What is it with Americans and their love affair with guns, an affair codified in the Second Amendment — adopted in 1791 as part of the first ten amendments contained in the Bill of Rights — as the right to “keep and bear arms” that “shall not be infringed upon”?
Ever since that time, the paradox in American constitutional law has been evident: A citizen could buy an M16 or any other type of assault weapon similar to that used by American soldiers, say in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not, without a doctor’s prescription, an antibiotic for a cold at one’s friendly, neighborhood drug store.
The consequence of that paradox has been the mass shootings at places like Aurora, Colorado (20 dead, 58 wounded moviegoers) in 2012 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that same year (27 killed, most of them children), to name but a few, along with, more recently, the wanton killing in North Charlton, South Carolina, of a fleeing motorist by a trigger-happy cop, who allegedly aimed his gun and fired eight bullets at the suspect’s back. No questions asked.
We know all too well there have been countless other incidents like that, from Virginia Tech and Colombia High School to the Beltway Sniper attacks (the coordinated shootings in the nation’s capital that killed 10 people over a terror-filled three weeks in 2002) and the rash of mayhem by disgruntled office workers who shot up their colleagues in their workplaces.
Every year in the US, for example, there are roughly 300,000 gun-related assaults. How monstrous is that? In an article he wrote soon after the Aurora killing, Billl Moyers, the preeminent social critic and former White House press secretary, reminded his fellow Americans that far more of them have been casualties of domestic violence — that’s domestic violence alone — than have died in all their wars. Wait, was that a typo in Moyers’ piece? Was Moyers being hyperbolic? No, that was no typo and the doyen of American journalism is not given to hyperbole. Yet, Americans continue their love affair with guns — and how else would you describe it? — protective of their right to “keep and bear arms” and those who “infringe” on that right had better watch out.
Last week, the National Rifle Association (NRA), whose 4 million members make it the third most powerful lobby in Washington, held its annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee (with 70,000 attendees), where the group’s president, Jim Porter, railed against those in the country who pose “a danger to gun rights.” He thundered at the podium: “They think they are smarter than we are. When it comes to those elitists, looking down their noses and telling us how to live, it’s time they got the message loud and clear: You elitists live however you want, but when it comes to us, get your hands off our freedom and leave us the hell alone.”
And Chris Cox, the head of the NRA’s lobbying arm in Washington, stated, his Churchillian rhetoric sounding more than a touch contrived: “We’ll fight you in the courts, we’ll fight you in the legislatures and we’ll fight you on Election Day.”
Truth be told, to these folks the association here is not just between guns and safety or even between guns and liberty, but between guns and cultural archetype. Guns are as American as apple pie. They evoke the mystique of the Wild West and tough cattle towns where outlaws and lawmen made gun toting glamorous, and where you gained fame or infamy by gunning down the bad guys. Think Shane and High Noon here.
Bearing arms, I say, is as American as apple pie. You will agree that it is when you read what Richard Henry Lee, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had to say about the issue. “To preserve liberty,” he averred, “it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
And, incidentally, is there a language in the world, other than American English, that has a word for “gun range,” the place where parents bring their kids, along with their rifles and handguns, to practice shooting there — though not always in a festive mood, as the killing of Chris Kyle, of American Sniper fame, at one such range, by an estranged friend, would attest? Not to my knowledge.
