Well, you did mention the guns
The other day I was reading a discussion on a forum I belong to, and someone mentioned that her husband had bought her a handgun the day they married. The discussion quickly moved on from the subject of the forum to guns, and the woman informed us she was a conservative pro-life Texan Republican who shoots competitively, that anyone who didn’t like that could unfollow or block her, and that “firearms never killed anyone”, people do, and could use other means if guns were unavailable. The discussion thread was closed for comments and moved to the “off-topic” section before I could respond, but it’s strange how sensitive the American gun-lover gets when anyone else questions the sanity of their hobby or their right to a murder weapon, especially anyone from a country where school shootings are almost unheard-of (that is, anywhere except the USA), and especially when it’s they who brought the topic up.
A few weeks ago I came across a video by a lady who lost her sight in a shooting in a city in California 11 years ago. She mentioned that in her city, house parties get “shot up” all the time. This was staggering to me as, in the rest of the world, that’s not normal. In most of the world, you can go to a house party or sit in a car with your friends in your neighbourhood and not worry about being blinded, paralysed or killed in a shooting. School shootings, especially mass shootings, don’t happen. The last one we had in the UK was in 1996, which was also the first: a paedophile angered at being denied access to other people’s children decided to kill a class of children, a teacher, and then himself, instead. We then banned the keeping of automatic weapons and handguns at people’s homes, and nothing like it has happened since. Workplace massacres don’t happen; this is partly because the average citizen cannot easily get hold of a gun without a background check and a legitimate use, but also because workers have rights and bosses cannot fire workers on a whim. When an innocent person, especially a child, is killed or injured in a shooting, even in a ‘ghetto’, it is big news (the cases of Thusha Kamaleswaran and more recently Olivia Pratt-Korbel spring to mind). If you have an unlicensed firearm and get caught, you go to prison even if you do not have ammunition.
Yes, it’s true that we still have murders, including shootings and stabbings; however, the US’s murder rate is higher than anywhere in Europe except Russia and Ukraine and higher than anywhere else in the developed world, and that is before you take into account non-fatal gun injuries, accidents and suicides. Often the shootings in the UK are related to domestic violence in houses where they did have a firearms licence, or to gangs, who can easily get hold of guns. However, nobody has yet invented an auto-stabber which can despatch twelve people in as many seconds. A stabbing is necessarily hand-to-hand, and the victim often has the chance to fight off his assailant. A shooting can be carried out from a distance and the victim not even know he or she is under attack. Knives do not backfire and rarely strike other than their intended target. Some guns take considerable skill to aim, and there is one (popular with gangsters at one point) known as the “spray and pray” because of the difficulty in aiming it for the untrained. Stabbings typically injure soft tissue and thus rarely leave survivors with lasting impairment. Finally, we need knives to cook and eat with, which is why knives remain legal in the UK though illegal to carry them in public without a good reason (e.g. you have just bought it and are taking it home, or are going to your catering job or course), and some knives which are designed solely for killing people are now illegal. (I am opposed to draconian sentences for merely carrying a knife, which are demanded any time someone is killed in a stabbing, because the people who receive them are likely to be young people from ethnic minorities stopped by the police because of their colour, but keeping weapons off the streets, especially guns, is a good thing.)
Let’s examine some of the arguments used by gun advocates and see why they don’t hold water.
“Guns don’t kill; people do!”
True, a gun sitting unloaded on the mantlepiece won’t kill you. But you don’t buy a gun as an ornament, usually. People shoot people when they have guns. As already mentioned, guns can kill more quickly at a longer distance and cause survivors worse lasting injuries than knives can. If you have a gun and you get angry, you can kill someone in a second; the time it would take to run over and stab them would give you some time to reconsider, and them to get away.
The Texan woman even mentioned that people could use bombs rather than guns; bombs take considerably more skill and know-how than guns to make and deploy, planting bombs or carrying out suicide bombings is covered by anti-terrorist legislation, and the steps to it could be if such bombings became enough of an issue; companies that sell the precursors (such as fertilisers) could be pressured not to sell them to people without a legitimate use for them. The obstacles to readying a bomb would also make some reconsider their course of action, and they cannot be prepared and used in the heat of anger, as a gun that is already on one’s person and loaded can.
“The best defence against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!”
However, bad guys with guns, or mad or angry guys with guns, usually get them from good guys with guns in a country where guns can be freely bought, unlike where you have to have a lawful purpose such as game hunting or pest control. Does anyone walk into a gun store and say “I need an AR-15 to kill a dozen people at a party next week” or “I need a revolver to do a couple of bank jobs”? Of course not. Much as with driving, there is a thinking time and an acting time, and during both those periods, during the time it took the good guy to realise there was a shooting happening and to get his gun ready, more shots could have been fired and more people killed or injured, and much as the solution when on the road is not to be looking at your phone or your book and not to be speeding but driving carefully and looking at the road, the best solution to bad guys with guns is to make sure they could not get the gun in the first place.
Furthermore, in a country where people don’t get shot very often, people won’t assume that, say, a banging or popping sound is a gunshot, and won’t, even if they have one for some reason, reach for their gun.
“If it’s a crime to own a gun, only criminals will have guns!”
Perhaps, but most criminals will not have guns or will use replicas, so the numbers killed in crimes will be lower and the criminals will be caught more easily, with less risk to their lives, to innocent bystanders and to police officers, who may not even have to carry guns when on regular duty, as is the case in the UK.
“It’s not the guns, it’s mental illness!”
This is simply untrue; a lot of shooters who are not gangsters are motivated by anger, entitlement, embitterment or extremist ideology rather than mental illness as such. Furthermore, if we exclude the mentally ill (such as those with depression, say) from owning guns in a society where people normally do, they are at greater risk if people in a small community know who can’t have a weapon. The way to protect both them and everyone else is to restrict the supply of guns.
“The safest parts of the US are the most armed!”
Perhaps because they are rural or suburban locations where urban gangs do not operate. However, they are still less safe than similar environments in other countries where the husband facing divorce from his long-suffering wife or the disgruntled school student cannot easily obtain a gun. Guns bought in these places have a habit of ending up in big cities in the hands of criminals as well as in the hands of the embittered locally.
“Guns weren’t meant to kill children”
No, they were designed to kill men, or at least animals, and anything that will kill a man will kill a woman or child, because they are made of the same stuff, i.e. bones and soft tissue. More to the point, they were designed to do it quickly, which is what makes them more dangerous than any other weapon.
“No, they were designed to propel a slug”
A real argument from a real American gun advocate. They were designed to propel said slug with sufficient velocity to penetrate the body of a human being or animal, in order to kill. This is why, if you have deer or foxes to kill and you aren’t severely mentally ill or a criminal, you might be able to get a licence to own a gun sufficient for those needs (not sufficient for massacring human beings) in a civilised country. Not if you just think you might need one.
“Cars kill people too!”
Yes, which is why you need a licence to drive and for that you need to prove yourself fit and competent. But also, cars are a means of transport. Despite sayings like “riding shotgun” and the fact that there’s a motorbike called a Bullet, you can’t use a gun for any other purpose than putting a hole through something or someone.
“We need the guns to protect ourselves from tyranny!”
The notion of a citizens’ militia protecting the people from a tyrannical US government is a fantasy indulged in by a number of political persuasions, but how often have guns been used to really protect people from state overreach or injustice? The fantasy dates back to the very early history of the US before there was a US Army or organised local, state and federal police. Tyranny in the US has generally taken the form of white supremacy, and citizens’ militias and other forms of citizen mobilisation have worked to enforce rather than combat it. How often in the world has a country been saved from descent into tyranny by citizens’ militias? Generally, coups fail because they do not have the whole of the army on board, not because there is public opposition (which can easily be suppressed), and in any case, tyranny often has the support of some of the population, as with American segregation.
Guns are part of American rural culture; people hunt and farmers need to deal with pests. This is not a bad thing. However, this does not require anyone to have access to automatic or semi-automatic weapons that can easily be used against large numbers of innocent people, including children, in a school, workplace, restaurant or any other public place where people expect to work, study or socialise in peace. The gun lobby resists efforts not only to restrict the sales of such weapons and to keep them off the streets of towns and cities, but also against safety devices that could reduce the risk of accidental discharge; it has also successfully lobbied to exempt the gun industry from liability for injuries caused by the products it manufactures. Politicians refuse to name the problem: the Second Amendment, a stupid and outdated piece of legislation that has never liberated anyone and costs lives every year. So, if you want to shout about your guns or how your hobby or your liberation army fantasies are more important than innocent people’s lives now, or your fellow citizens’ right to go about their business without fear of harm from an embittered loser they have never met, don’t blame anyone who calls you a selfish jerk.
Image source: Paddy Briggs, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 3.0 licence.
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