America’s sick, deadly obsession
The United States has again proved that it is exceptional — but not by exhibiting the traits in the stories we tell about ourselves or the virtues in which our myths are steeped. We tell ourselves that our nation is exceptionally free, exceptionally just, exceptionally courageous. Instead, among the Westernized democracies, we are exceptionally violent. We are exceptionally paranoid and illogical. We are exceptionally close to becoming ungovernable.
Before we could properly mourn the eight people massacred at spas across metropolitan Atlanta, another crazed gunman struck in Boulder, Colorado, and massacred 10. At a grocery store, for heaven’s sake. The murderous rampage is all-american, occasionally imitated in other countries but perfected here. No other nation, except those torn by civil war, sees the level of annual gun violence that wreaks havoc in this country.
The response to another gun massacre is now so utterly predictable that my 12year-old would have foreseen the immediate reactions: Parking lot memorials. Candlelight vigils. Thoughts and prayers.
Oh, as has been the case for generations, thoughtful politicians will make a rational case for common-sense gun laws. Predictably, they will be stymied by the delusional and raucous crowd claiming that the Second Amendment allows civilians to own battlefield weapons, guns, grenades, rocket launchers. So the massacres will continue.
They may grow more frequent and more deadly. On the crazed political right, some have declared that the solution is more weapons, more firearms, more highcapacity magazines. That sort of demented thinking cannot be halted with logic, but I will give it a try, anyway.
Why does the U.S. have so much gun violence? We have about 4% of the world’s population, but we also have about 40% of the firearms in civilian hands.
Some historians have attributed our love affair with firearms to our frontier traditions, but that seems an unlikely explanation for our ongoing gun mania. Australia also has frontier traditions, replete with cowboys and cattle. But that country managed to enact strong common-sense measures to curb massacres. After a man armed with a legally purchased AR-15 rifle shot and killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, Australia’s centerright prime minister, John Howard, pushed through restrictive gun measures. In a 2013 opinion essay in The New York Times, Howard wrote, “Few Australians would deny that their country is safer
today as a consequence of gun control.”
President Joe Biden was the target of heavy criticism from progressives for his leadership in passing the 1994 crime bill, which, among other things, provided states with funding to build more prisons. But the political left frequently forgets to mention that the bill also banned assaultstyle weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines for a decade. (That provision had a sunset clause.) Recent research shows that the ban helped to reduce fatalities from mass shootings.
But the gun lobby grew more powerful during the years after the crime bill was passed, bullying and threatening legislators who even dared suggest reasonable measures such as universal background checks, which would close loopholes that allow some private sales without those checks. The National Rifle Association and
its allies are so unhinged that they have fought the development of “smart guns” — technology that would equip firearms with personalized devices that would permit only authorized users to fire the weapon.
The gun lobby has been assisted by court rulings that have veered far away from the original intent of the Second Amendment, which begins, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state ...” In a 2008 ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed aside decades of precedent that allowed states and municipalities to restrict private gun ownership. Boulder passed a law prohibiting assaultstyle weapons in 2018, but a court struck down the law just 10 days before the latest shooting. Proponents of the ban say it likely would have prevented the shooter from purchasing the weapon he used.
Our nation is on a trajectory of more violence, more deaths, that could easily be prevented. But we cannot seem to stop ourselves.