America: Land of Guns and Murders

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many years ago, an author whose name I’ve since forgotten, figuratively threw up his hands in despair at the increasingly fractured American political landscape, and remarked in a magazine article that “there is New York City, a couple of neighbourhoods in Boston, and the rest of the country is the South.” (Actually, he could have included a few more liberal cities, such as San Francisco.)

By this he meant that the United States was becoming ideologically an increasingly right-wing country. Imagine what he would be saying today.

Despite two horrific mass shootings last year, one in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the other in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, by young men with military-grade assault weapons, the United States Senate on April 17 refused to even consider the possibility of tightening gun controls. Even background checks seem too radical!

This defeat occurred despite the fact that upwards of 90 per cent of Americans, according to recent public opinion polls, backed the failed legislation. One wonders whether the National Rifle Association, which opposed the legislation, not Congress, is the legislative branch of American government.

Today the NRA, with five million members, is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. Annual revenue tops $200 million. Its mission, states the organization, is “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.” To that end, it produces numerous pamphlets, magazines and television shows.

The NRA is heavily supported by the country’s thousands of gun manufacturers and dealers. NRA lobbying in the 1980s led to American manufacturers increasing the production of military-style weapons, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols.

One Pennsylvania gun maker, Keystone Sporting Arms, even produces rifles geared toward children!

In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in political races, backing (mostly Republican) opponents of gun control.

The NRA has turned the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1791, which refers, somewhat vaguely, to the “right to bear arms,” into a rigid doctrine that proclaims the right of every individual American to, effectively, be armed to the teeth. Today’s guns, of course, have firepower unimaginable to the founding fathers.

Its solution to gun violence is – more guns. After the Newtown massacre, it recommended placing armed guards in American schools, and suggested that even teachers carry weapons.

Americans today possess some 270 million privately held firearms. They have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. There are four times as many federally licensed firearms and ammunition dealers in the U.S. as there are grocery stores.

Not surprisingly, the country’s gun-related murder rate is the highest in the developed world. There are approximately 45 murders committed in the United States every day, mostly with guns.

The U.S. is a statistical outlier: Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.

It wasn’t always this way. Until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, guns were not a major cultural issue in the country.

True, there was a history of violence: after all, the United States emerged after an armed revolution against Britain.

This continued as Americans moved across the West, battling native peoples, Mexico, and each other in the Civil War. Hollywood films often glorified the John Wayne loner settling matters with a rifle.

But by the mid-20th century, it was assumed that this was all in the past, a matter of temporary lawlessness before proper political institutions were in place.

The culture wars following the 1960s changed that. In rural America, in the old South, and elsewhere, people frightened by the rapid changes in American life and fearful that they were “losing the country” to rich elitists on the coasts, new immigrants, and minorities, became easy targets for the purveyors of guns.

Some, spinning conspiracy theories, even formed militias, convinced that “Washington” had fallen into the hands of “un-American” enemies willing to abandon them to a UN-based “world government” that would take away their rights and impose “socialism” on the country.

We saw echoes of this type of thinking in the debate over “Obamacare” a few years ago, though the president’s health care reforms were, by the standards of most of the Western world, very mild indeed.

The NRA held its 142 annual convention in Houston the first weekend of May, attended by some 70,000 members. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” incoming president James Porter told them, but rather part of a larger “culture war.”  Added Wayne LaPierre, the association’s executive vice president, “We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation fight for everything we care about.”

In 1964 the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He asserted that American politics “has often been an arena for angry minds.” Such people emerge into the political arena whenever they perceive “enemies at the gates.”

The NRA and the gun lobbyists did not gain their power by accident – they have had fertile fields to plow.