Lessons from Sandy Hook
**On the 14th December 2012, reports of an all-too-familiar atrocity affecting innocent Americans began to flood global news networks. **
The terrifying details of another school-shooting began to filter across the Atlantic, this time at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. As the utter devastation of Adam Lanza’s killing-spree was unfolded and the details of the twenty children and six adults gunned-down were disclosed, a disturbing line of continuity seemed to be extended. We found ourselves asking, once again: what makes American society unparalleled in its self-definition as a nation where the gun is synonymous with its cultural identity?
The fact that European and American cultural definition is similar in so many ways seems to render the difference when it comes to America’s obsession with the gun utterly incomprehensible. The cultural homogeneity between Britain and our American counterparts, for instance, is unquestionable: dominated by the notion of consumerism, obsessed by the products of the mass media, our nations are so alike that we actively embrace cultural imports from across the pond in the realms of music, fashion and television. So why is there a huge cultural divide when it comes to the pervasiveness of the gun in American society?
Naturally there are historical roots to America’s relationship with the gun. In the colonial period, ownership of a gun was a necessity for many agriculturalists in order to defend their homes from hostile Indians and slaves, as well as for the purpose of hunting. The preference of local militias to a standing army to defend the colonies also meant that gun ownership was sometimes encouraged as people would be self-sufficient when called-up to defend against the threat of invasion from another European power. At this moment in the development of what we now perceive as a gun culture, however, the association imbedded in the American psyche between gun ownership and the safeguarding of the nation’s liberty was yet to be formed.
Dr. Timothy Lockley, lecturer at Warwick’s School of Comparative American Studies, commented that “only during the revolution did the gun come to be seen as a defence against tyranny, the theory being that a government with tyrannical leanings would think twice if most of its citizens were armed.” In the wake of independence, perceptions of the gun as a tool for defending newly-gained liberties were fully realised. The 1791 Second Amendment to the Constitution, which permitted ordinary Americans to bear arms, legitimised this belief.
It is clear that America has a long history of gun ownership. There is, however, a serious danger that in the historicization of a cultural norm, the justification for the widespread ownership of high-calibre firearms in 21st century American society involves inaccurate and anachronistic arguments. Take, for example, the assertion of many pro-gun lobbyists, most notably members of the National Rifle Association (NRA), that through owning a gun an American fulfils their ‘constitutional duties.’
As the American historian Richard Hofstadter identified over forty years ago, the amendment to the Constitution secured ‘a collective, not an individual, right.’ The wording of the clause actually states that a ‘well-regulated militia’ is a right of the American people for the upholding of libertarianism, with the focus being on communal arms-bearing as opposed to individual possession of firearms. The justification of gun ownership with the claim that it is an American tradition is also flawed in the sense that modern, post-industrial America is unrecognisable from the agrarian nation of the colonial days.
Leaving aside the weaknesses of the pro-gun lobbyists’ justification for gun ownership for a moment, it seems implausible to suggest that the scale of the problem in 21st century America is solely due to the perception of it as a cultural tradition. Michael Moore’s ground-breaking documentary Bowling for Columbine proposed a very different understanding of America’s modern gun culture. Moore led an exposé of contemporary mass media, scrutinizing the role media organisations play in fostering a mood of fear and paranoia.
The statistical data is staggering. At the turn of the millennium, despite the overall murder rate falling 20%, evening news coverage increased by 600%. It is difficult not to view such over-coverage as blatant fear mongering. It also breeds discursively produced social myths, including that of the ‘anonymous urban male,’ the white population’s fear of the black male, particularly in suburban America. If the mass media cultivates such a climate of fear, it is no wonder the gun remains lodged in the American collective unconscious as a necessary tool for personal protection.
All of this, of course, has economic implications and it goes without saying that somebody is exploiting the climate of fear for financial gain. With the Cold War over, the arms industry capitalizes on the mass media’s cultivation of fear. After 9/11, Walmart reported that gun sales soared by 70% and ammunition by 140%. It is the multi-billion dollar arms industry, however, which reaps the real profits by supplying a terrorized population with lethal firearms. All three of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers are US firms, one of which, Lockheed Martin, has a plant in Colorado located just miles from Columbine High School, where twelve students were massacred in 1999.
This is the same firm which was put in charge of the privatisation of the ‘Welfare to Work’ scheme, an initiative which forced Americans living way below the breadline to travel hundreds of miles to work menial, low-paid jobs in order to receive government hand-outs. It would be too simplistic to understand America’s modern gun culture purely in monetary terms, but it is certainly true that there has been a rampant post-Cold War capitalization on fear.
The socio-politico history of America’s gun culture and the mass media’s cultivation of fear seemingly leave us with little grounds for optimism in the quest to disarm a nation and break the pattern of gun violence.
This is, however, not necessarily true. An obvious yet crucial tool moving forward is that of dialogue. Political discourse and public debate must involve a tough self-examination of the forces responsible for the perpetuation of the problem and through such open discussion it might be possible that the climate of fear can be eased. The NRA may claim that it is a constitutional right for an American to defend their liberty with a gun but surely dialogue, the lifeblood of a democracy, should be the real tool used to uphold American liberty?
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