I’m not anti-gun. But America’s mad to give citizens the right to own such deadly weapons

AMID the worldwide expressions of shock and horror following the Las Vegas massacre, the usual people — mostly liberal East Coast Democrats — will cry out for controls on gun ownership.

And the usual people — middle Americans, especially Republicans and especially in such states as Texas — will sustain their unyielding resistance to any new law.

And the ‘freedom lobby’, as it thinks of itself, will win.

Here is a country with an estimated 270 million firearms in private hands — almost one apiece for every man, woman and child in the land. Nearly half of all U.S. households has a gun, most often a pistol ‘for personal protection’.

Beyond the traditional claim, harking back to the 1776 constitution, about a ‘right to bear arms’, many Americans passionately believe — in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary — that they are safer living in a house with a gun.

Murder

Yet there were at least 133 mass killings between 2000 and 2014 in the U.S., compared with four in Canada, two in Australia and one in Britain.

And that was before the 49 shot at a Florida nightclub last year and Sunday’s massacre.

Private enterprise murder on such a scale is only possible in a society which grants almost everybody unlimited access to automatic assault weapons — such as appear to have been used in Las Vegas.

Until 2004, the Federal Assault Weapon Ban prevented citizens from owning such hardware, but since it lapsed every attempt to renew it has fallen in Congress. Such is the power of the gun lobby, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association, that many members of the U.S. legislature tremble for their seats if they speak up for gun controls.

It is widely thought Hillary Clinton’s backing for at least some new controls contributed to her wafer-thin election defeat last November. In many states, restrictions — for instance, on carrying concealed weapons — have actually been eased in recent years. On Texas college campuses, since August it has become legal for a student with a permit to carry a hidden handgun to class.

It is all madness, of course. The lobbyists insistently claim that ‘good guys with guns’ can intervene to prevent crimes or for that matter massacres.

There is not a shred of historical evidence that this has ever happened — not once, ever, anywhere in the U.S.

What has happened instead is that some perfectly innocent people have been killed by would-be vigilantes, who have seen them allegedly acting suspiciously.

Some Americans reading this will mutter: ‘ Oh, he must be one of those stupid people who doesn’t know anything about guns.’ Yet I have owned sporting guns all my life.

A very long time ago I won a small prize, shooting for a Parachute Regiment team with rifle, sub-machine-gun and Bren gun. I have fired handguns on FBI ranges and tried most military small arms some time, some place.

So no, I am not ‘anti-gun’. But it is beyond my comprehension, as it is that of most British people, how any sane society can suppose it should be a private citizen’s right to own weapons purpose-designed for killing human beings.

Back in 1996, I thought that Michael Howard, as home secretary, went over the top when he imposed a total ban on all handgun ownership after the Dunblane shooting, in which 16 children and a teacher were murdered. Such terrible crimes are mercifully very rare in Britain, and the ban seemed tough on British target shooters, who regularly won medals at the Olympics.

I have since changed my mind. Howard was right. Disarming Britain, so that the only firearms left in private hands are those designed for sport, was an appropriate precautionary measure.

Very occasionally killings continue to be carried out with legally- owned shotguns, often alas of family members. But no shotgun could ever kill people in the numbers that Americans routinely achieve in their massacres.

Moreover, in addition to deliberate acts of homicide, each year in the U.S. about 15,000 accidental shootings result in about 600 deaths. Almost daily, somebody somewhere picks up the handgun they bought ‘for personal protection’, and it goes off with tragic consequences.

In the wilds of southern California a few months ago, a man whom I was visiting took me to his study to show me a file on his computer.

Seeing me glance uneasily at the automatic pistol lying beside it — loaded, of course — he said only a little apologetically: ‘That’s what we do here.’ And so it is.

Lunatics

Yet it need not be this way. After the 1996 Port Arthur killings in Australia, in which 35 people died, the country rallied in an extraordinary fashion against the gun lunatics.

All automatic weapons were banned and there was a ‘National Buy-Back’ scheme, whereby at a cost of more than £ 300 million some 600,000 weapons were surrendered or purchased by the state.

Australia today is a much safer place and sporting shooters can still own any ‘long guns’ — rifles or shotguns — they want, subject to licensing. Yet no such outbreak of common sense will happen in the U.S.

Social media, which empowers extremist minorities of all kinds to communicate with each other, perpetrating frightful untruths, has immeasurably strengthened the gun lobby. Only yesterday, Right- wing websites were claiming, utterly falsely, that the Las Vegas murders were the work of a named antiTrump Democrat.

The argument prevails that ‘if all the law-abiding people give up their guns, then only the bad guys will have them’.

Many of those who carry out massacres are not only extreme gun- owners, but obsessive online followers of extremist groups.

The gun lobby resists serious mental health checks, or tighter monitoring of dealers — a 1995 survey found that 57 per cent of all guns found at fatal crime scenes were sold by 1 per cent of dealers, and not much has changed since.

The world market for handguns is overwhelmingly dominated by American private buyers, and gun dealers run a formidable sub-lobby of their own.

Tribal

As the U.S. becomes ever more tribal, ever more resistant to rational discussion across political parties about health care, the weather . . . or gun control, the massacres will go on, because President Trump himself leads the true believers, who think it more important to preserve the right to own assault weapons than to keep them out of the hands of people such as the Las Vegas mass-murderer.

Those of us who love and respect the United States throw up our hands in despair.

Did you know that in Florida, a florist cannot practise his or her art without taking courses and buying a licence that costs at least £500? Yet in Florida also anybody who wishes to buy a gun and sack of bullets can get started without even five minutes of safety tuition.

This makes it unsurprising that 44 per cent of Americans claim to know someone who has been shot. One gun lobby slogans goes: ‘ Guns don’t commit murders. People do.’

Yet such ghastly deeds as the Las Vegas massacre could not take place unless a lunatic such as 64-year- old Stephen Paddock had ready access to weapons of a kind that no citizen of a civilised society should be permitted to own.