Culture of violence

Gun culture in US encourages individualism. It fosters a society of individuals — everyone isolated from each other.

A week before the elementary school massacre in the US state of Connecticut, I was in a toy store shopping for Christmas gifts. Walking through a store aisle, dazed by the overbearing selection of plastic dinosaurs, a young boy, no more than seven years of age, came running towards me. He pulled out a toy gun. Perfectly poised with a straight arm, fingers coiled around the gun handle and supported with a half-cocked elbow, the boy squinted through his imaginary scope and shot me. He ran off laughing as I doubled over, pretending to take the bullet in my stomach.

How does a child learn to re-enact the iconic gun-barrel sequence of walking, turning and shooting so perfectly? With the Connecticut tragedy, the Internet is deluged with factoids related to gun violence. I was surprised to learn that by the time the average child in the United States leaves elementary school, he or she will have watched 8,000 killings on television. Americans own 192 million firearms — considerably more than any other country in the world. In fact, with 89 firearms per 100 people, the US has a 40 per cent higher gun ownership rate than Yemen. Of the gun-owning Americans, 17 per cent own semi-automatic weapons, 68 per cent own handguns and 74 per cent possess shotguns.

The Newtown deaths were preventable. Stricter gun control legislation is needed. Currently, 35 states allow people to openly carry handguns without a permit while 47 states allow for people to openly carry shotguns. The US state of Vermont allows teenagers as young as 16 to buy handguns without parental consent. Federal law in the US allows individuals 18 years and older to possess handguns but has no minimum age for the possession of a shotgun. Only 20 states have a minimum age for the possession of shotguns. The age is typically 18 years, but in the US state of Montana it is 14 years.

Many gun owners in the US are members of powerful lobby groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA). These gun owners only appreciate democracy if they are allowed to own and carry a gun. But support for the gun owner comes from a surprising range of people, including academics, successful actors and the evangelicals. An ex-editor of mine, Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch, was an outspoken critic of American foreign policy, eloquently denouncing the civilian casualties in senseless wars. And yet, he believed gun accidents only happened in situations where there were drugs, alcohol, bad parents and undisciplined children. Christopher Hitchens, renowned journalist and a friend of Cockburn, had a similar view. Hitchens, in his prime, wrote compelling articles revealing the sinful collusions of religion. Yet, regarding guns, he wrote: “There is something truly admirable in a country (like the US) that codifies the responsibility for self-defence”. The actor Samuel Jackson also recently mentioned: “I don’t think it’s about more gun control. This shooting (in Connecticut) is about people who aren’t taught the value of life”. And, finally, not to be outdone is the former governor of the US state of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee — an evangelical icon — who said a few days ago: “We don’t need fewer guns in the hands of killers, we need more God in our public schools”.

The gun culture in the US encourages individualism. It fosters a society of individuals — everyone isolated from each other. This is not freedom. Both Cockburn and Hitchens were media gadflies, contrarians who were never truly motivated from their velvet chairs to criticise the American gun-toting culture. Jackson will never bite the hand that feeds him and boldly criticise Hollywood’s influencing trends, while Huckabee is more interested in convincing his followers that America is becoming a godless country. The NRA spent $17 million in the past federal elections. Annual gun sales in the US totalled approximately $3.5 billion. Every gun that is sold signifies a theft from those who are hungry, those who are cold and those who are destitute. True liberty means responsibility — not to oneself but to the people around you in need.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2012.