Solving US gun violence not as simple as ‘doing what John Howard did’
As an American who has lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, it’s probably the most common – and the toughest – question I get. Here are a few things to keep in mind. ASK JAMES MORROW A QUESTION ABOUT U.S. GUN VIOLENCE
“Mate, what is the deal with you and your guns?”
As an American who has lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, it’s probably the most common – and the toughest – question I get from friends and family and colleagues.
And it’s a question I’m being asked again, in the same perplexed, exasperated tones, after the twin mass shootings in Ohio and Texas this past weekend.
How is it possible, Australians want to know, that Americans are able to acquire a semiautomatic rifle and then walk into a school or a business or a house of worship and start massacring innocents?
It’s a tough one to respond to, because despite what everyone who asks the question wants to hear, there are no easy answers.
To be honest, I come at this from a conflicted position.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Ask James Morrow a question in the comments below
Despite my American upbringing and general conservative outlook, I’m not much of a gun guy.
I was raised in New York City, back in the bad old days when it was really sleazy and dangerous and Times Square was definitely not the family theme park it is today.
Yet even as a boy I noticed that despite shelves of laws prohibiting gun ownership, muggers and drug dealers as well as cabbies and shopkeepers all kept snub-nosed “Saturday night specials” within easy reach. It was an early lesson that the wider the gap between law and what is now called “lived experience”, the worse things can get for a society.
Later in life, I would learn the basics of shooting and firearms safety from my father (assume every weapon is loaded) after he moved to a rural property miles from any cop shop with bears and coyotes in residence.
I also got to meet his friendly dairy farming neighbours who would shoot a deer every season to be broken down and frozen, helping the family through the winter.
So I understand why lots of people want and even need firearms for sport, hunting, and self-protection.
But for Australians perplexed by what’s going on in America, here are a few things to keep in mind. None of this will solve the problem, but it may help people to understand.
First things first, it’s not simply a matter of “doing what John Howard did”.
There are an estimated 393 million civilian-held firearms in the United States (which is more than one weapon for every man, woman, and child in the nation).
The vast majority of these are unregistered, which means that any “buyback”, no matter how involuntary, would only take a small fraction of weapons off the street – likely those belonging to the most law-abiding.
Short of house-to-house searches, which would be both unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous for law enforcement, going down the Australian path of bans and buybacks would only remove a small fraction of the nation’s personal arsenal.
And it would confirm the worst fears of those who believe that an armed citizenry is the last best safeguard against tyranny.
Which again, sounds nuts to an Australian: Americans think that push comes to shove, they’ll be able to overthrow the government? Remind us again which side in that fight has tanks and nukes and fighter jets?
But remember, Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with their rulers, even before the Revolution.
The Puritans left England and settled in North America because they couldn’t get along with the established church. George Washington spent three years of his presidency putting down a violent tax protest known as the Whiskey Rebellion. The southern states rebelled violently against Washington over the issue of slavery.
And so on.
The second thing to understand is that, as much as mass shootings make the news, they make up a tiny fraction of the US’s gun violence.
In places like Chicago, gun violence is so commonplace it barely rates a mention on the national, much less international, stage.
While more than two dozen were killed in Texas and Ohio over the weekend, local media reports that over the same period of time at least 47 people were shot, four fatally, in gang-related violence Chicago.
Things got so bad that one hospital had to shut the doors to its emergency department, so overwhelmed were its staff.
It is this sort of violence — urban gang shootings, one-on-one killings, domestic murders – that claims almost all homicide victims in the US. A 2017 analysis by Mother Jones magazine found that in that year, mass shootings accounted for 0.7 per cent of all the nation’s homicides.
Indeed, the country’s overall homicide rate is half what it was in the mid 1990s — so things are, on this most important measure, improving, even if according to USA Today, 41 per cent of Americans fear mass shootings.
This isn’t to minimise the horror of what happened in that Texas Wal-Mart or that Ohio nightclub or the Las Vegas strip or in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania or any of the other countless locations where a madman has gone in determined to take down as many innocents as possible.
But it is important to understand the full picture. There is no single cause of mass shootings, and in a highly politicised America, the most necessary thing – putting aside tribal allegiances to work together on a problem – is also the least likely.
In an ideal world, conservatives would put aside some of their objections to restricting the sale of guns, and particularly so-called assault rifles.
Progressives would, meanwhile, stop their demonisation of the law abiding gun owners as simple minded rednecks and look at the mental health component of the problem.
Last month the US Secret Service released a report which found that 67 per cent of mass shooting suspects had some form of mental illness, and many experts believe that there needs to be more work done to ensure the seriously mentally ill undergo and are provided with treatment.
Does this answer the question about Americans and their guns? Maybe, maybe not.
But it might help Australians understand why things are as they are.
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