On December 14, 2012 we witnessed the wanton murder of 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7, as well as 6 adults, at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator was an emotionally disturbed 20 year old man with automatic assault weapons, lifted from his divorced mother's ample gun collection. after having first murdered her in the home where they lived together.
There have been 61 mass shooting incidents in the United States since 1982, 30 since the Columbine incident in 1999, and 10 in the year 2012, alone. The record alone is shocking - the time-line trend even more so.
With about 30,000 gun-related deaths per year, of which about 17,000 are suicides, about 12,000 are homicides and the remaining 1,000 mostly killimg of innocent bystanders, this places the United States at 4.5 times the per capita average of all OECD nations.
How can a country justify combining its status as the most overtly Christian nation on earth with this record of violent behavior? Is it a problem of too many firearms at large, is violence an integral part of the American cultural DNA, or is it all of the above?
GUN OWNERSHIP
The Second Amendment to the United States' Constitution, enacted in 1791, 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"
These few words have ever since been the subject of much political and judicial discord, often bordering on hysterical irrationality, particularly on whether the amendment should be interpreted as a right in the context of forming state militias, or as a wholly independent and personal right. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 ruled, in a narrow majority decision, that the amendment should indeed be interpreted as an individual right to bear arms.
Well before the enactment of the Second Amendment, common law, as well some early state constitutions, already affirmed people's right to keep and bear arms. There should be of little doubt that James Madison drafted this particular amendment with the purpose of securing the votes of moderate Anti-Federalists towards fullfillment of his wish to establish a centrally governed United States of America. Political expediency was not born yesterday.
But the Supreme Court in its 2008 ruling also afirms:
"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." (Italics mine).
Herein lies the seed of the reasonable, as well as maybe the possible, within the context of U.S. politics: a ban on private ownership of semi-automatic assault weapons which can fire multiple rounds of high caliber ammunition without the need for reloading. The only plausible end use for this category of arms is to kill people, as many as possible and in the shortest time possible.
My concern, however, is that this will not be the logical outcome from the fact that, for once, the nation has been shaken to the core by the Newtown massacre of small children. We may well end up with nothing more than a call for stricter background-check rules to keep firearms out of the hands of mentally disturbed people, the most likely perpetrators of mass shootings.
The uselessness of such a measure should be evident to anybody. There is no national database over mentally disturbed people. In most cases we do not even know who they are before it is too late.
Therefore, the only viable remedy is to make it more difficult for anybody to lay their hands on assault weapons, preferrably also making it a criminal offense to sell and own one.
A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE
This is where the country faces its biggest challenge - this unfathomable fascination with violence in so many aspects of daily life - in movies, television, video games, sports - and in the glorification of gun ownership.
It is interesting to note that in countries such as Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, Austria and Germany - all with long hunting traditions - in every one of them we find a gun ownership ratio of almost exactly 30 per 100 inhabitants.
It would be reasonable to believe that the gun-ownership-for-hunting ratio is similar in the United States. That leaves us with another 60 guns per 100 inhabitants, or close to 190 million firearms, laying around at the average of nearly two for every American household.
Since the actual number of households owning guns is situated somwhere between one third and one half the total, depending on who you believe, you may readily conclude that quite a few households contain lots of guns. For what purpose other than hunting? Self-defense?
There are no reliable statistics or credible studies attesting to the beneficial value of keeping or bearing guns for self defense. The conclusions reached by such studies are all over the map, depending on the authors' bias.
It is in most cases a criminal offense to kill an unarmed person under any circumstance, and your chances of successfully confronting and out-gunning an already armed perpetrator ready to pull the trigger is as close to nil as any odds can be.
On the other hand, we should be reminded of the 17,000 annual gun-related suicides. Shooting oneself is the least complicated way of committing suicide, and ready access to a gun in the home in the moment of ultimate despear certainly have an influence on the number of successful suicides actually carried out.
Furthermore, a substantial proportion of the annual 12,000 gun-related homicides occur in the home, perpetrated by familily members or persons known to the victim, frequently as a result of momentary personal altercations and by use of the victim's own weapon.
Anybody believing that the key to making America a safer and less violent place is more, rather than less, guns out there should have his head examined. Gun ownership for purposes other than hunting, as well as the level of gun violence, already exceed by a wide margin those of any other well established democracy. That alone should be proof enough that more guns does not make for a safer society.
The United States of America has many great attributes to be proud of and that the world would do well to emulate. Its attitudes to gun ownership and violence are not among them.
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