Guns in America - Whose Right?

Like Columbine and Virginia Tech before it, last week’s appalling massacre at an educational establishment in America has sparked nationwide soul-searching and another difficult debate about the role of guns in society. But for all the usual talk, will the outcome be any different?

The stimulus for action this time certainly feels different. It is not to diminish the tragedy of previous events to say that the premeditated murder of a score of elementary-school pupils (many of them as they fled) and 6 of their teachers while they shielded their pupils is an outrage of an order not seen in the US for generations.

A quiet young man, possibly suffering from Asperger’s, with no history of being trouble with the authorities, wakes up one Friday morning and shoots his mother several times in the head before taking her own legally-acquired arsenal of assault weapons to the local school – his alma mater – to write another chapter in the grim history of American mass murder.

Since no amount of regulation of gun ownership under existing rules could reasonably have prevented this series of events, attention has turned to whether tighter restrictions should be introduced (or re-introduced) on what weapons individuals can buy and own.

The stumbling block for any such legislation, though, is considerable – the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment enshrines the right of all citizens to keep and bear arms, and has prevailed or even been strengthened every time it has been challenged in the Supreme Court.

But the US has introduced restrictions on gun ownership in the past; the Gun Control Act passed in 1968 in response to the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy banned the sale of firearms to certain groups including criminals and children, and as recently as 1994, a federal law was passed banning the acquisition of assault weapons, but it expired after ten years in which its many loopholes had been criticised and exploited.

President Obama – reduced to tears as he followed both of his predecessors in witnessing such an outrage occur on his watch – has pledged his support for the reintroduction of a ban on assault weapons as well as the closing of loopholes in restrictions on the sale of ammunition (the gunman had dozens more rounds available to him and may well have used them had his potential victims and emergency services not responded so quickly).

However, we have been here before, and the Constitution – together with the vested interests that exploit it for their own security – means any reform will be gradual in its implementation, limited in its scope and (on the other side of the fiscal cliff) probably insufficient in its funding.

On this side of the Atlantic, inevitable parallels have been drawn between America’s timidity and the prompt response of the British government to the Dunblane massacre, introducing a ban on handguns that has apparently prevented any repeat (notwithstanding the Cumbria shootings two years ago).

But the two scenarios are very different. The events of that day in 1996 – like Hungerford before it – were a wake-up call to a nation that believed that such events belonged elsewhere. Repeated rows since about the limits of reasonable self-defence of one’s own person and property reflect a culture of restraint, in stark contrast to the American sense of duty to protect oneself and one’s family by whatever means necessary.

For a President already facing a festive period of bitter disputes and hard bargaining, this very unwanted distraction – and no less intractable dilemma – could not have come at a worse time.