Gun shame

Yet another mass shooting happens in America. The political extremes scream at each other and the mass of people between the two struggle to understand or take away some lessons.

But the most obvious lesson is always missed and dismissed: No one needs guns.

The right and far right in America have long perpetuated the lie that the US Constitution somehow gives people the right to carry concealed automatic weapons with armour-piercing bullets. Yes, I know most of them don’t actually say that, but it’s certainly a logical conclusion based on their rhetoric.

At a minimum, the right and far right claim that the Second Amendment to the Constitution gives people the right to have guns, including handguns (the amendment has, in fact, been used to try and justify people carrying concealed guns, owning automatic weapons or armour piercing bullets).

All the Second Amendment says is this:

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.

For 200 years people have been arguing about what that means: Does it mean anyone can own a gun, or does it mean guns are only to be held in connection with “a well regulated militia”? Citizen militias are now a part of history. Their descendents, state National Guards, are basically part-time armies; the need for ordinary people to instantly form amateur armies is long past.

Incredibly, some in America are claiming the answer to gun violence is escalation: More guns and more violence. Some of them will argue that if the students had been allowed to carry hidden guns, the mass killing wouldn’t have happened. Which, of course, raises the spectre of raging gun battles as armed people shoot blindly, unsure of who or what they’re aiming at.

CNN had commentary from Aaron Cohen, whom they described as a SWAT trainer. He argued that all police should have a higher tactical level, ready to swoop in without waiting for SWAT teams. This raises the spectre of police being SWAT teams, and SWAT teams becoming heavily armed armies.

Is it any wonder that America’s image in the world is one of a land filled with gun-toting maniacs?

Gun nuts don’t care about America’s image. They say that if people don’t have guns, the government will become a communist dictatorship in which rape of grandmothers and babies will be compulsory (or something equivalent). A person would have to be a complete idiot to buy that argument.

There are plenty of democratic countries in the world in which ordinary people can’t own guns or, at least, not easily. New Zealand is one of them. Handguns are virtually unknown here. Criminals sometimes use rifles, but improvised weapons (knives, clubs, whatever) are more usual. Obviously, a knife or sawn-off shotgun can kill a person, too, but a victim’s chances are better facing a knife or club than a handgun.

The New Zealand police don’t carry guns. There’s a special unit called the Armed Offenders Squad that turns out whenever there’s a criminal with a gun. In New Zealand, “Special Weapons” are guns.

Obviously, it is possible to live peacefully in a democracy without carrying hidden handguns, but Americans won’t be experiencing such a country. The gun nuts will make sure no gun control, no matter how mild, ever happens there. And more shootings will happen.

So, the tragedy today was not that 33 people died at Virginia Tech. It also wasn’t the inevitability that something like this would happen. The tragedy is that it will happen again. Tragedy? Maybe a better word would be shame.