December 18, 2012

Brian Masters

Every day 80 people are shot to death in the US. The Sandy Hook slaughter is not as unusual as it should be.

Illustration: Matthew Golding.

THE massacre of innocents at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday was indeed, as President Barack Obama put it, heart-breaking. His halting, grieving address to the nation captured the pain that is felt in the immediate aftermath of such a shocking event. But the pain will not last, for it has happened before – and no American politician will have the nerve to propose the only cure to this repetitive insanity, which would be a sensible, mature and responsible attitude towards the ownership and use of guns. They would never be elected to public office again.

This President cannot stand for election a third time, so perhaps he might be able to break the mould. But it is hard to believe. The truth is, America is a society obsessed with guns and addicted to their repulsive but effective use as instruments of death. They like them; they teach their children to shoot them, as Nancy Lanza did with her son, Adam, the young man responsible for the carnage in Connecticut; they store them; they harbour a fetish for them, and will never tolerate any attempt to deny them their toys. They rarely admit what their guns are designed to do, which is to kill.

Statistics may be a bad excuse for prose, but those that pertain to this subject make chilling and necessary reading. They demonstrate that there is a pathological pleasure at large in the United States. There are nearly 300 million guns to be found there, one-third of them handguns – which are useless for hunting purposes, but brilliant as tools for killing. This represents the highest concentration of private ownership of murder weapons in the entire world.

Every year, 17,000 people are killed in America, 70 per cent of them with guns, and nearly 20,000 people commit suicide by shooting themselves to death in the home – where a gun is readily to hand. Almost half of all US households have a gun stored as easily as the knives and forks. In the whole world, only Colombia has a worse record.

The statistics are even more heart-breaking when applied to the young. The slaughter of children by gunfire in the United States is 25 times the rate of the 20 next largest industrial countries in the world combined. If you add them all up, since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, well over a million Americans, children and adults, have been shot to death, and even now 80 people die in this manner every day. The terrible slaughter on Friday is not as unusual as it should be.

Speaking personally, the very notion that an object in my hands could kill somebody in seconds if I pushed the right button fills me with passionate dread. Most Americans would think me blind to one obvious advantage that a gun bestows, and that is the powerful value of deterrence. Possession of a handgun protects us, they say, from random assault.

The trouble with this bland statement is that it is not true. Careful studies have demonstrated, over and over again, that homes which do not have a gun in the drawer are safer than those which do, for the mere sight of such a weapon provokes immediate action; the only thing it deters is thought.

Most tragic of all is the incidence of suicides, far higher in American homes that possess guns than in those that do not. If a gun is at hand, resolution of one’s troubles can be swift and painless, effected in seconds. The gun renders suicide an attractive and emotional option; homes that harbour them are inherently dangerous places.

Adam Lanza presents us with a woeful illustration of all this. He was troubled, and he had weapons. It was easy. And yet, incredibly, suggestions have been put forward to extend the carrying of guns well beyond the home, to virtually anywhere. A Texas Republican in the House of Representatives, Louie Gohmert, once proposed a bill to permit members of Congress to carry firearms into the Capitol.

That such a barmy idea may even be uttered speaks loudly of America’s malaise. In Arizona, where the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the slaughter of six others took place last year, almost anyone can have a permit to carry a concealed weapon and be allowed to take guns into a bar; that same state’s legislators have talked about passing laws permitting teachers and students to carry guns to school with them. Such is the contagion of madness.

Furthermore, the news channels are so far removed from any moral anguish that they happily pounce upon the scene of latest slaughter to get close-ups of bloodstains and to portray the distress of the bereaved in harrowingly stupid interviews. Some channels will not deign to air any view which might suggest that citizens, even those who are mentally disturbed, ought perhaps not to be armed with lethal weapons; they might thenceforth be refused advertising revenue if they dared.

That is why President Obama’s decency, humanity and restraint should be a lesson to the media and a snub to their extravagance. In 2008, the deranged student Seung-Hui Cho mowed down 32 of his fellows at Virginia Tech. The news channels did exactly what he wanted, obliging him with massive attention. This young man had no point he wanted to prove, no statement he needed to make, no enemies that he wished to conquer. He wanted only to express himself, and took with him two powerful guns with which to do so.

This was murder in the pursuit of self-esteem, what the writer James Carroll called ”expressive violence”. It was the perversion of yet another American value, the one which says no child should have his aspirations for self-expression thwarted; ally this with the value that nobody should be denied the right to own and use a gun, and you have the loudest expression of self imaginable.

Over the decades, there have been some weak attempts at sanity, always subsequently rescinded. When a gunman tried to assassinate President Reagan and instead gravely wounded White House press secretary Jim Brady, the US Congress was shocked into action. It passed the so-called Brady Law, which included some small measures to make handguns less easily available to maniacs. In the ensuing 30 years that law has been so progressively emasculated that it now means nothing. Any politician who tried to give it some weight would not be re-elected. This is not because the public would not welcome reform, but because those with power and money would not allow it.

Here is the sort of thing they do: in Virginia, laws have been enacted prohibiting the police from mounting so-called ”sting” operations on shops that openly sell assault weapons to people without checking their histories. The police are thereby legally prevented from doing their job of keeping public order. Whenever they try, somebody will happily go before the camera to proclaim the right to carry and use a gun without any restriction, even that of lunacy.

And here is the sort of thing they say: an Arkansas Republican called Jay Dickey told an International Herald Tribune journalist that ”it’s really simple with me. We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have”. By this, the man can only mean the freedom to kill, which he cherishes higher than the freedom to be governed democratically. It is indeed a frightening remark because the US government is seen as the enemy.

Nor is this paranoia isolated. After the vile shooting in Arizona, the sale of handguns rocketed because the loonies were terrified that their government might take their guns away. Former vice-president Dick Cheney once loudly proclaimed, to wild applause and the kind of whooping with which adolescents greet pop stars or baseball heroes, that America’s source of happiness sprang from the barrel of a gun. His audience, of course, was the National Rifle Association, one of the most noisome and dangerous groups in the world. It is impossible to overstate its power and influence. On the matter of weapons designed to kill, it controls America.

Members of Congress are afraid of this pernicious organisation, which has spent more than $35 million on its lobbying machine since 1997, and spends millions more on advertisements and publicity often devoted to the calumny and denigration of anyone who resists the appeal of its reckless morals. It is not above simply telling lies about its opponents to get its way.

The NRA might assume the manners and attitudes of a John Wayne, but the world which inhabits its imagination disappeared well over a century ago. Justice Stephen Breyer, with rare eloquence and clarity, has pointed out the differences between an ”18th-century, primarily rural America, where frontier life demanded guns, and the present, primarily urban America, where gun possession presents a greater risk of taking innocent lives”. This obvious truth, grounded in nothing more complex than common sense, eludes everyone at the NRA.

A few years ago, mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York and Thomas Menino of Boston organised a group of mayors to speak out against gun violence, on the grounds that neither the White House nor Congress appeared willing to do so.. They were not popular with the NRA, and their movement went quiet. Now, mayor Bloomberg has again urged the President to crack down on guns. But the bald and distressing fact is that all too many Americans are intoxicated with the glamour of guns and indifferent to the havoc and horror they create. Worse, they regard them as fuel for the kind of anarchic, nihilist entertainment in which they rejoice.

Such appetites may, and should, be easily satisfied with gun clubs, where gun nuts can shoot at inanimate targets to their hearts’ content. Why don’t they? Because such a skilful sport lacks the one ingredient which infatuates them the most – the risk of death through the exercise of individual power.

Of course, there is no reason on earth why any American should heed what I say, and they might even consider my words an impertinence. Indeed, in a lifetime of writing about crime and criminals, I have never argued anything with so little expectation of success. But what really depresses me is that even if America’s police chiefs, their parsons, their heroes, or their President, were to say something similar, they would pay no attention at all.

Brian Masters is the author of The Evil That Men Do and Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen.

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