Live and die by the gun

From The Age, April 19 2007

The right to bear arms is enshrined in US politics and culture. The latest massacre will do nothing to change that, writes Gwynne Dyer.

YOU can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the United States would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn't.

That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's sin earlier this year — and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere. (Where were they when President Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction"?)

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the United States. That's why hardly anybody in the US is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (33 dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There's not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

Gun control is a dead issue in the US, and it isn't coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn't the same thing). The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realised that it wasn't going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn't stop talking about gun control. The party's leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realised that their problem was more than just George Bush's fatal charm. They weren't winning in "heartland" states because they were seen as trying to take Americans' guns away.

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it's hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party's national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — and in the 2006 election it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would "stand up to anyone — Republican or Democratic — who tries to take away Montanans' gun rights".

The new Democratic Governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has "more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I'll control mine." It's a whole new image for Democrats, and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn't have been enough.)

The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro Men live) if they didn't drop gun control. So they dropped it, and now no large party supports it. That's the politics of it, and you can't argue with that.

There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn't get much traction in American politics any more. It's simply too late. This is a society that owns about equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: about a quarter-billion of each. There's no going back — and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those 32 murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It's perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses.

This loophole must be closed. At least, that is the way the argument is usually put in America, although the reality is not one gun per citizen over the age of 12, but some citizens with a great many guns and most citizens with none at all.

More fundamentally, the gun-control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of 18 and 45 also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilisation model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don't murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries such as Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organisation in the US. But it's really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet-holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: "Guns don't kill Americans; Americans kill Americans."

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And in a related article: Bush defends the right to bear arms