In looking at the substantial library of books on the American gun control issue, it is difficult to be remotely optimistic of any meaningful change in the culture that generates the regular massacres. The library itself is contaminated by vested interests. Legal historian Patrick J Charles’s history of gun rights, Armed in America (2019) argues that too much historical work on firearms has been “principled on legal advocacy, political activism and expanding the meaning and the scope of the Second Amendment as broadly as possible”. That amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Those reflecting on the deep-rootedness of the gun culture frequently point to three main historical reasons: America’s history of rebellion, the battles over its frontiers and the fierce focus on individual rights. But there was also a widespread consensus after the American civil war about controlled access to arms; in Charles’s words, “state and local governments maintained broad police powers to regulate dangerous weapons in the interest of public safety . . . so long as they did not utterly destroy the armed citizenry model of the Second Amendment”, and without encroaching on the individual’s right to armed self-defence in “extreme cases”.
That consensus broke down during the second half of the 20th century. Firearms advocates, most obviously through the National Rifle Association, aggressively pursued a more expansive reading of the Second Amendment which the supreme court had largely avoided, and this advocacy, especially from the 1970s, included the use of academics to promote a particular reading of the amendment, the so-called “standard model” of the amendment, divorcing the issue from its connection to militia service, as originally intended, and instead pushing to make personal firearms ownership sacrosanct.
[ A timeline of failed attempts to address gun violence in the USOpens in new window ]
Estimates suggest there are about 390 million civilian-owned guns in the United States. This week, commentators drew attention to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organisation that tracks gun attacks, which calculates there have been 3,500 mass shootings across the US, involving four or more people being killed or injured, since the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 which left 26 dead.
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There is, of course, a parallel archive of solemn and teary pronouncements from US leaders that enough is enough. President Joe Biden’s reaction to this week’s shootings in Texas will now be added to that archive, to no avail. To be fair to Biden, he has, throughout his career, pushed for tougher laws, but the dispersal of political power and the strength of the gun lobby in the United States has created an insurmountable wall. The system of government gives disproportionate power to gun-embracing areas and Democrats, as seen for example in the aftermath of their drubbing in the 1994 midterm elections, have historically linked some poor results to their stance on stricter gun control.
The Obama White House archive contains a section on his reaction to various shooting atrocities, titled “Now Is the Time to Do Something About Gun Violence”. But it seems now is never the time. In campaigning for the presidency, Obama was tepid on gun control, aware that the delicate balance in swing states could be tipped by pushing the issue. Obama responded emotionally to the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 and in its wake polls suggested most Americans supported legislation to close loopholes on background checks and facilitate a ban on assault weapons but in 2013, such a ban could only generate 40 votes in favour on the Senate floor with 60 against. A few years later it was highlighted that the US, with fewer than 5 per cent of the world’s population, had 45 per cent of the world’s civilian held firearms.
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Writing in 2014, legal academic Charles Collier, reflecting on the gun culture’s rootedness in the “individualist paradigm” backed by the mantra that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, concluded that “substantive gun control measures are, in the context of American cultural history, not merely improbable but essentially impossible”. As many like to see it, this is about a beloved philosophy of freedom dating back centuries which means gun ownership is responsible citizenship.
Life and liberty, it seems, cannot be balanced in the US. Consider the conclusion of American author Greg Gibson, writing in the New York Times in 2014: “In essence, this is the way we in America want things to be. We want our freedom, and we want our firearms, and if we have to endure the occasional school shooting, so be it.” Twenty-two years before Gibson wrote that, his son Galen was murdered, the random victim of a school shooting.
The methodical execution of children in American schools will continue while, at the same time, the US will tear itself apart over abortion, with many of the supposed “pro-lifers” the most enthusiastic defenders of liberal gun laws that they believe confer “God-given rights”.