It’s not like the United States alone in the industrialized world has suffered the tragedy of gun violence such as we experienced recently at Virginia Tech.
On a spring day in 1996 in Dunblane, Scotland, a former shopkeeper and scout leader, Thomas Hamilton, entered the gymnasium of the elementary school and opened fire. He was armed with four legally obtained and owned handguns and he shot and killed fifteen children aged 4 and 5 along with their teacher. One child survived. Outside he fired on other school buildings and wounded more children and staff before returning to the gym and shooting himself. One of the wounded children died on arrival at the hospital. For the sheer horror of it, this incident stands out as the very worst of its kind.
Other countries such as Canada, at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, 1989, and Australia in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in the same year as the Dunblane massacre, have experienced national trauma because of deranged men with guns. In the Montreal incident fourteen female students were murdered by a man with a legally obtained assault rifle. In the Australian example, where thirty-five tourists at a resort were shot to death by an assailant armed with two assault rifles, the weapons were not legally owned.
What sets America apart from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, however, is not merely the frequency with which these events happen, but the responses to them. After Dunblane, the UK to all intents and purposes banned the private ownership of handguns. Australia and Canada have implemented more stringent controls to register firearms, and to regulate their purchase and storage. None of these countries has suffered another incident on the same scale.
Yet in America in the wake of multiple mass shootings at schools, shopping malls and various workplaces, the regulation of firearms is, if anything, weaker now than it was ten years ago. The National Rifle Association and its supporters love to say that with 14,000 gun laws on the books America doesn’t need any more and that they are, in any case, ineffective except to impede law-abiding gun owners. The reason, however, is that the vast majority of the laws that are on the books (which presumably counts every state, county and municipal law that relates to guns in the country) are toothless.
What we need in this country are some tough but fair national laws that mirror the approach of Canada and Australia. The emphasis should be on putting barriers in place to prevent the acquisition of guns by criminals and nutcases. This inevitably means some inconvenience, God forbid, to the rest of us. For example, since we are talking about a lethal weapon here, I see no reason why a potential gun owner should expect to be able to go home with it the same day as though he were buying a lawn mower. Instead, prospective gun owners should not only be more thoroughly vetted with enhanced criminal and mental health record checks, but should also have to provide character references. A waiting period should be mandatory. And if a gun-owner brandishes or uses his (or her) weapon irresponsibly, the privilege of gun ownership should be suspended, in the same way that we might withdraw a motorist’s driving privileges if he has behaved recklessly or dangerously.
We should more strictly regulate who is authorized to legally sell firearms. One obvious starting place is to ensure there will be no such thing as the gun show loophole. And there should be regulation of where and how a firearm can be stored. One of the reasons it’s so easy to obtain a gun illegally is because huge numbers are stolen every year. We could at least make it harder for burglars to steal weapons by mandating that they be stored in tough-to-break-into lockboxes.
All of this is pie-in-the-sky of course. With my British sensibilities, it took me years to realize that a rational debate on common-sense measures to control America’s gun plague is simply impossible here. The NRA and its sister organizations (some of which, for example the truly wacky Gun Owners of America, are even more fanatical, however impossible that may seem) are part of the reason.
The American political system gives inordinate power to a well financed one-issue constituency than does a parliamentary democracy. It’s why we have such a bizarre national policy towards Cuba, driven as it is by right-wing Cuban exiles in the key electoral state of Florida; and it is why in America people who say that the answer to the Virginia Tech tragedy is to arm the students and teachers are actually taken seriously. The answer, in other words, to America’s awful gun violence is, yes, more guns.
Nowhere in the industrialized world is it as easy to acquire a gun as in this country. If owning guns made us all safer, you’d think this society would have the lowest homicide rate in the industrialized world rather than highest by a mile. Well, there we go again, trying to inject rationality into the debate.
Other countries react to mass shootings such as the one at Virginia Tech by actually doing something meaningful to prevent the next one. How quaint of them.
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