A Changing Ireland

 

Guns in America                Gerry OShea

More than 43,000 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2023. That accounts for one death every twelve minutes. More than half of these deaths were suicides or accidents, and almost 19,000 were homicides. In addition, guns were named as one of the leading causes of death among young children and teenagers.

 A mass shooting is defined as an incident resulting in the death or injury of four or more people. By this measure, there were 656 mass shootings in the United States last year.

In 2022, the previous year, the statistics show close to 48,000 gun deaths and 647 mass shootings. Two of these incidents, separated by ten days in May of that year, one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the other at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, account for a total of 31 deaths, among them 19 children. In both tragic cases, the gunman used an AR-15-style rifle.

In February 2023, Barry Moore, a Republican congressman from Alabama, introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to declare the AR-15 rifle the National Gun of the United States. This proposed legislation was co-sponsored by three other Republicans: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, George Santos of New York (no longer in Congress and facing legal charges), and Andrew Clyde, a multi-millionaire gun dealer from Georgia.

The bill died on the House floor, so the US is still functioning without picking a National Gun! However, it surely leaves a serious question begging for an explanation: How to understand why the assault weapon used in many of the deadliest mass shootings in America has been proposed in the country’s Congress by members of the majority party as an official symbol of the country?

There are around 400 million guns owned in the United States, more than the total population by around 50 million. AR-15s comprise about 5 percent of the total, but they are currently the best-selling rifles in the country.

A member of the National Rifle Association recently told the Washington Post that “AR folks are the heart and soul of NRA membership,” and it has made promotion of what they deem as “America’s Gun” its number one priority. They choose to disregard that this sophisticated rifle is now closely associated with mass shootings and also with far-right and white supremacist movements and militias like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers.

The NRA seems to have successfully convinced a majority of Americans of an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment, which reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” There is no room in NRA thinking for adapting sentiments that made sense two and a half centuries ago to the conditions of our time.

Politicians, almost exclusively Republicans, beneficiaries of big campaign checks from the NRA, insist on a narrow interpretation of the Constitution and have successfully resisted sensible changes to bring the words into line with modern scientific reflection.

A Washington Post poll conducted in 2022 found that 81 percent of AR15 owners are male, and 74 percent are white. The profile of the average person possessing these weapons comes through as a middle-aged male from a red state with a higher-than-average income who is four times more likely to identify as a Republican than as a Democrat.

The reason we have 25 times higher gun homicide rates in The United States than in any other Western country is that we have far too many gun owners and a powerful gun lobby. The NRA has effective veto power over the country’s firearm laws that are written to profit gunmakers and not enhance the safety of the citizenry.

In 1922 during the Irish Civil War the Free State Government faced a major decision on whether the new police force should be armed as their predecessors, the Royal Irish Constabulary, were. They finally decided in favor of a model of community policing where the new civic guards would be trained to use a baton to deal with rowdiness or illegal behavior. That was a very wise decision and paved the way for the development of a police force that was and still is respected throughout the country.

In the 1950s, a man in California named Eugene Stoner developed the AR-15 as an advanced version of the Armalite family. Stoner, who did not have a college degree, completed his important development in his own garage. He was delighted that the US army welcomed it as a sophisticated rifle that could counteract the AK47, which was used by many communist regimes, despised by Americans in those years.

Guns are central to American mythology. The men and women who moved West to develop territories that were occupied by so-called barbaric Indian tribes are always seen carrying a rifle. These Indian tribes occupied a special place in the mythic stories about brave cowboys fighting tribesmen to establish a new American culture. Armed men on horseback defending their new homesteads hold a high place in American iconography.

Many of those involved in the Capitol Hill insurrection of January 6^th, 2021, had flags carrying images of the AR-15 and the daunting motto “Come and Take it.”

The firearms industry, aided by politicians from the Right, fosters the idea that liberal elites are determined to strip so-called ordinary citizens of their right to gun ownership. In response to this imagined threat, they have introduced what they call Second Amendment sanctuaries conjuring up places where “good” people can find refuge from chasing sheriffs.

Commenting on the daft legality of this behavior, Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut points out that “it is richly ironic for Republicans to say we shouldn’t pass new gun laws while in the same breath promising that they won’t enforce present restrictions.”

Consistent polling shows strong resistance to limiting gun ownership. However, a clear majority of Americans – conservative and liberal – favor restricting the right to purchase a firearm to people over 21 who are trained in safe weapon use and are cleared by the police as having a clean record. A permit allowing gun ownership should have the same importance as a driving license.

Anything close to legislation along these lines will not pass in Congress, especially in the Trump administration.

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com