The numbing down of America

It was difficult not to sympathise with US President Barack Obama last week when he expressed anguish over what has become utterly mundane in modern-day America: the gunning down of multiple people in single, horrific incidents.

“Somehow this has become routine,” the president said after a 26-year-old gunman killed nine people at a community college in Oregon on Thursday and then himself. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it – we have become numb to this.

“This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America.”

Obama issued yet another call for tougher gun legislation, an echo of his pleas following the Newtown, Connecticut, school killings in 2012. Despite an immense groundswell of public support for gun control at that time, US legislators ultimately ignored the pleas, leaving the president of the world’s most powerful nation powerless to make a difference.

The Oregon man who perpetrated last week’s terror carried six firearms, including a rifle, to the college and had eight more at home. It was the 45th school shooting in the US this year alone. Yet such awful numbers never add up to legislation that might curb the carnage, so strong is the pro-gun lobby and so deep-rooted the belief among many Americans that they have a “God-given right” to own weapons.

The US has become a virtual armed camp, with an estimated one gun for every American. To those who say that’s too many, the gun lobby counters that, if everyone carried a weapon as a deterrent, there would be no crime at all. The problem of school shootings would vanish if teachers were armed, they insist.

In a recent study Harvard University found that, between 1982 and 2011, there were on average mass shootings in America every 200 days, and since 2011 every 64 days. No other country in the world has a problem with gun murders on this scale.

It is wearying to hear these people and the National Rifle Association (funded by US weapons manufacturers) continually evoke the Second Amendment to the US Constitution that gives citizens the right to arm themselves. The authors of that amendment specifically had in mind an armed militia of civilians that could be quickly mustered in the event of any threat to the nation. In its modern-day interpretation, however, it enables individuals to stockpile weapons of high calibre and brutal force for the sheer pleasure of it – or for mass homicide.

But the Second Amendment is only a small part of this ghastly picture. Legal access to firearms – including assault rifles and machine guns banned as war weapons in most countries – is widespread and easy, legislation varies from state to state, and enforcement of existing laws is spotty. The much-vaunted use of “background checks” on prospective gun buyers is readily undercut by online vendors. And then there are the black-market suppliers.

All of these gaping holes need to be closed if America is ever to emerge from this nightmare, but then what to do about the reform-busting senators and congressmen (and Republican presidential candidates) who have no interest in taking action on any of the above? And what to do about the vast segment of American voters, on whose support they depend, who count gun ownership among their inalienable rights not to be touched by government, as a key element in “the pursuit of happiness”?

As long as this mindset remains a significant factor in American society, and as long as the arms industry and the gun lobby can fool people into believing that guns are essential to everyday life, the litany of mass shootings will continue.