My three-year-old wouldn’t stop jumping on the bed. Some guy accused me of pushing in the queue for tacos. She rejected me when I chatted her up. It was an accident, which happened as I was picking up my toddler. Every month, the pressure group Parents Against Gun Violence posts on Facebook a list of circumstances in which, Americans have shot each other. To read them is to rub your eyes in disbelief. These can’t be true, surely. People can’t take a life, hospitalise their own children, hollow out families in a second for such astonishingly banal reasons?
And maybe they’re not the reasons, exactly. Maybe those lie too deep even for the shooters to identify. But these are the stories that gun owners tell the police — the stupidly petty provocations, witless arguments and tragic accidents that need never have ended in the morgue if guns weren’t everywhere; if it wasn’t so ridiculously easy for any idiot to buy a firearm.
Britain is reeling from the horrific fatal shooting of Jo Cox, a bright and much-loved young Labour member of parliament, bursting with so much promise. There will rightly be soul-searching in days to come about how to stop such a thing from ever happening again. It’s bitterly cold comfort now, but if there are any lessons to be drawn about taking guns off British streets, I don’t doubt Westminster will want to draw them.
Thankfully, Britain is still a country by and large terrified of guns. So it beggars belief that no such line in the sand was drawn by the near-fatal shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in America; and that the grim immediate legacy of the Orlando massacre is a spike in gun sales.
America is a country that sometimes looks more frightened at the thought of losing them. But then the message some Americans draw from each and every mass shooting isn’t that there are too many weapons around. It’s that there are too many bad people, many of them armed — so you’d better arm yourself.
Like scared teenage boys on tough inner-city estates, who start carrying knives as everyone else does, they see themselves as victims not aggressors; people who would never pull a gun for the wrong reason. And so they lose sight of where this arms race is ultimately heading.
Seen through this distorting prism of panic, the aftermath of a shooting — precisely the time when the rest of the world screams at America to do something — becomes a paradoxically hard time to restrict gun ownership. People are afraid, and frightened people don’t think straight.
From the outside, it looks insane, even suicidal. But those were the words also chosen by an American newspaper columnist bewildered by Britons’ urge to leave the European Union. The two choices are in no other way comparable, but serve as a reminder that armed Americans probably welcome British views on their lives every bit as much as Leavers welcome the Washington Post’s — and that what looks blindingly obvious from a cool distance can feel different up close.
Nation-shaping decisions
There is a problem facing governments across the West now that is both simple and impossibly complicated. It’s what to do when people seem hell-bent on a direction damaging not just to the collective interest, but even to their own. We’re not talking here about everyday self-destructiveness, like smoking or eating too much or taunting trigger-happy French riot police in Lille. It’s the nation-shaping decisions, the ones where there is no democratic alternative to trusting the people to get it right. You may not agree with the results of any given general election, but there’s usually a broad discernible logic to who gets elected.
Polling last week found a narrow majority of Americans now support a ban on assault weapons, even if their elected representatives don’t. But when fear gets the upper hand — well, that’s when humanity risks shooting itself in the foot. Fear engages animal instincts, not the rational mind. It encourages narrow, selfish thinking, because when survival is at stake, then worrying about others is just a distraction. It makes you want to lash out, not listen; to defend yourself even if ultimately that only encourages further violence. And that’s as true of economic fear as the physical kind — if you wake up every day with a knot in your stomach about money, then voting for welfare cuts for the supposedly undeserving can feel like simple self-defence. If it feels like there’s not enough to go round, reduce the competition. Only then you wake up to find it’s your tax credits they’re taking away, your job disappearing.
Choices born of fear can beget frightening things, which beget more fear in turn. Yet, to say that people don’t always make the best decisions about their own lives sounds patronising and paternalistic.
It is right to be suspicious of being governed by people who have led overly comfortable lives, of course; but fearful individuals can make lousy choices too, and what’s worrying is that in a world where to override even the most self-destructive individual impulse means being branded out of touch, politicians feel increasingly inhibited about stepping in and saving us from ourselves. Both in Britain and America, one has seen the dangerous rise of politicians who pander to and stoke fears instead of defusing them.
There’s always the ghost of a chance that Orlando could be the elusive tipping point for America; the final nudge towards gun-law reform. Even Donald Trump declared last week that he would talk to the National Rifle Association about not allowing individuals on the US terror watch list to buy guns. But it says something that America’s National Rifle Association’s idea of a concession is that maybe terror suspects should have to wait three days for further checks before buying weapons. Some great leap forward.
Meanwhile, the sort of people who may one day pull a gun in an argument over a glitter manicure (as in a Detroit nail salon, last month) or mowing the lawn (Oregon, in May) barely figure in the argument. For now, they can step up and enjoy their constitutional rights pretty much as they always did. Ironically, their potential future victims may be just too afraid to stop them.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist and former political editor of the Observer.
