Letter from America
We may not be able to understand it, but it’s a fact of life in the US
Since Valentine’s Day, when a crazed nineteen-year-old shot and killed fourteen students and three members of staff at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, America has fallen into one of its periodic bouts of angst about guns.
It remains a mystery to many how such a socially and economically developed country can tolerate levels of gun violence more than fifty times higher than in the UK or Germany.
One place to start understanding all this is the online store of the National Rifle Association (NRA), that staunchest defender of Americans’ right to bear arms, whose five million members, and their subscriptions, fund the opposition to stricter gun control.
In the store, you’ll find an ‘NRA: Stand and Fight’ baseball cap, lots of holsters, a couple of rather Village People leather and denim waistcoats, and a pine ammo box engraved with scenes from the NRA’S founding in 1871. You can buy parchment-like reprints of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the all-important Second Amendment, which reads, ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’
You’ll also come away with a clear understanding of the politics of the NRA. These are emphatically Republicans. On the NRA’S home page, there’s a quote from its leader, Wayne Lapierre – author of books including Guns, Crime and Freedom and Shooting Straight: Telling the Truth About Guns in America.
Under the headline ‘Help Fight the Socialist Wave’, he writes, ‘President Trump’s election, while crucial, can’t turn away the wave of these new Europeanstyle socialists bearing down upon us… they hide behind labels like ‘Democrat’, ‘left-wing’ and ‘progressive’ to make their socialist agenda more palatable, and that’s terrifying.’ Lapierre’s list of duplicitous Democrats covers most of their likely presidential candidates for 2020. The NRA is nothing if not prepared. And in President Trump, who has already filed his re-election campaign papers, it has a strong supporter and friend.
It is hard not to see the intense reaction to the Parkland shootings as in part reflecting the intensity of the opposition to Trump. There are arguments to be had, but such is the red mist surrounding Trump’s presidency, it is hard to draw a clear bead on them. Trump hasn’t helped. One day, he told a group of Democrats visiting the White House he wanted a ‘beautiful’ bill with tougher laws on gun ownership. The next night, he had a private meeting with officials from the NRA in the Oval Office. As on so many issues, he’s promising something, but no one quite knows what.
Just how politicised is this debate? When news broke of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual predation, he issued a statement intended to win back those in the Democratic Party whom he had so lavishly funded. ‘I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention,’ he said. ‘I hope Wayne Lapierre will enjoy his retirement party.’ Not even his erstwhile friends were having it. As Weinstein retreated to an Arizona sex addiction clinic, Lapierre, the head of the NRA, had outscored him.
Up in my corner of north-west Connecticut, opinion feels as divided as it is in much of the country. There are gun clubs and hunters and pick-ups rolling through town with stickers of machine guns. But there are also parent groups haunted by the memory of the Sandy Hook killings in Newtown, about forty minutes away, in 2012. Ever since, my sons’ schools have had regular lockdown drills, in which one teacher pretends to be a shooter going from classroom to classroom, while the students cower beneath their desks or run for the nearby woods. It’s clearly all deranged.
I just pulled up the Firearms Transaction Record from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which you have to fill out if you buy a gun. Questions 10a and 10b ask for your ethnicity and race. Only further down the page are you asked if you’re a fugitive, a drug addict or a ‘mental defective’. And that’s it – you’re good to go, assault rifle in hand.
Trump is no fool when it comes to understanding who elected him and why. A survey last year showed that, among gun-owners, Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to equate owning a gun with personal freedom.
Gun-owners and non-gun-owners broadly agree on a few things: preventing the mentally ill or those on no-fly or watch lists from buying guns, and even on the need for background checks for private gun sales. According to a poll last year, the opposition to the NRA isn’t as virulent as you might suspect. Some 44 per cent of adults say it has too much influence over gun legislation, and forty per cent say its influence is about right. Fifteen per cent say its influence is too little. Again split along party lines.
Last year, Americans only narrowly opposed allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns, 55 to 45 per cent; a proposal Trump supports. His views may seem outrageous from an ocean away, but they align perfectly with the mainstream of his voters.
‘My sons’ schools have drills, where one teacher pretends to be a shooter’