Gun violence’s cause: Is it guns or is it us?

GUEST COLUMNIST

If it’s not guns, is it us? I’ve often wondered about those arguing for unfettered gun rights. You know, those proclaiming that guns don’t kill people. If it isn’t guns, clearly the implication is that it is us. But is it?

There is a larger question seldom asked in America. Gun advocates invariably present the issue as, “Who kills us?” Rather, I argue the debate should more importantly focus on, “What kills us?”

The worn-out old chestnut that guns don’t kill didn’t originate with the NRA.

Around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote, “Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est.” This translates to, “A sword is never a killer, it’s a tool in the killer’s hands.”

Fast forward to the early years of the 20th century (by 1913) and America’s gun lobby is issuing press releases promoting the idea that guns aren’t the problem.

An early attempt at shifting the focus from guns came as a PR slogan from the Colt’s Manufacturing Company with,

“It’s not the gun, it’s the man behind the gun.”

So all through the 20th century, Americans were being sold the idea that we’re the problem, not the proliferation of guns themselves. I ask, are Americans — you and I and our neighbors — inherently more violent than say, the citizens of Japan or England or Poland?

Are Americans a different breed of human being from our counterparts in Western Europe where death by gunfire is a much rarer occurrence?

According to a 2016 New York Times article, “In Poland and England, only about one out of every million people die in gun homicides each year — about as often as an American dies in an agricultural accident or falling from a ladder.”

The American Journal of Medicine reported in 2016 that, “Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other developed countries.”

Additionally, “The U.S., which has the most firearms per capita in the world, suffers disproportionately from firearms compared with other high-income countries,” said study author Erin Grinshteyn, an assistant professor at the School of Community Health Science at the University of Nevada-Reno.

“These results are consistent with the hypothesis that our firearms are killing us rather than protecting us,” she said in a American Journal of Medicine news release.”

Is America’s true exceptionalism then, unfortunately and tragically, our political willingness, our national acceptance of death by gunfire? Nearly 100 Americans are killed by guns every day of the year in the United States, with hundreds more injured.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly in 1970 observed in his Pogo comic strip, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Is it? Us? Or, is it the proliferation of guns?

Any thinking, reflective, rational American knows the answer.