The past year has shown that the gun debate in America is about power, and power wielded unequally
By Lexington | WASHINGTON, DC
A YEAR after the shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, America has learned a lot about itself. Just before Christmas last year 20 young children and six staff were murdered in their schoolrooms by a disturbed young man, using guns bought by his mother in an attempt to bond with her son. In the aftermath of that horror, it seemed likely that Congress would—at a minimum—tighten the rules imposing background checks on gun buyers, screening for those with criminal records or histories of severe mental illness.
Barack Obama and others talked of actual gun-control measures. Perhaps there might be curbs on the most powerful weapons and largest ammunition clips. They were urged on by mourning parents from Newtown—plain, undemonstrative New England folk, their good manners intact but their eyes somehow blank with grief. They toured the corridors of Washington power, trying to channel their pain into constructive policy.
Others, wiser about the realities of electoral politics and the clout of such gun lobbies as the National Rifle Association (NRA), murmured that stricter gun control would be a stretch. Too many Republicans needed A grades from the NRA to secure them from primary challenges back home. Enough Democrats from rural, conservative districts feared the attack ads that would haunt them if they voted for weapons curbs, accusing them of being gun grabbers for Obama.
Yet some optimism was possible, early on. After all, increasing the number of background checks would not be gun control. It would merely involve enforcing existing law more thoroughly. Surely Congress could manage that pitifully modest legacy for Newtown’s dead children. Some polls showed Americans supporting universal background checks by margins of more than 80%.
Then came failure. The Democratic-controlled Senate could not muster the 60 votes needed to close gun-sale loopholes, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives did not even try. How did this happen?
In part this year has shown, once more, the power of a determined, passionate minority to overcome the half-hearted, unfocused wishes of a majority. It showed the fear that members of Congress feel when their office phone lines and email accounts fill with furious voter messages, carefully co-ordinated by the NRA (whose leaders were under pressure, in turn, from still more combative gun-rights groups).
But America already knew that the NRA was powerful and members of Congress easily frightened. This year offered some new clarity about the way American democracy works, too.
This is a political climate in which para-facts—nuggets of pseudo-truth, edited, wrenched from context, or simply invented from whole cloth—are wielded as weapons, used to shout down opponents, to comfort true believers in their prejudices and to blunt the force of actual, boring, factual facts. Here is just one representative example. In March, Lexington attended a rally by gun-rights activists outside the state capitol in Hartford, Connecticut. Activists waved NRA placards and signs reading “Stand and Fight” and “Feels like Nazi Germany”, less than an hour’s drive from Newtown. They cited strings of statistics to explain to your reporter, with passion and conviction, why the exceptional number of guns in America (some 300m) in no way helps to explain the country’s exceptionally high murder rate (four times higher than Britain’s and six times higher than Germany’s).
Several in Hartford cited the exact same talking point, claiming that home invasion rates soared in Australia after that country banned the most powerful forms of guns in 1996, following a mass shooting. They are wrong. Home break-in and robbery rates have fallen sharply in Australia since 1996, as have gun-death rates, with no corresponding rise in other forms of homicide. (The most recent Australian crime statistics may be found here.) No matter. The Australian “fact” is a staple of gun-rights rhetoric. Scan the comments on any news article about guns (perhaps even this one) and it will be cited.
The American gun debate is also one in which logic does not operate normally. After Newtown, the NRA’s main spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, and his allies in Congress were united in presenting the massacre as proof of a mental-health system in crisis. "We have no national database of these lunatics... We have a completely cracked mentally-ill system that's got these monsters walking the streets," Mr LaPierre told NBC days after the Newtown murders. The NRA backs the FBI-run instant background checks system used by gun dealers when selling firearms, Mr LaPierre soothed. The NRA supports putting all those adjudicated mentally incompetent into that system. That sounds conciliatory enough. Yet the same NRA opposed, ferociously and successfully, proposals to use those very same background checks more frequently.
The gun lobby, it was confirmed this year, argues its case in the same way that a fairy-tale wolf sports Grandma’s bonnet and nightgown. While America still felt winded by the tragedy of Newtown, the NRA was willing to give distraction and obfuscation a try. But when its patience ran out and its agenda was threatened, it ditched all pretence of co-operation, bared its fangs and attacked. Soon enough Mr LaPierre tired of talking about the mentally ill needing better care, and predicted in a speech to supporters on February 23rd that criminal records and the mentally incompetent would "never" be part of a background-check system, which was really aimed at "one thing—registering your guns". The “powerful elites” were not serious about prosecuting violent criminals or keeping dangerous people off the streets, Mr LaPierre went on. The elites had all the security they wanted, he said, before pivoting neatly from envy to fear. Regular folk needed the second-amendment right to bear arms, he thundered: “When the glass breaks in the middle of the night, we have the right to defend ourselves.”
America gained new insights about the working methods of the gun lobby. A fine piece by Robert Draper, due to be published on December 15th in the New York Times Magazine, catalogues the cowardice and cynicism required for Congress to ignore the bereaved mothers and fathers of Newtown. But it also observes that the NRA’s aggression is partly born of fear. As Mr Draper notes, surveys suggest that the percentage of American households possessing one or more guns declined by 36% between 1977 and 2012.
Cleverly, the gun lobby’s aggression is often most intense when dealing with political allies. A few weeks ago this reporter interviewed the outgoing mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, for a column. Mr Bloomberg, a vocal supporter of gun control, has funded political campaigns against candidates who have stood in the way of his goals. Some have been conservatives, but in an Illinois congressional primary, he funded leaflets and ads that helped to defeat a Democrat who had harmed the gun-control cause. Mr Bloomberg explained his tactics, and how they reflected his careful study of the NRA’s methods.
The NRA, he said, took an interesting approach with mostly-supportive politicians who had crossed them in some way, earning their enmity. Such politicians might typically protest: oh, but my opponent is even worse on guns. The NRA was typically unmoved, Mr Bloomberg noted. “The NRA say, we don’t care, we are going after you. That sends a message that the calculus you have to use now is the following. If you go against the NRA, they are going to be against you. If you don’t go against the NRA it is still possible that [other constituents] will vote for you, because they agree with your positions on [abortion] and gay rights and immigration and fiscal policy and so on.” That disciplined, remorseless pursuit of their goals gave single-issue advocacy groups “enormous” power, he concluded.
In a strongly Democratic corner of Illinois, Mr Bloomberg’s own variety of ruthlessness worked. But more recently his money and backing could not help two Democratic state senators in Colorado survive recall elections organised by gun-rights advocates, enraged at their role in passing firearms curbs in the wake of a cinema massacre in the state.
That points to another aspect of the gun debate that was exposed with great clarity this year. National opinion polls saying that most Americans want this or that to happen to gun laws are largely useless. Guns divide Americans deeply by region, locality and—to a striking and depressing degree—by race. Americans are divided in their opinions, because their incentives and experiences are very different.
The Washington Post has published some stunning analyses of the different roles played by guns in different communities. America’s overall gun-murder rates conceal vast disparities. Whites are disproportionately hostile to gun control, in part because they are rather unlikely to face a hostile, armed shooter. Gun murder is not a serious threat for most white Americans, and is vanishingly rare in such conservative, rural states as Wyoming. Overall a white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun, the Post found. In contrast, “for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.” Unsurprisingly, most blacks support strict gun controls.
A final point of clarity is perhaps the most troubling. Attend gun rallies, watch speeches or interview politicians, and it could not be clearer that the single most potent message of the pro-gun lobby revolves around tyranny, and the idea that American patriots need to be armed to prevent the government from snuffing out their liberties. The second amendment’s right to bear arms, in this telling, underpins all other rights, and any move to qualify that right amounts to evidence of a liberticide government at work.
In the world of the second-amendment absolutists, this swiftly tips into narcissism: an explicit claim that gun owners, being men of clear sight and courage, will see tyranny descending when more sheep-like citizens remain blind (and that they, by personal force of arms, will defeat the jackbooted thugs of the federal government). That in turn feeds on deep-rooted traditions around secession and the rejection of top-down rule.
An elected Republican sheriff in Illinois recently told this reporter how he was sent text messages or emails almost “every day”, urging him to join other sheriffs in vowing to ignore federal gun-control laws. A wave of nullification bills were introduced in state legislatures after the Newtown murders, vowing to block federal gun laws (though the torrent has largely slowed, the Sunlight Foundation reported recently, as the prospects for federal law-making faded).
Perhaps no development is as striking as the rise and rise of the public-carry movement. New laws have been passed in several states granting new rights to citizens to wear their guns in such places as bars, churches and on university campuses. Activists in Texas and elsewhere have exercised their legal rights to stroll around supermarkets or queue in coffee shops while packing heat.
It is important to concede at this point that such laws and rights are the product of a democratic process. Outsiders may find it baffling, even horrible that the Newtown massacre did not lead to a wholesale rethinking of gun laws (though it did lead to the nation’s schoolchildren receiving lessons in how and where to hide, in the event of an armed intrusion). But the sheer weight of democratic inertia demands a certain deference: not only has nothing much changed, but Americans have largely moved on. Recent mass shootings—as in a naval facility in Washington, DC—suggest Americans are learning to live with gun massacres.
But there needs to be clarity as well as deference about what is really involved when one American passes another in a supermarket aisle, a rifle self-consciously dangling from his back. Such gun-owners are not only exercising their lawful rights. An armed man in the dairy aisle, surrounded by unarmed shoppers, is unilaterally awarding himself the power of life and death over all those around him. Implicitly, shoppers are supposed to understand that they are quite safe, because this is what Mr LaPierre would call “a good guy with a gun”, whose presence deters “bad guys with guns”. That is a large claim. The power that comes with carrying a gun is very great.
The past year has shown, with great clarity, that the gun debate is not an argument about law and order or public safety. It is a conflict about power, and power wielded unequally. Power being such seductive stuff, perhaps the only mystery, looking back, is that anyone thought that after Newtown very much would change at all.
