Common Sense Gun Reform Isn't What You Think It Is

America's Gun Culture is a Deadly Disease

Once again, families in America are grieving today as a consequence of a school shooting. This one was in Georgia. The shooter was, apparently, 14 years old. As of this writing, four people are dead and nine are injured. The number of relatives who are now agonizing over this senseless act and the kids and neighbors and people across the country traumatized by it is incalculable.

It is back-to-school season in America. Which means it is also back to active shooter simulation drills for students from coast-to-coast. We didn’t have those when I was a kid. Instead, periodically, we would have air raid drills to help us prepare for nuclear war. They would sound a siren and lead us into the hall where each of us sat in our designated place. We were instructed to put our coats over our heads and wrap our arms around our legs in anticipation of a thermonuclear war. I’ll admit, although not an expert in weapons of mass destruction as an elementary school kid, I never thought my coat was likely to provide much protection.

Here’s what else I thought: If grown ups thought it was worth running these drills then it was very possible that the day would come that we would be ushered out into the hall, we’d hear planes or missiles overhead, there would be a bright flash of light and we would be vaporized.

It haunted me then. I’ve had nightmares about it as an adult.

And there was never a nuclear war.

Imagine being a kid today. The drills come with dread-instilling regularity. But so too do the headlines saying mass shootings are not a long shot. They are a regular occurrence in the United States with roughly two happening every day.

Guns are the leading cause of death for American kids and teens.

I saw this Tweet today about this grim reality which showed a sign in front of a church which read “When will they love their kids more than their guns?”

Vice President Harris said today, “It is outrageous that every day in our country, parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It's senseless. We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn't have to be this way.”

It was heartening to hear such a thoughtful, strong response and even more heartening to remember that the Democratic nominee to be president of the United States understands this issue as well or better than any of her predecessors and is, in fact, one of the leading voices in the United States calling for sensible gun reform.

Her views are, despite the impression you might get from the media, supported by a large majority of Americans. Nearly six in ten of us feel that stricter gun controls are needed. Super majorities of Americans support preventing people with mental illnesses from being able to buy a gun, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun to 21, banning high capacity magazines, and banning assault style weapons.

These are common sense views. We can only hope that Harris wins and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate also due and the filibuster rule is suspended so that these sorts of basic reforms should be put in place. And while they’re at it perhaps a new administration could make gun producers liable for the damage done by the weapons they produce. Other industries must bear such responsibility. There is no reason to continue to provide them the protections won as a result of the corrupt work of the NRA.

But our problem is bigger than common sense reforms can contain. The deliberate misinterpretation of the Constitution’s Second Amendment has caused incalculable damage to our society. Chief Justice Warren Burger got it right when he said, “"The gun lobby's interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

The result has been that although the U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world’s population we are the place you will find almost half of the world’s guns. We also, unsurprisingly, have the highest homicide by firearm rate of any of the world’s most developed nations.

There are roughly 400 million guns in the U.S., more than one per each of the 330 million of us in the country. But of those guns, just three percent of Americans own half of them. These gun hoarders on average own 17 guns each.

Gun owners give plenty of reasons for owning guns. One is self-defense. But guns are seldom actually used in self defense. Another is for hunting. But no one in the United States today actually needs to hunt and sport hunting is, I am sorry, an abomination.

Gun owners and the gun lobby cite the Second Amendment as guaranteeing them the right to a gun but as Burger noted, it does nothing of the sort. It was clearly intended to provide weapons for national defense in a day when arms were a far-cry from the advanced, rapid-fire, high-capacity weapons of war we see today. Most countries, of course, make it much harder to own a gun than does the U.S. and that is only reasonable. Owning guns is a threat to the well-being of society rather than a defense of it.

That is why, while I support the calls that have been led by the Vice President for reform, in my view we should also at least acknowledge that our gun culture is a pathology that is killing tens of thousand of us each year.

Further, and here is where I know many of you will disagree, I do not believe that anyone outside the military and police (and frankly, as in the UK, we don’t need to arm all the police) has any need for a gun. In fact, countries like Japan have improved the quality of life and reduced the risk to citizens by making it very very difficult to own a gun and even more difficult to keep the gun in your home. In so doing they have effectively eliminated guns as a public health or safety threat to society.

Civilization is about progress toward realizations like these and the ability to achieve them. So-called “common sense” gun reforms are fine, a vital step even. But genuine common sense, the result of believing what we have seen during our lives, of understanding history requires something much more sweeping. Indeed a massive reimagining of what is ideal and what is possible is essential if we are to actually protect ourselves and future generations from the threats and the physical as well as psychological pain that we know living in a world full of guns produces.