a soldier.

It started to feel like the beginning of something different, but something that I had known before. With bullet speed, I remembered my school friend’s brother who, at the age of 11, was rendered tetraplegic when a game of Russian Roulette using his father’s gun went wrong.

I thought of my niece who lives on a farm in rural Illinois with her three kids and husband. Her gun is next to her bed each night, just in case.

There was the elderly man who lived next door to my mum who recently got tired of living. To ensure he wouldn’t make a mess on his wife’s white carpet, he walked out the front door and pulled the trigger at his forehead while standing on the pavement. The neighbours all gathered around his body. The white carpet had been spared indeed.

Growing up in gun-laden America, I used them too. One adolescent night, we raided a friend’s parents’ liquor and gun cabinets, in that order. The shots we fired into the darkness – where we thought we’d heard strange voices – were in reckless fun but, in truth, could’ve changed the course of my life.

I think you know, John, that these anecdotes are examples from an arsenal of facts about living in a place where there are more guns than people. In a society where having a firearm is the norm, the gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher than any other high-income country in the world. Since I was born, more Americans have died from firearms than the total population of the South Island.

While the American gun culture has a very different history from that of New Zealand’s, grounded in an enforceable constitution, its prevalence and power has built up, little by little, over decades of the legitimisation of the need for firearms, the increasing political and economic power of pro-gun lobby groups, as well as the mushroom cloud of fear that hovers over much of the US.

It’s a fear of strangers, including strangers employed by the police and given guns, that causes other citizens to gun up. It’s often deep-seated biases – not rationale based on good training – that tell our brains who are our enemies and who are our allies, founded on race, gender, and appearance, and influence our impulses to pull the trigger and how many times.

So when I heard the news as I was drying the pasta pot and about ready to attack the dirty skillet, I realised that it isn’t the guy with the gun that I’m scared of. It is us. It is the humans that drive the guns that make my knees shake like a kid at Columbine.

New Zealand Police are supposed to be approachable and friendly, trustworthy, and represent the rule of law, not the rules of gun violence. I couldn’t stop thinking about a bunch of uniformed humans – flawed, impulsive, selfpreserving that we are – moving through my town with loaded guns ready for action, amped on the possibility of using them to exert their power, test their training, or preserve their genes.

In fact, it was a ‘‘panic shot’’ by one of your armed cops that shattered a window in the community house 200m away during the shootout which spurred the directive. Trained armed defenders, I guess, are subject to adrenaline-fuelled mistakes too.

That fact and a desire for New Zealand to avoid taking the small, unnoticed steps toward a more violent country is why I wanted to let you know that I’m not ready to see guns on the hips of your officers.

It will make us wonder whether we ourselves need to get one too, forming, little by little, our own Kiwi cloud of fear.

Anyway, it’s over now. Your frontline cops are no longer armed and my world feels safe again . . . until next time.

Sincerely, Lana Hart

It is us. It is the humans that drive the guns that make my knees shake like a kid at Columbine.