The Firearms Culture Is Encoded into the DNA of US Identity
“We pledge allegiance to gun manufacturers and the NRA of America, and for campaign funds for which they give, we sacrifice, under God, our integrity and compassion for all.”
The Pledge Taken by Too Many Politicians
I write these words after hearing of yet another school shooting in the United States. This time a shooter killed at least four people at a private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin before killing himself. At least five others have been taken to hospital with bullet wounds.
With two weeks left to go in 2024, there have been at least 385 mass shooting, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot. But gun violence in the United States is so common as to be unremarkable, almost normal. At the height of the Corona-19 pandemic in 2021, for example, gun-related violence resulted in 26,328 suicides and 20,328 homicides.
Earlier this month, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old highly educated young man from a wealthy family allegedly acted out the rage many of us have against mega-insurance companies and other blood sucking corporations by murdering, in cold blood, the CEO of one of the largest “health” insurance companies in the country.
Even a cursory glance on several social media sites shows the extent to which Mangione has already become a cultural icon, a hero in the realm of David slaying the mightily Goliath, or Robin Hood challenging the powerful Mayor of Nottingham on behalf of the poorest among us.
But we cannot separate the shooting of children and teachers at a school and the CEO of a highly profitable corporation because each case testifies to the violent nature of the United States of America, which was founded and maintained on violence.
The framers of the United States guaranteed, in the Constitution’s Second Amendment, its “free” people the right to carry and shoot terrifying weapons, but enslaved countless people transported against their will from the African continent to serve as dehumanized beasts of burden, and to rob the people who had preceded Europeans by thousands of years of their lands, their livelihoods, and their very lives.
While they were mostly wise men who crafted what many consider today as a brilliant and enduring blueprint for a new nation, they were products of their times with their individual human shortcomings and biases.
Just coming off a war of independence against one of the world’s great colonial powers, leaders thought it reasonable to ensure the “free” people the capability of defending themselves against any potentially tyrannical government. In this regard, they established the Second Amendment in its Bill of Rights granting people “the right to bear arms.”
Since then, firearms and the culture supporting it has been encoded into the very DNA of U.S.-American identity and what it means to be “an American.” But what may have been “reasonable” in the 18th century, without substantial reform today stands as unreasonable and deadly.
A Brief History
The Chinese around 850 of the Common Era invented a powdery mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate that when ignited with a spark, created an explosion. Though they discovered it quite accidentally when attempting to invent an elixir for immortality, they quickly utilized it for defensive and offensive advantages in wars against internal and cross-border enemies.
First used to stuff tubes in which the Chinese tied a fuse and lighted to propel as a hand-held rocket aimed at their adversaries, gun power transformed the “art” and scale of killing the likes of which the world had never seen. Throughout the decades and centuries in countries across the planet, technologies created even more and deadlier types of “hand cannons” as they were once called.
Attributed to the Portuguese in the 1400s, the “matchlock mechanism” was added to become the first known mechanically-firing gun. They attached a wick to a clamp that when triggered, sprang into the gun power. The Spanish carried these with them on their invasions into the Americas, and the Pilgrims brought them from England when they arrived in what would become known as North America.
Christopher Columbus took with him matchlocks and other types of hand cannons and breech-loading wrought-iron weapons and arquebuses — an early type of portable firearm supported on a tripod or a forked rest. When he sailed from Haiti, he ordered shots fired through the shipwrecked hull of the Santa Maria to frighten indigenous populations with the power of European firearms.
European inventors in 1509 replaced wicks with friction-wheel mechanisms to create wheellock guns. These generated sparks to ignite the gun power. Later, as would become common in Colonial America, residents used flintlock guns invented around 1630 with flint-ignition mechanisms.
The Long Rifle (“Kentucky Rifle,” “Pennsylvania Rifle”) developed with spiral grooves giving iron balls a spiraling motion, which improved overall stability and accuracy. Combatants used these firearms as major weaponry during the so-called French and Indian War as well as in the American Revolutionary War.
At the end of the 16th century in Germany and other European countries, firearms technicians came up with a “wheel gun” (revolver) that included a revolving cylinder containing several chambers and at least one barrel for firing. Now shooters no longer had to reload following each shot but could unload up to six bullets at their intended targets. In the U.S., Samuel Colt in 1836 mass produced these multi-shot guns, popularly called “six shooters.”
By the 1850s, shot guns (also referred to as scatterguns) became popular. Usually fired from the shoulder, they use a single-fixed shell to fire numerous small spherical pellets called “shot” or a solid projectile called a “slug.” Today, these firearms range from single action to semi- and fully automatic varieties.
The Union forces in 1862 popularized the Gatling gun, developed by Richard Gatling, as a weapon of mass destruction. This rapid-fire gun was the forerunner of the machine gun. And then, the Cartridge Revolver, developed by Colt in 1872, was a .44-caliber rear loading weapon.
And the technology with its capacity to injure, mutilate, dismember, and kill increases with each passing day. If Leif Erikson, the first known European to set foot in North America, had known of these later technologies, there is little doubt that he would have brought firearms to those shores.
Comparing and Contrasting
Before and up to 1996, Australia had relatively high rates of murder, but a tragic incident at Port Arthur, Tasmania, April 28, 1996, was the proverbial straw that broke the poor camel’s back. On that date, a man opened fire on a group of tourists killing 35 and wounding another 23. The massacre was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.
Taking decisive action, newly-elected conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, negotiated a bipartisan deal between the national, state, and local governments in enacting comprehensive gun safety measures, which included a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and laws prohibiting private firearms sales, mandatory registration by owners of all weapons, and the requirement that all potential buyers of guns at the time of purchase give a “genuine reason” other than general or overarching self-defense without documentation of necessity.
By 1996, polls showed overwhelming public support of approximately 90% for the new measures. And though firearms-related injuries and death have not totally come to an end, homicides by firearms fell by 59% between 1995 and 2006 with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides, and a 65% reduction in gun-related suicides.
In addition, there has been significant drops in robberies involving firearms, and contrary to fears by some, no increase in the overall number of home invasions. In the decade preceding the Port Arthur massacre, Australia recorded 11 mass shootings. No mass shootings have occurred in the 20+ years since the measures went into effect as of 2016.
Just six days after a terrible hate-inspired gun murders of Muslims praying at two Mosques in Christchurch New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced sweeping new firearms regulations, which included banning semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity ammunition magazines, and a mandatory government buyback of such previously sold weapons.
The U.S. Congress enacted a brief federal ban on assault weapons, The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, in September 1994. The ban, which also included barring high-capacity magazines, expired in September 2004 as required in its 10-year sunset provision. The measure has not been reauthorized by Congress.
As a provision inserted as a rider into the 1996 federal government omnibus spending bill, the Dickey Amendment, named after Arkansas Republican Representative Jay Dickey and lobbied heavily by the National Rifle Association, passed the Congress into law. It mandated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
So, what limits, on the national, state, and local levels should we as a nation consider and enact on the sale and ownership of firearms? Many people within the larger Gun Safety Movement have proposed “common sense” solutions. Unfortunately, what one person determines as “common sense,” another personal considers as “freedom killing.”
How free, though, are any of us as tens of thousands of people are murdered annually, and tens of thousands lose their lives by guns through accident or suicide? How free are we as the guns lobby purchases our politicians in the service of firearms manufacturers in their quest to acquire even more power and profits?
With the relatively easy access to firearms in the United States, few of us have not already been touched by the ravages of gun violence. Hardly a day goes by that we do not hear of yet another high visibility mass shooting, which does not even begin to reflect the seemingly countless number of lives taken in small towns and large cities throughout the nation that don’t make it to the national spotlight.
What will it take for us to cease fighting insanity with insanity? How many more of our precious people of all ages will have their lives cut short under the banner of “freedom to bear arms”?