America’s weakness: The gun culture
While teaching at a university in China, I often asked my students if they thought Chinese citizens should be able to own guns. Every student, no matter their social status or political views, worriedly shook his or her head no.
In the past 10 years, there have been a spate of knife rampages by “mentally ill” individuals in the country. There often are fatalities in such attacks, with most of the injured and killed being children. But imagine the carnage if the disturbed attackers were able to use guns of any type or caliber. Getting a gun in China is nearly impossible. Once in a while, news of organized criminals brandishing a gun while robbing a jewelry store will make the news, but it’s rare, and even then, it is unheard of for anyone to get shot in China as a result of crime.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno views culture as an industry that is marketed as an actual tangible good. When one sees the gun culture in the U.S., this theory begins to make sense. In China, Australia and nearly all other highincome countries, one does not perceive the gun shops, the gun ads, the gun shows, the pro-gun bumper stickers on pickups, the gun-infested pawn shops, the glass counters revealing cases of both cheap and high-end handguns sprawled on their sides in peaceful recline. Colt, Beretta, Glock, Taurus, Smith & Wesson: The American gun enthusiast knows all the major brands and manufacturers, while the names couldn’t sound any more foreign to the average Chinese citizen for this simple reason: There is no gun culture in China. No gun lobby riding the back of a centuries-old gun rights amendment that was intended as a means of forming a militia and protecting one’s property from Native American raids. In China, applying for a hunting rifle demands a long wait and severe background check, and handguns are not sold for profit to the population. The same is true for Australia, the U.K. and too many other developed nations to name here. It is this profit, as well as the gun lobby that protects it, that fuels the gun culture in the U.S. and prevents any meaningful gun control legislation from being passed.
The gun debate follows a pattern in U.S. history of special interest groups exploiting the collective nation for the groups’ own gain. One only has to look to the pilgrims to find the first evidence of this. As they appropriated great swaths of Native American land, the early colonizers forced their British morality and way of living onto the rightful owners of North America. Further down the road, in the 1860s, the U.S. became one of the last major nations to abolish slavery, and we know how contentious that turned out to be. While it did beat the U.K. to establishing the right to vote for women, it lagged behind others in eradicating racial segregation. In fact, the South still possesses an ambience of segregation to this day.
Meanwhile, there are two areas in which America also has fallen behind high-income nations: gun violence and universal health care. We can no longer allow one segment of the country to benefit at the expense of the rest, because doing so adversely affects the whole, causing the nation to collapse in upon itself. This is a major reason the U.S. was labeled a “flawed democracy” by The Economist Intelligence Unit in 2017.
Darren Dillman is a native of New Mexico and a doctoral student in literature and writing at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia. He has taught English in the U.S., Taiwan, Macau and in China.