31,347 US gun deaths a year. That’s freedom
Hugo Rifkind
Self-defence is not the priority. Rather it’s about individual (perhaps selfish) rights drowning out everything else
I bought my first gun at a country fair when I was 13 and I have rarely loved a thing more. It was a Gat air pistol, capable of firing corks, darts or pellets, and I’d had a mind to use it to hunt things. I suppose I could have used it to kill rabbits, but only if I’d been exceedingly skilled in throwing it at them. Used conventionally, it was capable of mortally wounding anything up to the size and stature of a bumble bee. Mainly, I deployed it against drinks cans, flowerpots and the tulips by the back wall. Sorry, Mum.
A bigger, heavier more powerful air pistol followed a couple of years later. That one was used mainly, or at least most memorably, on the farm where my friend Alex lived, although for crows and pigeons you really wanted his air rifle. I’ve used proper rifles since then, and shotguns aplenty, but I’ve never enjoyed myself more with a gun than I did with that one. It was a Weihrauch HW77, and it had a telescopic sight on top. In later years we’d go out at night in the fields with a searchlight and a six-pack. Proper redneck fun.
I mention all this for two reasons, and the first is to drag this column away from the lofty, censorious and frankly ignorant tone that most discussions of gun control adopt. Too often, people struggle to separate their distaste for guns from their distaste for the people who fire them. We do this particularly in Britain when we talk about American gun control; as though operating from the starting point that anybody who wants to own a gun must, by definition, be either a gangster, an inbred Deliverance-style hillbilly, a Waco-style nutjob or a budding psychopath with a tiny penis. I’m not having it. It’s rarely how I get my kicks these days, but that’s probably got a fair bit to do with living in Crouch End. Sometimes guns are ace.
I’ll tell you what else is ace, though: British gun law. Many British people will never even have seen a gun, save in the hands of soldiers or airport policemen. Pistols are wholly illegal and have been since the Dunblane shootings of 1996. Automatic weapons are also illegal, as are properly functioning pump action shotguns. Those who own guns must keep them in locked cupboards, which are inspected by the police, and can lose their licences if anybody else (even, in one case, their 81-year-old mother) knows where they keep the keys.
Obviously, it sometimes fails. Three people were killed by a man called Michael Atherton on New Year’s Day, and his guns were legally held. Indeed, a girl from Gloucester is in hospital right now after being shot in the back with an airgun on Sunday. But contrast the 51 people killed by guns in the UK last year with their (deep breath) 31,347 counterparts in the United States, and it’s hard not to conclude that we’re doing something very right. After the deaths of 12 people at last Friday’s cinema shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the great question once again is why America doesn’t feel capable of doing it too.
It is surely indisputable by this stage that gun control would save lives. This has to be true everywhere, not just in America, and the stricter it gets the more lives would be saved. Over the past few days various American voices have sought to be make despicable hay over the Utøya massacre a year ago, in which Anders Breivik used weapons for which he was fully licensed. “Norway has very strict gun control laws,” John McCain told CNN.
In fact, Norway’s gun laws are only strict in comparison with America’s. Which is to say, not very. Breivik conducted his slaughter with a Glock pistol and semi-automatic hunting rifle, both of which he obtained with only a little forward planning. In Colorado, though, James Holmes bought his guns over the counter and his bullets online. Maybe even Norway’s laws would have stymied him. Britain’s would have likely thwarted both of them. Certainly you can kill people with a shotgun, but only a couple at a time.
Why does America so fear to be like us? It can’t just be the Second Amendment, regardless of what it is supposed to mean. True, the American tendency to treat their constitution as a holy text is baffling at the best of times. (Who cares what Thomas Jefferson meant in 1787? Maybe he hadn’t given people bringing semi-automatic weaponry into cinemas that much thought?) But this surely goes deeper.
Much as it might look that way, America’s debate about gun control isn’t really about being able to defend yourself (as part of a militia or otherwise) from the inevitable tyrannical government when the Muslims and/or Jews take over. It’s about freedom, and freedom of a very particular sort. It’s about the rights of the individual versus the greater good. America just doesn’t seem to do the latter. Call it a legacy of the Bill of Rights; call it the upshot of half a century fighting communism; call it pure and simple selfishness, whatever; it’s there. When American politics sounds odd and alien to European ears, this is why. It is the sound of the clamour for individual liberty drowning out everything else.
On the American right even the desire to not let people do things — have abortions, marry people of the same sex — is today characterised as protecting the freedom of those who object. Right-wing America doesn’t want to give up its guns for the same reasons it didn’t want to be forced to have healthcare and doesn’t believe in global warming.
Opposition to gun control is this obsession at its purest. American liberty holds that the honest, decent gunowner should not be held responsible for the actions of a minority of criminals and lunatics.
European liberty starts by worrying about the criminals and lunatics and works backwards from there. Me, I’d rather be in Europe. But then, I am. In any political system other than the American one it’s unthinkable that popular outrage about a domestic problem that causes (let’s take that deep breath again) 31,347 horrible deaths a year could be so utterly dwarfed, every time it flares up, by popular outrage about the notion of any possible solution.
America could solve its gun problem in half a generation if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to. That’s a whole other problem it needs to solve first.
