Guns, Jerks and Steel

Jarrod Diamond traced the fall of the great South American dynasties to the decimation by disease and the destruction by superior weaponry visited upon the unwary citizens by marauding hordes of invaders. Like its southern counterparts, the great northern dynasty, America, is too doomed to be outgunned; its innocents slain by not terrorists from out there, but by their own citizens carrying ridiculously unnecessary weaponry aimed for use within the paradigm of a war rather than for personal suburban safety.

Aiding and abetting the “bigger is better” and “never too young to start” NRA, is American Congress, keepers of the Constitution and guardians of the peoples’ safety and best interests. But funded as they are, largely by the NRA it would seem conflicts of interest abound unchecked. A recent, quite reasonable response, to the Sandy Hook School massacre, was to increase the requirement for background checks of those applying for a gun license. But this was rejected and never even made it to the vote. The logical reasoning was that Adam Lanza was using his mother’s rifle and so the background check would have made little difference.

Quite so.

But why is it so hard for them to pass a bill requiring a more stringent background check on gun licence applicants? Why are the gun lobby so averse to this? You have to train for over a year (at least here in Australia) before being granted a car license because it is afterall, a weapon in the hands of a quite young driver and can (and does) cause immense damage. But to get a license for a gun; you simply walk into a supermarket and come away with an AK47. I realise there are checks run but really, is it so wrong to demand that more care is taken when choosing who walks away with a weapon?

But to make it more difficult is perhaps to reduce gun sales.

As of 2007 about 5% of Australian adults owned firearms for the main reasons of hunting, controlling feral animals or  target shooting. Between 1984 and 1996 several high profile mass killings made frantic media headlines and increased concern about firearms among the population and politicians alike. Then in April of 1996 the Port Arthur Massacre brought the nation to its knees when 35 people were killed and 23 injured. The public outrage led to massive firearm reform and gun licenses were only issued to applicants with genuine reasons such as feral animal control and remain to this day pretty concentrated in the farming communities rather than the urban environment.

Since then the deaths by guns in this country have almost halved. In 2010 the rate was 1 ½ deaths per 100,00, most of which were suicides. It’s not fantastic; 0 would be fantastic. But it is patent that the fewer guns available, the fewer deaths by firearm. Obviously.

The Huffington post published a piece last April outlining the death of a child by gunshot in Burkesville Kentucky. The two year old girl was accidentally shot and killed by her five year old brother, who was playing with a .22-caliber rifle that was given to him as a gift.

Right there I could rest my case for stricter gun control. But wait, there’s more.

Gary Younge reporting in the Guardian in April talked about gun crime and the case of Adam Lanza, who shot 20 children and six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut in December.

“Twenty children, aged between six and seven, are slaughtered in school and the American polity takes five months to decide [to] do nothing. Unable to break the filibuster limit, it didn't even come to a vote. Hiding behind the National Rifle Association's (NRA) talking points, gun rights senators cloaked themselves in the constitution, insisting support for gun control would violate the second amendment "right to bear arms".

It’s absolute madness. This American obsession with the second amendment and the ‘right to bear arms’ is simply a country out of control. The 'right to bear arms' is quite specifically in relation to forming a militia in times of civil strife or war. What Thomas Jefferson et al. meant was that Americans had the right to defend themselves against an overwhelming threat ie. war or invasion. They did not mean that you could all get armed to the teeth and shoot someone you didn't like the look of under the guise of self defence. But in 2008 Dick Heller fronted the move by Robert A Levy and the Cato Institute (founded by the Koch brothers) which essentially financed the outcome of the modern interpretation of the gun lobby giving everyone and anyone a gun through the Supreme Court case of the District of Columbia v Heller. (I would like to know who funds Cato…from 108 foundations…)

“More than 85 people – including eight children – are killed with guns on an average day in America and more than twice that number are injured. Even taking into account the fact that most gun deaths are suicides, that's still several times the death toll of 9/11 every year.”

But by all means harp on about the threat of terrorism from “OUT THERE” and your right to carry guns.

Ignore the death of 8 of your children a day.

As Abraham Lincoln said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” And here it is happening and they insist on their rights to bear arms in the face of overwhelming evidence against the prudence of this.

Mother Jones reported;

“For example, in 2012, the number of deaths resulting from acts of terror perpetrated by Muslim American suspects was zero. By comparison, there were 66 deaths from mass shootings in the United States in 2012…more people were killed in mass shootings in the US in 2012 alone than died in all terrorist attacks by Muslims in the US since 9/11.”

Juan Cole in his blog in June noted,

“…over the past 12 years about 300 Americans a year on average were killed by terrorism (in the past *ten* years it would be less than 10 a year on average). Between murders and suicides, 30,000 a year die of gunshot wounds. We’re told nothing can be done about the 30,000 dead a year.”

Essentially because that transgresses on the auspices of the sacred and ubiquitous NRA, grand pumbahs, overly generous fillers of Capital Hill coffers and upholders of the Untouchable Second Amendment.

Nick O’Malley writing for the Age said,

“At the time of writing [June], at least 5109 had died by shooting in the US in the past six months, in comparison with 4409 soldiers lost in Iraq.
 

Nicholas Kristoff in the  New York Times is a voice in the wilderness despite making immense sense;

“We appear willing to bear any burden, pay any price, to confound the kind of terrorists who shout “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) and plant bombs, while unwilling to take the slightest step to curb a different kind of terrorism — mundane gun violence in classrooms, cinemas and inner cities that claims 1,200 times as many American lives.

… It looked as if we might follow Australia, which responded to a 1996 gun massacre by imposing restrictions that have resulted in not a single mass shooting there since.”

Kristoff goes on to lament that Congress did not pass a motion for more robust background checks for gun purchasers; something that seems ridiculously obvious.

“The imbalance in our priorities is particularly striking because since 2005, terrorism has taken an average of 23 American lives annually, mostly overseas — and the number has been falling.

More Americans die of falling televisions and other appliances than from terrorism. Twice as many Americans die of bee or wasp stings annually. And 15 times as many die by falling off ladders.

Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries. {Read it and weep America].

Doesn’t it seem odd that we’re willing to spend trillions [8 per annum- that is roughly $70 000 per household] of dollars, and intercept metadata from just about every phone call in the country, to deal with a threat that, for now, kills but a few Americans annually — while we’re too paralysed to introduce a rudimentary step like universal background checks to reduce gun violence that kills tens of thousands?”

Last May, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett engaged the Woolwich murderer in London (as reported in the UK Telegraph) in conversation as he still held the blood stained knife, mere metres from the savaged body of the soldier, Lee Rigby. Her aim was a bid to keep the distressed attacker from possibly hurting the bystanders who had begun to gather in some numbers. It was 22 minutes before a police response arrived. This bravery, she insisted, was nothing more than doing (as Bruce Willis avers in Die Hard 4) what needed to be done (by being that guy- [or girl]). Was she armed? No. Was she afraid? Hell yes.

Then last week the astonishing Antoinette Tuff talked down the gunman who attempted to raze the Ronald E McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Georgia, with an AK-47-style assault rifle. Michael Hill, a 20 year old man suffering from mental illness had 500 rounds of ammunition and "nothing to live for".

It was Hill’s lucky day when he met the school bookkeeper before he opened fire on a single 5 year old.

As Gary Younge from the Guardian article said, “The way she talked down a gunman at her school, armed only with her faith, shows we needn't assume the worst in others.”

“After the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, left 20 children and six adults dead, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, insisted the incident was not evidence of the need for more gun control but more guns. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,'' he said.”

Younge’s point is that that is simply not true. I always remember that line in True Lies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis when she finally discovers that her husband of many years is a spy and indignantly asks him if he’s ever killed anyone. In true Schwarzenegger character style he replies, “Yes, but they were all bad.”

This epitomises for me the nature of the American psyche when it comes to a moral compass; it’s all about the power and being right; it’s all about heading west to the gunslinging haven. ‘We’re the good guys, you’re not’. The polar thinking that forms the rationalisations and self delusions is breathtaking; the ego of a teenager who knows everything. And power lies in having the gun; a bigger, badder gun than anyone else. And now Zimmerman has proved that you can chase down an unarmed person and shoot them to death without reprisal under the spurious guise of ‘self defence’; the American ‘right’, affirmed by the constitution which they claim to hold sacred yet recent events show this is simply an expedient lie.

But a little 42 year old bookkeeper and a 48 year old cub scout leader managed to face down the ‘baddies’ unarmed.

And alone.

And that’s the point America. You don’t know who the ‘baddie’ is. Yes, Michael Hill was about to perpetrate an abomination. But in that first nanosecond of terror, Tuff recognised his humanity. She saw herself, her pain, her self doubt, her despair in his eyes and she responded, not with the much loved American violence, but with a heart of love and a soul of empathy. She gave him a little bit of what he needed; what the American bureaucracy and health care had failed to give him; the attention and compassion he needed to bring him back from the brink of madness.

Tuff will no doubt tell you it was Jesus that saved Michael Hill, not her. But I tell you, if Jesus was solely responsible it would be Heaven on earth already. You must be open. You must have the heart or nothing changes. Children would have been slain, Hill would have been torn to shreds by hundreds of police bullets and grief would have wound its tentacles around the throats of a thousand mourners and torn at their hearts til they had no breath left if Antoinette had not been there quietly looking through the eyes of a wounded soul to recognise a kindred spirit, broken and despairing.

The answer is not more guns but empathy. If Hill had got the health care he needed, the drugs he needed, the adult care he needed he would never have darkened the doorway of the Ronald E McNair Discovery Learning Academy. Unless perhaps, in a better world, as a teacher. We must always remember our own part in the downfall of others. Where did we fail them?

And continue to fail them by putting a weapon in the hands of the mentally ill.