AMERICA:Obama's speech saluted the heroism of victims such as a nine-year-old girl. But many see guns as their God-given right, writes LARA MARLOWE
IN THE US, every movie has a happy ending. From every tragedy must come some good. Resilience and optimism are admirable American characteristics.
President Barack Obama’s memorial to the six people killed and 13 wounded by 22-year-old Jared Loughner was a case in point. By concentrating on the goodness of the victims, Obama managed to turn the country’s umpteenth rampage shooting into a parable about heroism and “what is best in America”.
Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl whose death so moved the country, was herself an example of Americans’ ability to transform the meaning of disaster. Christina was born on September 11th, 2011, and was featured in a book about 50 babies born that day, Faces of Hope.
Her mother Roxanna told the Arizona Republic newspaper her daughter “looked at 9/11 as a holiday . . . and looked for all the hopeful things that came out of it”. The Green family said they were “delighted” a New York fireman brought the tattered “national 9/11 flag” – which had been photographed in the ruins of the World Trade Center – to Tucson. It flew outside the St Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church during Christina’s funeral on Thursday. But even as Americans sought meaning in the disasters that book-ended Christina’s short life, they seemed to passively accept that rampage shootings are a fact of life, the price of “freedom”. Within days of the atrocity, journalists dished out the same old cliches about “the healing process”.
“God’s ways are not our ways”, a well-wisher outside the office of the wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords told me. Referring to the outpouring of grief and sympathy, she added: “Think about all the beautiful energy that’s coming together.”
Beautiful energy? Such language is a thin veneer, masking the country’s failure to make this simple connection: the highest concentration of gun ownership in the world equals the highest firearm homicide rate in industrialised countries. Some 80 Americans die of gunshot wounds every day. In the wake of the massacre, you wanted to scream: “It’s the guns, stupid!”
In his 34-minute speech, Obama referred once in passing to the crux of the drama: “Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental system.” The conversation may have commenced, but I’ll wager it won’t go far. Two days after Loughner’s rampage, handgun sales in Arizona had increased 60 per cent. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents to a poll by the Arizona Republic said gun laws were not too lax. The Glockmeister shops that market semi-automatic pistols like the one Loughner used reported a 300-500 per cent increase in demand for high-capacity magazine cartridges, which fire 33 rounds, instead of just 15.
According to the Violence Policy Centre, “similar semi-automatic firearms with high-capacity magazines have been used in most major mass shootings in the US in the past 30 years”. In 2007, a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people with a Glock 19 with a high-capacity magazine, the weapon used by Loughner on January 8th. Both killers exhibited signs of mental illness, but were allowed to buy guns.
High-capacity magazines were banned from 1994 until 2004, when President George W Bush allowed the ban to expire, at the urging of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Such is the hold of the NRA over Congress that the group was exempted from a campaign fund disclosure law passed in the House last year. The NRA has hidden behind “respect for the victims” in refusing to comment on the killings in Tucson. It has not abandoned its campaign to legalise guns in schools, bars, parks, offices and churches.
Representative Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed and son wounded by a gunman on the Long Island Railway, and New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg have proposed a Bill that would restrict magazines for semi-automatic pistols to 10 bullets.
Jared Loughner was tackled when he stopped to change his ammunition clip. If he’d had a 10-round magazine, he could have shot at most 10 people, instead of 19. The NRA campaigned against the ban. The group’s power has grown since.
There is no reason to think the McCarthy-Lautenberg Bill – the bare minimum that might be expected after Arizona – will pass.
In quotes published by EJ Dionne of the Washington Post, Tea Party senator Rand Paul and Republican representative Paul Broun said Americans need guns not for hunting or self-protection but as the last resort against a “tyrannical” government. Such beliefs underlie the refusal of many on the right to discuss regulations on guns.
The mere suggestion Congress might consider the issue after the carnage in Arizona prompted Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America to tell the New York Times: "Politicians need to remember that these rights aren't given to us by them. They come from God. They are God-given rights."