This is a follow-up to my last post on tragic murders of students and staff at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Yesterday, I spoke to a group of 70 high school students about my experience as an antiwar activist in the late 1960s. The students were attentive and asked excellent questions about both the moral and political aspects of my actions. Fairly quickly, however, the conversation turned to school shootings and what to do in response. The students, from a very liberal area just north of Washington, DC, were unanimous in their support for gun control as the answer to this crisis.
When I raised the possibility that this crisis had more complicated origins, their response was adamant; we must focus on gun control, because, as one student clearly stated "the only difference between the one country that has mass shootings and all the others, is the lack of gun control".
Now I am strongly in support of real gun control. Background checks, bans on any form of semi-automatic weapons, repealing open carry laws, etc. I'll concede the right to have a 22 caliber rifle for hunting (but only after gun safety training). Want to hunt, get a bow and arrow and give the deer a chance.
But the problem is not just the guns. We live in a society that glorifies violence. We live in a society that fails, again and again, to meet peoples needs. We live in a "democracy" in which money, not the demos (i.e. the people, the crowd) determines what the government does or doesn't do. We live in a society where discourse is controlled by a tiny minority who own the media.
All of these are impediments to any chance of getting legislation for background checks, let alone more substantial gun control measures. Every time there is another horrific instance of gun violence, there is a public outcry, and every time the forces of reaction use their money and power to fend off meaningful action, the protests eventually run their course, and things return to "normal", until the next time.
Even if we were successful in making it harder to buy guns legally (and the optimist in me can't imagine we will be), there are so many guns already in the hands of Americans, primarily white males, that this would only make a small dent in our problem of gun violence. Certainly even that small dent would save some lives, and that's very important. But, the problem is, that by focusing solely on making guns harder to buy legally and ignoring the broader political, cultural, social and economic causes of our gun problem, we will continue to be the world's leader in mass shootings and other gun related violence.
We need to change how we respond. We have to focus our anger on the broader changes that need to be made. We need to show how this crisis is connected to our other crises, resurgent racism, economic insecurity, lack of affordable health care, attacks on our fragile democratic system and so on. Is it any wonder that mass shootings and other gun related homicides (and suicides) have skyrocketed during COVID? Or that the violent attempt to overthrow our government have encouraged violence as a way to "settle" disagreements.
Some have pointed to Americans love affair with guns as the source of our problem. But I would argue that our history demonstrates a real love affair with the use of violence and exploitation (a form of violence) to advance the interests of a few. In one sense the NRA is right - guns don't kill people. I watched a segment of the Daily show about another country that has a love affair with guns - Switzerland. The statistics show that having a lot of guns in private hand does NOT necessarily lead to gun violence. The 8.3 million Swiss own 2 million guns, yet have only 0.002 gun related homicides per 100,000 Swiss. By comparison, in the US there are 4.46 gun related homicides per 100,000 Americans.
The NRA is, of course, wrong. Guns do kill people. But until we recognize that the correct formulation of this relationship should be that it's "people with guns that kill people", we will continue to fail in our efforts to stem the violence that is endemic in our society.
Very good article. While I totally agree with almost everything you’ve mentioned, I have some question about American exceptionalism in regard to "a real love affair with the use of violence and exploitation......" . That is true of many nations if you look back to their origins. I think a more interesting question is whether we would resort to violence if we didn’t have an easy instrument at hand, e.g., a gun, instead of having to use a knife or our bare hands. It is much easier for a human being to render harm to another with a gun than with a knife, and the easiest is to drop a bomb on people you can’t even see. I think that has to do with not having to face another’s humanity. I’d love to hear more about this, b/c I think it’s an interesting and important issue. But the other issue, which you address in paragraph 4, and which the kids responded to, needs to be dealt with immediately. There are measures that can be taken to control the possession of guns. I’m afraid that the NRA is going to do what they always do and blah,blah,blah about how it’s not guns that wreak the havoc, but people. That is followed by disallowing felons and the mentally ill from having them and arming teachers – for them, that solves the problem. For me, it does not. Clearly anyone who shoots 20 youngsters and 2 teachers to death has a more serious mental health problem than your run-of-the-mill American, but how do you identify them? Are we going to be wary of every kid who is uncommunicative or an introvert? Will people be able to access the medical records of people they THINK might be or turn out to be a problem? The idea of armed teachers is abhorrent. The most honest, straightforward, and easiest thing for a society to do is to implement certain restrictions on the types of guns and magazines that can be owned, licensing owners, registering every gun and recording every sale of that particular weapon. If we can have restrictions on abortion, on drugs, on driving when impaired, we can have restrictions on guns. So, perhaps a solution is to become a 1-issue voter – never vote for a person who takes money from the NRA and who is opposed to gun control. In so doing, you would probably also be voting against those opposed to abortion in all cases.
ReplyDeleteI cringe at the suggestion of becoming a one-issue voter. Based on experience in the past with a person I know, I think one-issue (anti-gun) voters would become fringe voters & settle for nothing short of complete abolition of all firearms. Thus they would reject candidates with more realistic approaches to the problem & court backlash. Otherwise, I think your remarks are on the money.
DeleteThanks for the thoughtful comments. I agree there are a number of steps that could be taken to reduce the easy access to guns, particularly those used in mass shootings. And, if they can be accomplished, that would be great. But what I'm trying to raise in my "critique" of the focus on making guns a little harder to access legally, are three problems:
Delete1. Given the current state of our political system (I hesitate calling it a democracy) it would appear that meaningful gun control will not pass at the national level, nor in most states. More likely responses from local and state governments will be more police with more weapons, although the presence or absence of police seems to have little or no deterrent effect.
2. Even if it becomes harder to access guns legally, there are so many guns already in this country, that this would probably only make a small dent in the gun related homicide rates. In addition to high profile school shootings, young people are threatened with gun violence everywhere. In fact, in the last 2 year, homicides are the number 1 cause of death of those 1-19 years of age, replacing automobile accidents
3. The response of the liberal media and politicians indicates, for the most part, a lack of understanding of the fact that this crisis and the other crises that we as a society face are interconnected and that until we confront these other issues (and I would put the crisis of our democracy at the top of the list) we cannot make real progress in confronting the issue of gun violence.
Yes, demand background checks, but also demand that we reconstitute our government and our social and economic systems to serve the interests of all of us.
Agree with the thoughtful comments. Just finished reading an article by Chris Hedges that I thought very good and enlightening: "America's Gun Fetish."
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