The brutal murder of 20 children and seven adults inNewtown, Connecticut, shakes us to the core as individuals and requires aresponse as citizens. The United States seems to reelfrom one mass gun killing to another – roughly one a month this year alone.Easy access to guns in the US leads to horrificmurder rates relative to other highly educated and wealthy societies. Americaneeds to find a better way.
Other countries have done so. Between the mid-1970’s andthe mid-1990’s, Australia had several mass shootings. After a particularlyhorrible massacre in 1996, a new prime minister,John Howard, declared that enough was enough. He instituteda severe crackdown on gun ownership, and forced would-be gun owners to submit to a rigorousapplication process, and to document why they would need a gun.
Conditions for gun ownership in Australia are now verystrict, and the registration and approval process can take a year or more.Howard’s government also implemented a rigorous “buyback”policy, to enable the government to purchase guns already owned by the public.
The policy worked. While violent crime has not ended inAustralia, murders are down, and, even more dramatically, there has not been asingle mass shooting since 1996 in which three or more people died (thedefinition used in many studies of mass shootings). Before the crackdown, therehad been 13 such massacres in 18 years.
Yet the US still refuses to act, even after this year’s string of shocking incidents: the massacre in a movietheatre in Colorado, an attack on a Sikh community in Milwaukee,another on a shopping mall in Oregon, and many more before the ruthless slaughter of first graders and school staff inNewtown. The gun lobby in the US remains powerful, and politicians are afraidto counter it. Given the shooting of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in2011, perhaps they even fear that they, too, might be targeted.
There can be little doubt that some societies are more steeped in violence than others, evencontrolling for obvious factors like income levels and education. The US homicide rate is roughly four times that of comparablesocieties in Western Europe, and Latin America’s homicide rates are even higherthan in the US (and dramatically higher than Asian countries at roughly thesame income level). What accounts for staggeringly high rates in the US andLatin America?
American violence is rooted in history. The US and LatinAmerican countries are all “conquest” societies,in which Europeans ruled over multi-racialsocieties. In many of these countries, including the US, the European conquerors and their descendantsnearly wiped out the indigenouspopulations, partly through disease, but also through war, starvation, deathmarches, and forced labor.
In the US and many Latin American countries, slaveholding fueled mass violence as well. The slaves– and generations of their descendants – were routinely murdered.
The US also developed a particular populist belief that gunownership constitutes a vital protection against government tyranny. The US was born in a citizens’ revolt againstBritish imperial power. The right of citizens to organize militias to fight government tyranny was therefore afounding idea of the new country, enshrined inthe Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which declares that, because acountry needs a well-regulated militia, the people have the right to bear arms.
Since citizens’ militias are anachronistic, gun owners nowuse the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if thatsomehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Courthas agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owningAmerican sub-culture.
But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadaysare getting massive bloodshed and fear. The claim that gun ownership ensuresfreedom is especially absurd, given that most of the world’s vibrantdemocracies have long since cracked down on private gun ownership. No tyranthas risen in Australia since Howard’s gun-control reforms.
Simply put, freedom in the twenty-first century does notdepend on unregulated gun ownership. Indeed, America’s gun culture is a threatto freedom, after the murder of a president, senator, and other public leaders,and countless assassination attempts againstpublic officials over recent decades.
Yet US gun culture remains as pervasiveas it is unrecorded. America reels from oneshooting disaster to the next, and on nearly every occasion, politicians dutifully declare their continued devotion to unregulated gun ownership. Indeed, no oneeven knows how many guns Americans hold. The number is estimated to be around
270million, or almost one per person on average. According to one recent poll,
47% of households have a gun at home.
The shooting in Newtown was not only especially horrificand heartbreaking, but is also part of an increasingly common pattern – aspecific kind of murder-suicide that has been carefully studied bypsychologists and psychiatrists. Loners, oftenwith paranoid tendencies, commit these heinous acts as part of their own suicide. They usecarefully planned and staged mass murders of innocents in order to take revengeon society and to glorify themselves as theytake their own lives.
The perpetrators are not hardened criminals; many have noprevious criminal record. They are pathetic, deranged, and often have struggled with mentalinstability for much of their lives. They need help – and society needs to keepguns out of their reach.
America has now suffered around 30 shooting massacres overthe past 30 years, including this year’s deadly dozen; each is a gut-wrenching tragedyfor many families. And yet, each time, gun owners scream that freedom will beeliminated if they are unable to buy assaultweapons and 100-round clips.
The bloodbath in Newtown isthe time to stop feeding this gun frenzy. Australia and other countries providemodels of how to do it: regulate and limit gun ownership to approved uses.America’s real freedoms depend on sane public policy.
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