WILL THE US GUN MASSACRES CONTINUE?

WILL THE US GUN MASSACRES CONTINUE?
By Dr Duncan R Shaw

Madrid, 16 June 2022

Last week I started this series of columns (How To Live Decently In An Indecent World) by criticizing the current British political system; this week I am going to do the same with the American system.

The postwar generation in Britain grew up full of admiration for the US, whom we viewed as our generous saviours from German aggression in two world wars. This image of ‘America the Generous’ was cemented for us by the Marshall Aid Plan of the 1950s.

In England in the 1960s we relished US television series for children (partly because there were practically no British series in those days), especially Lost In Space, Wacky Races, The Little House On The Prairie and The Waltons. In the 1970s American police shows like Charlie’s Angels, Kojak, The Streets Of San Francisco, Colombo and Starsky and Hutch gave us ‘across the pond’ a strong hint of US inner-city problems, while Roots explained to us the background to America’s ‘original sins’ of slavery and racism.

As a teenager I was fascinated by American literature (Steinbeck, Faulkner, Salinger, Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Heller, Bellow, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Twain, to name but a few) and music (Jackson Browne, Eagles, Beach Boys, Dylan, Creedence, Paul Simon, America, Motown, soul, R&B).

Despite the election of Reagan and the ascent of the ‘New Right’, I was desperate to see America for myself – and finally did so in 1981, working as a ‘soccer coach’ at a youth camp in upstate New York. We were hardly paid at all there but were given an unlimited Amtrak ticket for September, when our youthful charges had gone back to school.

We criss-crossed the US from north to south and from east to west by train, enjoying the generosity and openness (usually) of the American people. However, my positive mood was soured by meeting right-wing vigilantes who boasted about stockpiling assault weapons “for the coming race war” – and by witnessing an appalling police shootout in tense Los Angeles.

In Britain (at least before 2000) the police rarely carried weapons; the noble tradition was that the rifles were safely locked away in the police station, until a judge declared a rare state of emergency.
Once, while hitch-hiking from Colorado to Oregon, I stopped for a beer; the gas station owner proudly took me into his back room and showed me all the assault rifles he could sell me – without any background check whatsoever.

Since 1981 I have visited the US (all 50 states, actually) on many occasions, and enjoyed a brief spell as visiting professor of history (at Suffolk University, Boston) in 1998. I was offered a permanent post by Suffolk and was considering accepting it – until the Columbine Massacre and other mass shootings made me think twice.

In 2015 I took my wife and daughter to sweltering New York for a fortnight; they were appalled by the ugly tension (Fourth of July celebrations in Central Park cancelled by the nervous police) and the ever-present threat of gun violence.

The grim facts: 277 US mass shootings between 2000 and 2018, with almost 900 people killed and more than 1500 seriously injured. The weekly gun massacres have continued apace since 2018, with sad predictability.

Last week’s Texas school massacre did not surprise me – how could it, in a country where more than a third of all households have a least one gun, and where ‘copy cat’ school shootings have become a grim fashion since Columbine?

Will the massacres continue?
Unfortunately yes, despite most Americans  and President Biden actually favouring stricter gun laws and background checks.

What a terrible indictment of US ‘democracy’: the people and the president keen to change a dreadful situation, but one particular political party (the Republicans) and one particular interest group (the NRA) determined to prevent that change – together with the gun manufacturers themselves.

Almost all Republican (and some Democrats, also) governors, senators and Congressmen take money from the NRA for their expensive electoral campaigns; they will never bite the hand that feeds them, and they will resolutely obstruct practically all gun control measures in Congress.

The tears of a thousand grieving parents and relatives will not change this sad situation. The Republicans and the NRA actually believe not in limiting the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) but in extending it: by arming the teachers, and bringing more rather than less guns into schools and restaurants.

So in which US state or city will the next mass shooting occur, and when? Coming up shortly, I fear…

I’m not an ‘anti-American’ European intellectual; I love many aspects of US culture (optimism, civil liberties, music, literature), but the power of the gun lobby really must be curtailed – but, sadly, it won’t be.

As Jonathan Freedland (another English admirer of most things American) asked last week in The Guardian: “America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship?”

Or as the great Jackson Browne put it back in 1986 (when America’s gun massacre nightmare was just starting): “By the dawn’s early light, by all I know is right – we’re gonna reap what we have sown.”