After decades of campaigning to bring about common-sense gun control in the U.S., it appears that a group of children may succeed where even Presidents have failed. Following Friday’s deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida , in which 17 people including 14 students were killed, survivors took to the streets in a relatively rare show of anger directed at President Donald Trump and Congress for not doing more to promote gun control. Their courage is to be doubly applauded, for they appear undaunted by the depressing history of America’s 227-year-old lethal love affair with guns, built on the constitutional right to bear arms, overlaid with a myriad state-level laws that make gun ownership easy. After the devastating school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, a tearful Barack Obama, then President, mooted legislation to tighten the regulation of gun ownership. That was speedily seen off by conservative lawmakers. With the failure of all 17 of his attempts to bring common-sense gun control to the floor of Congress, his parting gift to the incoming Trump administration was to close loopholes in gun laws through executive actions that would expand background checks for gun ownership and boost funding for federal enforcement agencies. Mr. Trump nullified those actions in February 2017, as he had promised to do during his election campaign.
The fact that school shootings do not lead to gun control reform shows how powerful the gun lobby is. The National Rifle Association contributes over $4 million each year to lawmakers in Washington to ensure their agenda is prioritised, and sizeable dark flows of pro-gun money likely reach Congress under cover of the Citizens United campaign finance law of 2010. But that is a drop in the ocean for most Congressmen and Senators, whose individual coffers can exceed $10 million. The immense pressure for gun rights thus goes beyond funding. It stems in greater measure from the pro-gun lobbies’ ability to mobilise large numbers of voters, who feel strongly about the Second Amendment, whether for personal security, to defend themselves from the “tyranny of government” or to hunt wildlife. This ingrained “gun culture” is exacerbated by the light-touch regulation of gun ownership, which leads to more mass shootings. While the U.S. has 270 million guns — more than 112 per 100 people — and has had 90 mass shooters during 1966-2012, no other country has more than 46 million guns or 18 mass shooters. A 2015 study found that across countries, after controlling for mental health, racial diversity, video game playing and baseline levels of societal violence, it was the extent of gun ownership that determined the odds of mass shootings. At its heart, the U.S. debate on gun laws will only turn on the fundamental value attributed to human life. At the present juncture, it is clear what that value is.
