Guns and America – A State of Denial

The deaths were sudden, violent and totally senseless. Innocent lives snatched away in the blink of an eye, without any reason, or remorse. The killer dead, a willing victim of his own murderous rampage. The motive, an illusion, fuelled by a mixture of ignorance, anger and hatred.

That’s where the similarities end. For these were not thirty two American lives lost on a windy morning in one of America’s premier educational institutions. These were a hundred and seventy one Iraqis massacred in cold blood in a car bombing a day later.

But these victims were hardly mourned, barely earning a passing mention on American prime-time television, simply added to the tally of an ever growing grim statistic. There were no pictures of grieving friends or family, no tv-psychiatrists talking about post-traumatic stress and the healing process, no ‘medical correspondents’ explaining the damage caused to organs by shrapnel, no security experts analysing what went wrong, no finger pointing about responsibility, no Presidential address, no televised prayers for the deceased and certainly no investigations. This was just another incident in the seemingly endless bloodbath that has become a feature of life in occupied Iraq. Or as Condi Rice likes to call it, ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East’, though nobody seems to be quite sure just what is being born here.

Of course, these deaths in Iraq were not caused by American bombs but by a suicide bomber. A breed, strangely enough,  unheard of in Saddam’s Iraq, and whose presence in Iraq today has been made possible by the ripe conditions created by the chaos in the wake of a hyperpower’s misadventure. But these are minor hiccups for a nation whose idea of conflict resolution has always been to fight violence with still more violence. Which seems to be the exact guiding principle behind the politically powerful gun-lobby in the United States. As crazy as it sounds, gun-rights campaigners in the US have actually gone on a pre-emptive offensive (another American speciality) after the Virginia Tech massacre, and just two days back, the shooting inside the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Their logic is simple. If everybody had a gun, the massacre wouldn’t have taken place at all, because somebody would have killed the attacker in the first place.

Of course, the first time I heard this reasoning, I did a double take, It’s probably incomprehensible to most people outside this country. But this school of thought is not new here. For years, the Luby’s Massacre in Killeen, Texas has been the rallying cry for the National Rifle Association and other conservative gun-rights groups in the US. In 1991 a deranged man drove his truck into a Luby’s Cafetaria in the town of Killeen and shot 23 people dead. A girl, Suzanna Hupp, saw both her parents being killed but was powerless to do anything about it because the handgun she possessed was left behind in their vehicle to comply with a Texas law against concealed weapons in public places. She later stood for public office and campaigned tirelessly to have this law overturned. And in 1995, it was.

Call it cultural difference, or pacifism, but very very few people in the world can agree with, or even understand, America’s obsession with guns. The much-abused Second Amendment to the American constitution is always cited by the god n’ guns lobby. This constitutional amendment which states “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.” has always been interpreted as granting Americans the right to carry arms, and is the cornerstone of their defense against any argument to the contrary. It is ironical that the same section of American society which complains the loudest about Islamic fundamentalists not allowing the religion to change with the times, should themselves fight so hard to defend an archaic constitutional provision that was clearly written under very different circumstances in the middle of the 18th century.

America is a country where the frontier spirit is still alive today. The same willingness to go to extreme lengths to defend one’s individuality still exists. People do not give up their rights easily. Most are ready to fight for them if required. The same stubbornness that centuries ago enabled them to take over and settle in an alien land, has now morphed into an attitude, an almost insular mindset. After all, why do civilians need guns today? Ostensibly to defend themselves. Dare we ask, from whom? Maybe it is a stupid question to ask in a country where people built underground shelters and stocked up on food, water and weapons for the armageddon that was supposed to occur on New Years Day at the turn of the millennium. The bunker mentality is in evidence wherever you turn. People are suspicious of strangers. You may not know your neighbours even after staying at a place for years. Ignoring ‘No Trespassing’ signs can actually get you killed. People live in cocoons, and a ‘community’ is an artificial social structure that people are encouraged and cajoled to participate in, much like the ridiculous concept of ‘quality-time’ that parents are supposed to spend with their kids (isn’t every moment of your life spent with your family and friends quality time??). In its attempt to break down everything into a science, American society is losing its ability to look at the simpler, more obvious solutions to life’s problems. Every aspect of life, every behaviourial nuance does not need to be psycho-analyzed! 5 year old kids don’t need to go into therapy! Teenagers need to talk to parents and siblings, not go around beating up homeless people and harbouring thoughts of mass murder!!

Obviously, the camouflage-jacket-wearing, hunting-is-cool-and-you-are-a-sissy, NRA-membership-waving gun lover does not think so. And oh, they are very well connected. After the Virginia Tech incident, not a single media outlet took the gun-control issue head-on, though it was obviously the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Not a single 2008 presidential candidate talked about it. Because they know, it can cost them dearly. So we see talking heads on television and editorials in newspapers and magazines talk about the psychological profile of the killer, the reasons behind the murders, the step-by-step recreation of every step that he took that day, but not about the basic fact that he could not have carried out this act without the easy availability of the extremely deadly weapons that he used.

Unfortunately, this kind of meat-headed thinking percolates all the way to American foreign policy. Looked at objectively and over time, the overall strategy seems to consist of three simple steps – provoke a standoff between two parties, arm one side, wait for an escalation of violence and then arm the other side. If that doesn’t work, no problem. Just add a few 500-pound bombs, a hundred more bombing runs and a couple of thousand more trigger-happy soldiers. It fits right in with the theory of ‘more guns solve all problems’. The results, of course, are there for all to see. The thing is, I can sit here and pontificate about it. If you’re in Baghdad between a car-bomb on the sreet and a stealth bomber above your head, you don’t have such luxuries.

“Guns don’t kill, people do” goes the argument. For decades, this is the best the NRA could come up with. Of course, it’s not my country, not my culture and it’s easy to dismiss my opinion. But at least I recognize stupidity when I see it. Every country in the world has its share of lunatics and mass murderers. But the United States is perhaps the only one which creates such ripe conditions for them and empowers them to carry out their macabre fantasies. If Cho Seung-Hui was armed with a knife instead of the automatic handgun that he could buy with his credit card in downtown Balcksburg, it’s probably safe to say that there wouldn’t be thirty two victims. But that’s an academic discussion.

In the United States, the onus is always on the anti-gun campaigners to prove that restrictive gun laws reduce gun crimes, and not the other way round. So the premise is that guns are not harmful, and that any attempts to prevent citizens from obtaining sophisticated and deadly weaponry is in effect, an assault on their human rights. For example, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was signed into law by Clinton in 1994, to ban the over-the-counter sale of semi-automatic assault rifles like the AK-47. However, following a study which showed ‘no direct correlation’ between the law and decreasing gun-crime rates, the law expired in 2004, with no significant attempt to revive it. This is a classic example of the ‘guilty unless proven innocent’ situation that exists for anti-gun campaigners in the US.

It seems unfortunate for this country, and indeed the rest of the world, that the current trigger-happy approach to international relations and the deep-rooted love affair with guns, are both rooted in the same cultural background. And, as they are so eager to preach to the Islamic world, the change to that culture needs to come from within. The number of moderates on these issues in the United States far outnumber the extremists, and they are the ones who should ’speak out’ and bring about that change. The world will probably not remember a murder incident in the southern United States, but every time another daisy cutter is dropped from a stealth bomber somewhere, the stereotype of the gun-toting shoot-’em-up ugly american will come rushing back.

~ by Shubho on April 22, 2007.