Guns are killing Americans – and that has to change

The United States is heading down the wrong path when it comes to weapons, writes Sholto Byrnes

Lucinda Rex, right, and Clarity Thorne embrace during a candlelight vigil downtown for the victims of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. David Goldman / AP Photo

It took America’s National Rifle Association a little longer this time. For two days after the deadliest mass shooting in US history – the Orlando atrocity that left 50 dead and 53 injured – the irrepressible gun-lovers who declare themselves to be tireless defenders of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”, no matter how many innocents die, kept quiet.

Then yesterday one of their leaders, the NRA’s chief lobbyist Chris Cox, spoke up. The killing spree had nothing to do with the ease with which military grade firearms are available to buy in America. The fault lay instead, he wrote in USA Today, with “the Obama administration’s political correctness” and failure to tackle “radical Islamic terrorists”.

The background

Some may find it strange that a man who had been investigated twice by the FBI for possible connections to terrorism – as the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, had in 2013 and 2014 – could openly buy a long gun and a pistol within the last weeks

But then the NRA and its allies in the US Congress are such tireless defenders of guns that they don’t believe in banning people on terrorist watch lists from buying them. They blocked a bill to do so last December, voting against the measure during and even directly after the attack at San Bernardino by a self-radicalised couple who killed 14 people and seriously injured 22 more.

The Al Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn had famously urged would-be jihadists in the US to take advantage of America’s lax laws. In a 2011 video he said: “You can go down to a gun show and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check, most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”

But time and time again we are told that too many guns is not the problem.

What's the problem?

On at least one occasion, such as last June, when Dylann Roof, 21, shot and killed nine worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, firearms proponents have said that too few guns was the issue.

According to Charles Cotton, an NRA board member, the pastor was to blame for opposing “concealed carry” in churches. Eight parishioners “who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead,” Mr Cotton posted on an online forum. “Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

The statistics are very clear. In countries with strict laws on gun ownership, such as the UK, deaths from shootings are very low, at around one per million. In the US, however, the figure is close to 30 per million. According to a BBC report: “Of all the murders in the US in 2012, 60 per cent were by firearm, compared with 31 per cent in Canada, 18.2 per cent in Australia, and just 10 per cent in the UK.”

The fact that America is “absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms,” as Mr Gadahn, also known as “Jihad Joe”, put it, is no reason not to act. When Australia tightened its gun laws after a shooting in 1996, one of the measures it took was a buy-back that reduced the number of firearms by one fifth. Not, perhaps, enough in America; but then the programme could be extended, or made ongoing.

The US gun lobby, of course, was outraged by Australia’s widely-applauded move. The NRA described it as a “mass confiscation … seizing firearms from law-abiding citizens – leaving them helpless against the attentions of armed criminals”.

The public opinion

American public opinion is not actually with the arms fanatics. In a poll by Gallup last October, 55 per cent were in favour of stricter gun control laws, while 86 per cent supported universal background checks. Why, then, do all attempts to lower America’s appalling gun homicide rate by making it harder to get one fail?

There is much dark talk of the power of lobbyists in America. But in the case of the NRA and its friends, their sway over politicians – whom they publicly grade for gun-friendliness – is so great that even Barack Obama felt obliged to say that he went shooting “all the time” in a 2013 interview. Just clay pigeons, in his case, but the fact that he had to talk of this supposed enthusiasm shows the lobby’s reach.

This fetish for the right to bear arms, as outlined in the US constitution’s second amendment, has to end. It is not even legally beyond dispute, as until the 1960s the Supreme Court generally interpreted it as referring to a collective right of the “well-regulated militia … necessary to the security of a free state”, not to individual citizens.

The right to defend

The insistence that every householder has the right to defend themselves with guns led to 265 people being accidentally shot by children in America last year. Eighty-three died, and 41 children killed themselves. This March, a gun rights activist was boasting online about her four-year-old son’s target practice. The next day he shot her in the back after he came across her weapon in the car.

Most of the world looks on at this obsession with one thought: it is utter madness. “Repeating the same thing but expecting a different result is the definition of insanity,” wrote the NRA’s Chris Cox yesterday, quoting Albert Einstein. Indeed it is. And responding to every shooting by saying that it has nothing to do with lethal weapons is a perfect example. When will he, and all those who made it so easy for Omar Mateen to commit Sunday’s atrocity, wake up to that fact?

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia

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