America Needs to Talk About Gun Control in the Wake of
the Colorado Shooting

     Sympathy for Aurora's victims should not stop us
     addressing the fact that more than 84 people are
     shot to death daily in the US

Gary Younge
guardian.co.uk
July 20, 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/20/america-needs-talk-gun-control-wake-colorado

The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic
shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver,
Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain
in a perennial American elegy. Different singers
mouthing different words, but basically singing the same
song.

Psychological profiles of the shooter emerge, along with
portraits of the victims, while the political class
closes ranks so that the nation can heal. Incanted tones
to sooth a permanent scar.

All rituals serve a purpose. And this one is no
different.

At least 12 people have died. Their families must be
given space to mourn, and that space should be
respected. But it does not honour the dead to insist
that there must be no room in that space for rational
thought and critical appraisal. Indeed, such situations
demand both.

For one can only account for so many "isolated"
incidents before it becomes necessary to start dealing
with a pattern. It is simply not plausible to understand
events in Colorado this Friday without having a
conversation about guns in a country where more than 84
people a day are killed with guns, and more than twice
that number are injured with them.

Amid all the column inches and airtime devoted to these
horrific slayings, though, that elephant in the room
will remain affectionately patted, discreetly fed and
politely indulged. To claim that "this is not the time"
ignores the reality that America has found itself
incapable of finding any appropriate time to have this
urgent conversation. The victims in Colorado deserve at
least that. And these tragedies take place everyday,
albeit on a smaller scale.

America's president, Barack Obama, understands this. The
number of homicide victims in his home town of Chicago
this year has outnumbered those of US troops serving in
Kabul.

Speaking in Fort Myers, Florida on Friday morning, Obama
was right to suspend the routine campaign rhetoric and
play the statesman. Nobody wants to hear about Mitt
Romney's tax records and stimulating the economy on a
day like this. There will be other days for
electioneering.

But he was wrong to insist on this: "There are going to
be other days for politics. This is a day for prayer and
reflection."

For what are we to reflect on if not how this, and so
many other similar calamities, came about. Those who
insist that we should not "play politics" with the
victim's grief conveniently ignore that politics is what
caused that grief. Not party politics. But a blend of
opportunism on the right that flagrantly
mischaracterises the issue, and spinelessness on the
left that refuses to address it.

Americans are no more prone to mental illness or
violence than any other people in the world. What they
do have is more guns: roughly, 90 for every 100 people.
And regions and states with higher rates of gun
ownership have significantly higher rates of homicide
than states with lower rates of gun ownership.

The trite insistence that "guns don't kill people,
people kill people" simply avoids the reality that
people can kill people much more easily with guns than
anything else that's accessible. Americans understand
this. That's why a plurality supports greater gun
control, and a majority thinks the sale of firearms
should be more tightly regulated.

The trouble is that people feel powerless to do anything
about it. The gun lobby has proved sufficiently potent
in rallying opposition to virtually all gun control
measures that Democrats have all but given up on arguing
for it. In the meantime, the country is literally and
metaphorically dying for it.

Gun control is possible. There are both a constituency
for it and an argument for it. But it can't happen
without a political coalition prepared to fight for it.

If America can elect a black president, it can do this.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate