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| The need for using guns is spoon fed into most American kids |
When I first went to my friend Sherry’s house for dinner, I couldn’t help
noticing tiny holes all over the white kitchen cupboards. She was a new
friend, my only friend, actually, as I had just moved to Miami.
Her mother came in and saw me looking and said: “That’s where Shane
shot himself up.” Shane was Sherry’s cousin. Her mother was mostly
annoyed that he had used Sherry’s dad’s gun. Whether this was an
accident or a suicide I was too polite to ask. He was 16.
When Sherry’s dad sat down at the table, he showed me his huge
collection of guns. One rifle after another. I sat there nodding,
wondering what to say.
The American dream was what my father had offered my mother. Escape from
small-town Suffolk to a place of Pontiacs and huge fridges. She liked
Americans so much she married two of them, with an English man in
between. “He bought me a lovely little handbag pistol,” she said of my
father. This was as glamorous to her as the menthols she smoked: a
special ladies’ gun.
This casual relationship to gun ownership is different in different
parts of the US. For the US is several different countries. When, later
in the 80s, I moved to New York, gun violence was seen as a black crime.
I had moved to the US because it seemed to offer everything I already
knew and more. But very quickly I knew that this was an extremely alien
culture. It is an illusion of popular culture that makes us think it
isn’t. Somehow, though, Europeans still think they “know” America
because they once had brunch in Manhattan. Americans are just like us
but with bigger portions, some still say. We can prescribe our liberal solutions to
their terrible problems if they would only listen.
This is delusional. The unknowability of the US, even to itself, has
been brought into focus by Donald Trump’s election. Nowhere is it more
apparent than in the debate around gun control. An angry white man is in
the White House. And angry white men who murder scores of people with
guns are not terrorists, apparently.
The reaction to these massacres is
that more people go out and buy guns to protect themselves. This mentality is incomprehensible to many of us. Never mind
North Korea, Americans excel at killing each other with guns and
opioids. The terror that they fear is coming over some mythical wall is
in fact rooted inside their own culture.
The same figures are rehearsed
after every massacre. It is estimated that the US has the highest number
of privately owned guns in the world – in 2012, there were thought to
be
about 300m, held by about one-third of the population (enough for every man, woman and child in the country to have a gun).
The second-ranked country is Yemen.
In the US, 18 young people are killed every day by guns. Meanwhile,
suicide – the majority by gun – is the second most common cause of death
for Americans between 15 and 34.
One of the saddest parts of Gary Younge’s devastating book
Another Day in the Death of America
is when parents of children gunned down speak of relief. The mother of
Tyshon Anderson, who was shot in a gang-related incident at 18, says: “I
don’t have to worry about him being out there killing nobody else or
nobody else trying to kill him.”
Every right-minded liberal can point to Australia, where
gun control has brought the homicide rate right down. Legislation would implement background checks for gun ownership and yet …
Gun fairs are visited as if by Victorian anthropologists. Who are
these people? The National Rifle Association is powerful, and, of
course, the militias were out recently in Charlottesville. This is not
“left-behind” America, but it is a part we find utterly foreign.
The
anti-centralised state narrative may be wrapped in second-amendment
bluster, but part of the problem with gun control is precisely this word
“control”. Obamacare is rejected again as something to do with control.
I offer no solution to the massacres. I don’t particularly like the
US’s reliance on cars either, but I can’t see the country without them.
The now-familiar argument in the US on gun control is that of two
different nations circling each other. It seems to me much of the US
cannot be understood as a developed nation. Look at the levels of
inequality, the infant mortality rates, the addiction, the
self-inflicted wounds. The absolute rejection of a centralised state is
part of its notion of freedom. That this culture is not ours, that it is
something entirely different, gets brought home time and again.
When I was being taught to shoot by an American ex-cop, he emphasised
that children must learn how to behave around guns. At what age, I
asked him, did he think they should have their first gun?
“Three” he said.
Note EU-Digest: Let us also not forget that the US has coined the
phrase "collateral damage" when they carpet bomb thousands of innocent
civilians to their death in areas of conflict, they have basically
created themselves in the name of "democracy" .
EU-Digest
