America's Love Affair with the Gun Feeds its Fear

The debate over America’s gun laws chimes like a recurring refrain.

The aftermath of yet another shooting spree has become the grisly closing act of an all-too-familiar drama.

Same story different people.

We know the plot too well. An individual who should never have been able to purchase a gun opens fire on unsuspecting innocent people. The killing seems random. Children often lie among the dead.

America and the world is shocked. There are outpourings of grief. Opinion columns are penned. Candles are lit. Tears roll down the cheeks of uncomprehending mourners. The politicians don black and wear appropriately somber expressions.

How could this have happened?

And, like a familiar chorus, the old debate is trotted out. Should Americans be as free as they are to purchase and carry guns?

A few timid intellectuals proffer sensible arguments explaining that if people are allowed to carry guns then other people are likely to end up getting shot.

Cause and effect.

Across the philosophical aisle voluble, power-wielding gun lobbyists point to the Second Amendment, which enshrines an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Little matter the second amendment was drawn up in 1751 when America was surely (one would hope) a far less sophisticated, far less modern, far less crowded society than it is today.

Little matter that in nations where guns are strictly controlled such tragedies are few and far between. Little matter it stands to simple reason that a nation without guns is likely to see far less shootings (even if violent crime remains).

Looking in from the outside, America often seems like a bizarre and confusing place, a place of stark paradox living in direct contradiction of its own ideals.

In the post 9-11 era America has been at war with Terror. It has been on a mission to bring freedom to those who don’t have it; an obligatory ‘gift’ handed over at gunpoint.

America’s war against Terror has taken its troops into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan: wars being fought, ostensibly, to protect America’s national security, to make Americans feel safer at home.

Yet Americans seem to feel less and less safe, its enemies are multiplying and victory, however it may be defined, seems as elusive as ever.

In the years since 9-11 Americans have learned that fighting Terror means being alert. It means living in fear of an armed enemy, foreign and most probably Muslim, who may strike at any time.

Yet, as America has also learned, more often than not Terror doesn’t come from a dusty village in Iraq or Afghanistan. It lives next door. He or she carries a gun concealed in a glove compartment or snuggled under their jacket, loaded and within easy reach.

Terror lives at home and is very likely American.

As Michael J Moore so poignantly illustrated in his documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine,’ America’s is a society built on fear, a society whose very momentum, fuelled by the media, is driven by fear. Fear and Terror live side by side.

The statistics speak for themselves.

In 2009 more than 9,000 Americans were murdered in crimes involving firearms. Extrapolate that number out over the past ten years and we can estimate that close to 100,000 Americans may have been murdered with a gun. Even if the exact number were 50% of this figure, the magnitude of gun related violence in such a modern nation is astounding and shocking.

There are those who would argue that for all its guns America is still far from being the most violent nation on the planet. El Salvador and Mexico are way ahead in the homicide charts. But for a nation of such wealth, with such ambition and whose politics are often infused with such moral fervour, America’s sea of firearms and its dramatic homicide statistics can only be a source of shame.

In the end, what separates the gun toting American from the gun toting Afghan? Law? Wealth? Morality? Religion?

While the positive language of freedom, progress and democracy is the brand America would sell to the world, the reality is that its own society has proved unable to move beyond an amendment drawn up in 1751.

For all America’s sophistication, for all its laws, for all its political rhetoric, for all the safety norms that are imposed in every facet of American life, you can still be shot tomorrow on the street, or in your school, by a guy with a gun.

And no it’s not about freedom, its not about principles or rights as gun advocates claim. It’s not about feeling comfortable and safe with a gun on your hip.

Peel away those spurious claims and you are left with the raw reality that guns are designed to kill and maim. To carry a gun is to empower yourself with the immediate click-of-a-trigger power to destroy life.

Almost exactly 100 years before the Second Amendment was penned, it was the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes who pointed out the need for individuals to yield up a part of their freedom to the State without which society would return to what he called ‘a state of nature’ which in turn would lead to a ‘war of all against all’.

His ideas formed the based of the social contract whereby civil society is based on the rule of law.

His point, an obvious one today, was that freedom in and of itself is not a good thing. There needs to be balance and there needs to be some areas where the individual agrees to yield up a part of his or her freedom to the State and the rule of law.

The right to bear arms in America is a clear example of excessive freedom, the bloody side effects of which are there for all to see. Without controls on gun ownership, America slides towards Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’, cloaking its society in fear.

The Freedom America so loves cannot exist in a nation condemned to live in fear.

If Americans believe in their own State, if they wish to build a truly civil society as an example to the rest of the world then they must impose laws curtailing gun ownership.