America Needs to Talk About Gun Control in the Wake of the Colorado Shooting

by Gary Younge For The Guardian

Saturday, July 21, 2012

The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver, Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain in a perennial American elegy. Different singers mouthing different words, but basically singing the same song.

Psychological profiles of the shooter emerge, along with portraits of the victims, while the political class closes ranks so that the nation can heal. Incanted tones to sooth a permanent scar. All rituals serve a purpose. And this one is no different. At least 12 people have died. Their families must be given space to mourn, and that space should be respected. But it does not honour the dead to insist that there must be no room in that space for rational thought and critical appraisal. Indeed, such situations demand both. For one can only account for so many "isolated" incidents before it becomes necessary to start dealing with a pattern. It is simply not plausible to understand events in Colorado this Friday without having a conversation about guns in a country where more than 84 people a day are killed with guns, and more than twice that number are injured with them.

Amid all the column inches and airtime devoted to these horrific slayings, though, that elephant in the room will remain affectionately patted, discreetly fed and politely indulged. To claim that "this is not the time" ignores the reality that America has found itself incapable of finding any appropriate time to have this urgent conversation. The victims in Colorado deserve at least that. And these tragedies take place everyday, albeit on a smaller scale. America's president, Barack Obama, understands this. The number of homicide victims in his home town of Chicago this year has outnumbered those of US troops serving in Kabul. Speaking in Fort Myers, Florida on Friday morning, Obama was right to suspend the routine campaign rhetoric and play the statesman. Nobody wants to hear about Mitt Romney's tax records and stimulating the economy on a day like this. There will be other days for electioneering.

But he was wrong to insist on this:

 

"There are going to be other days for politics. This is a day for prayer and reflection."

For what are we to reflect on if not how this, and so many other similar calamities, came about. Those who insist that we should not "play politics" with the victim's grief conveniently ignore that politics is what caused that grief. Not party politics. But a blend of opportunism on the right that flagrantly mischaracterises the issue, and spinelessness on the left that refuses to address it. Americans are no more prone to mental illness or violence than any other people in the world. What they do have is more guns: roughly, 90 for every 100 people. And regions and states with higher rates of gun ownership have significantly higher rates of homicide than states with lower rates of gun ownership. The trite insistence that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" simply avoids the reality that people can kill people much more easily with guns than anything else that's accessible. Americans understand this. That's why a plurality supports greater gun control, and a majority thinks the sale of firearms should be more tightly regulated.

The trouble is that people feel powerless to do anything about it. The gun lobby has proved sufficiently potent in rallying opposition to virtually all gun control measures that Democrats have all but given up on arguing for it. In the meantime, the country is literally and metaphorically dying for it. Gun control is possible. There are both a constituency for it and an argument for it. But it can't happen without a political coalition prepared to fight for it. If America can elect a black president, it can do this.

[Yet again the world is treated to a vision of a country drowning in guns and the consequences of the frankly crazy idea that the right to bear arms somehow makes you free. Most of the rest of the world seems to manage without this ‘right’. Most of the rest of the world seems to avoid the regular carnage too. What are frighteningly isolated incidents in most of the rest of the west are frighteningly regular incidents in the US. I really have to wonder just how many people need to die before someone somewhere says enough is enough: Many, many more by the sounds of things. It would appear that 84 deaths a day are considered to be ‘acceptable losses’ compared to the infringement of ‘fundamental freedoms’ such as gun ownership. I wonder if the families of the victims feel that way. I’m guessing, and I’m really hoping, that they do not. But, of course, little or nothing will come of this latest ‘incident’. There might be some talk in the media but I doubt very much if any American politician will even mention the phrase ‘gun-control’ except to say that such ideas are simply beyond debate. So it’s only a matter of time before another ‘crazed lone gun’ makes international headlines again… and again… and again. Welcome to the land of the free – please be aware of hurricanes, drought and occasional mass shootings. Have a nice day now!]