The Debatable Land

Why do Americans love guns?

I am puzzled. Puzzled that is, by the British attitude towards America's gun culture. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's (in my view) common sense ruling that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual, rather than a collective, right to bear arms, British commentators responded by, well, by throwing their hands up in the air and, yup, wondering at them there crazy Yanks. Thus Bryan Appleyard:

I no longer try to understand the American acceptance of well over 30,000 gun-related deaths a year.  No other country comes close - though it should be noted that over half are suicides, in other countries people may just kill themselves in different ways so the total gun death figure may be misleading. Either way, the weird complacency remains...Gun culture remains one of America's greatest aberrations. It baffles other nations. But there you go.

Thus, too, the BBC's Man in Washington, Justin Webb, who quotes the 2nd Amendment and asks:

Errr, what does that mean?... You can disagree with the majority view, but you cannot escape from it if you live in the United States.

Well, as I say, this befuddlement puzzles me. Like may other foreign commentators, these two (whose views, I would suggest, are representative of the British view of American gun culture) seem to be confusing something that is exceptional with something that may be considered bonkers. But the former does not imply the latter. And in fact the unique nature (in the western world) of American gun culture seems, to me at least, firmly rooted in a peculiarly, even uniquely, American set of historical, cultural and legal circumstances. Considered individually some, or even each of these, might be thought insufficient explanations for America's love affair with the gun; taken collectively they render the matter much less mysterious and, I'd hazard, entirely explicable. 

Other developed countries - Canada, Switzerland - also enjoy high rates of gun ownership, yet do not suffer American levels of gun violence. But, rather importantly, neither Canada nor Switzerland was founded at the point of a gun. Timing matters. I'd suggest that had the United States been in a position to declare independence from Britain in 1676 rather than a century later, American culture might be rather different. As it was, the revolutionaries launched their war just as guns became sufficiently reliable and affordable to be everyday purchases for "ordinary" people. Swiss independence, of course, pre-dates the gun while Canadian independence was, generally speaking, a peaceful, negotiated affair rather than the consequence of an armed insurrection.

Department of Firearms

Good news from Washington: a common-sense interpretation of the Second Amendment prevails at the Supreme Court:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court's 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment.

More later, I imagine. It will be interesting to see how Obama responds to this, especially given his ambitions to conquer the Mountain West states where, shall we say, support for gun rights is strong. Most european reaction will, I suspect, have a Would you look at those Crazy Yanks tone...

Who says the culture wars are over?

This is probably the dumbest thing Barack Obama has said all year.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

That Obama was speaking at a  fundraiser in San Francisco, of all places, makes it worse. Just watch the Clinton and McCain campaigns spin this as the "real Obama", just another Ivy League liberal who thinks he's better than the Average Joe. 

Granted, the complete transcript of Obama's remarks is not as bad as that extract makes it sound and that he's really recognising that folk in struggling industrial towns aren't as receptive to Obama's message of hope as other audiences may be and some of this scepticism is perfectly understandable, even, to some extent, reasonable. But still... The tape of these remarks has got to be a McCain ad in the autumn. And not just in Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania either, but anywhere McCain needs to bolster or shore up his support amongst white male voters. "They cling to guns" is an especialy unfortunate phrase...

UPDATE: Obama explains himself here, arguing that he's more in touch with ordinary voters than either Clinton or McCain and that the bitterness many voters feel is, to a large extent, right and proper and the sort of thing he's running to change and overcome. It's a pretty good recovery even if it won't entirely dispel the ghosts of Stevenson/Dukakis/Kerry or stop the GOP ads attacking Obama on this:

“I was in San Francisco talking to a group at a fundraiser and somebody asked how’re you going to get votes in Pennsylvania? What’s going on there? We hear that’s its hard for some working class people to get behind you’re campaign. I said, “Well look, they’re frustrated and for good reason. Because for the last 25 years they’ve seen jobs shipped overseas. They’ve seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.

“And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement-- so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

“Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch? No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania. I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They’re angry and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.”

Guns in Britain and America

Good news, for once, from Washington as the US Supreme Court looks likely to uphold a ruling that the District of Columbia's blanket prohibition on owning handguns is unconstitutional. Frankly, people, I'm confused. That is to say, I'm confused that there's ever been any confusion over the meaning of the Second Amendment. It all hinges upon the interpretation of the provision that:

"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."

As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick says,

The constitutional question is whether that first clause limits the right to bear arms to a citizen militia, or whether the militia language represents a bit of constitutional phlegm standing between you and your full-throated right to bear arms.

Really? I should have thought it simple: how can you have a militia at all unless the people have the right to bear arms in the first place? Otherwise what will they fight with?  And doesn't it seem unlikely that the Founding Fathers intended for guns to b kept in state arsenals? That being so isn't it pretty obvious -to the point of being simple common sense - that the private ownership of guns shall not be infringed?

Of course I'm not a lawyer and perhaps this is a simplistic view. But, to put it another way, given the lives, beliefs and times of the men who wrote the US constitution it might be a strange interpretation that permitted abortion but banned the private ownership of handguns. As I say, the militia has to come after gun possession not the other way round.

Alternatively, such a ruling would, in Ms Lithwick's view, represent:

the abandonment of every principle of strict construction, federalism, and judicial modesty in which the Roberts Court ever purported to believe.

Meanwhile, in Britain, our own crazy gun laws continue to apply. My brother, for instance, has just had to fork out £40 to have his shotgun certificate renewed. To be sure this only happens every five years, but it still seems a less than pressingly useful apportionment of police time. There's an interview - to demonstrate you're not a nutter - and several forms to be filled in and the whole process of renewal takes six weeks. Why?

It's hard to see how a cost-benefit analysis would endorse this process. Last time I checked there wasn't a real problem of chaps who like to pot rabbits or shoot pheasants going on maniac homicidal rampages in market towns across the country.... To the (limited*) extent that there's a problem with gun crime in Britain I think we may assume that fellows in corduroy and tweed are not the problem.

*Very limited: there were only a few dozen shooting homicides last year. In a country of 60 million people. The hysteria in the press over gun crime is a) entirely predictable and b) typically overblown. The latest nonsense is a crack-down on air rifles. What next? Catapults and pea-shooters?

The Foreign Journalist's Path to Enlightenment

As we all know, Americans' love affairs with God and guns baffle foreigners. In that respect this Reuters story is obviously not aimed at the wires' US clients. It's meant to be helpful and explanatory and is, therefore, a good thing. In fact it's a kind of journalistic rite-of-passage you need to pass through to demonstrate that, to some extent at least, you've moved beyond the cartoon stereotypes of America that editors - and many readers - love so much.

Still, one can't help but smile at this sort of stuff (emphasis added):

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.

The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors.

"People are 'Oh, you collect guns, you must be bad.' That's nonsense. Gun collectors aren't criminals, they are nobody to be frightened of," says Black, one of several hobby collectors in this small Arizona town.

Still, I shouldn't mock the Reuters reporter. Like I say, it's an important stepping stone along the road to understanding America a little better. I made some of the same points in a Scotsman piece the morning after the dreadful shootings at Virginia Tech last year:

"By road, Blacksburg is only a few hundred miles from Washington DC; psychologically, it belongs to a different America altogether. This was once frontier territory, the front line of the American colonies as the fledgling republic began its relentless expansion west. These hills - the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Smoky Mountains and the rest - were largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants whose ethos and culture played a still under-appreciated part in the formation of the United States. If America's gun culture has a spiritual home, it is to be found in Appalachia.

As Jim Webb, the Vietnam hero who was elected to the Senate last November, writes in Born Fighting, his history of the Scots-Irish in the US, the people here "are a culture founded on guns, which considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct, while literary and academic America considers such views not only archaic but also threatening". It's not, of course, only "literary and academic America" that struggles to understand this proudly redneck culture; the rest of the world does too.

If Webb is right - and I think he is - then the gun is an inescapable part of America's sense of itself. If the colonists had not been armed, they could not have rebelled against King George. Such sentiments may seem anachronistic or even callous in the wake of the worst mass shooting in US history, but no attempt to understand why America, alone* of western countries, remains an armed society can hope to be successful without appreciating the historical - and constitutional - place the gun has played in its history. Wishing it otherwise is not enough to wish it away.

That culture still thrives. Three summers ago, I attended what proudly billed itself as "America's Largest Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show" in rural Kentucky. Guns from all over the world were on sale, while patrons could rent .50 calibre machine guns to blast away at wrecked cars, buses and boats. Time after time, I was asked if there was anything like this in Scotland. "No, not really," I would say, mustering as much understatement as seemed sensible. "You could see how people could twist this into something it's not," one sub-machine gun wielding man told me. "But," he insisted, "these people are just average Joes having fun."

And for the most part, he was right."

*An error, of course. Switzerland for one has a very high rate of gun-ownership. But that slipped my mind at the time.

[Hat-tip: Jacob Sullum]

Chuck Norris doesn't endorse, he tells America how it's going to be...

Via Garance, here is by far and away the best advertisement of this interminable presidential election campaign:

UPDATE: Daniel Larison makes the good point that Huckabee's two word plan for securing the border ("Chuck Norris") is an admission that Huckabee doesn't really have a border policy at all (or at least not one likely to appeal to discontented Iowa Republicans).

Best - or at least most amusing - reaction to Huckabee's ad comes, of course, from our old friend Witless Fred Dalton Thompson whose campaign spokesman complains that "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy."

Hackery of the First Order. Surprise!

It's not, I suppose, surprising that Dinesh d'Souza, should see the Blacksburg shootings as an opportunity for cheap, tendentious point-scoring:

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing...

...To no one's surprise, [Richard] Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules.

Look, the recourse to religion in a time of grief or suffering is entirely understandable and only the more boorish type of doubter would seek to deny, trivialise or belittle the comfort that ritual and religion can bring to many people at times like this. Each to each is what we teach and all that. For the rest of us of course, it's all about the molecules. Bad, bad, molecules...

[Via Andrew Stuttaford]

The Scots-Irish connection

I've an op-ed ($ may be required?) in Wednesday's edition of The Scotsman in which I try to persuade a generally sceptical readership that, whatever they might think, the United States is unlikely to give up on its gun culture any time soon and that, more importantly, there are well-established cultural and historical reasons for American's lov affair with guns. It is, briefly, part of the American id.

An extract:

By road, Blacksburg is only a few hundred miles from Washington DC; psychologically, it belongs to a different America altogether. This was once frontier territory, the front line of the American colonies as the fledgling republic began its relentless expansion west. These hills - the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Smoky Mountains and the rest - were largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants whose ethos and culture played a still under-appreciated part in the formation of the United States. If America's gun culture has a spiritual home, it is to be found in Appalachia.

As Jim Webb, the Vietnam hero who was elected to the Senate last November, writes in Born Fighting, his history of the Scots-Irish in the US, the people here "are a culture founded on guns, which considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct, while literary and academic America considers such views not only archaic but also threatening". It's not, of course, only "literary and academic America" that struggles to understand this proudly redneck culture; the rest of the world does too.

If Webb is right - and I think he is - then the gun is an inescapable part of America's sense of itself. If the colonists had not been armed, they could not have rebelled against King George. Such sentiments may seem anachronistic or even callous in the wake of the worst mass shooting in US history, but no attempt to understand why America, alone of western countries, remains an armed society can hope to be successful without appreciating the historical - and constitutional - place the gun has played in its history. Wishing it otherwise is not enough to wish it away.

That culture still thrives. Three summers ago, I attended what proudly billed itself as "America's Largest Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show" in rural Kentucky. Guns from all over the world were on sale, while patrons could rent .50 calibre machine guns to blast away at wrecked cars, buses and boats. Time after time, I was asked if there was anything like this in Scotland. "No, not really," I would say, mustering as much understatement as seemed sensible. "You could see how people could twist this into something it's not," one sub-machine gun wielding man told me. "But," he insisted, "these people are just average Joes having fun."

And for the most part, he was right.

Virginia Tech shooting

I'm off to Blacksburg to cover the awful shootings at Virginia Tech. Not sure when I'll have time to post a report but I'll try to find the time to do so.