Guns in America: beyond control

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/20/gun-control-usa

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There is something in the old libertarian refrain – guns don't kill without people getting involved. The deadliest shootings of modern times have included such disparate corners of the Earth as Dunblane in Scotland, Utøya in Norway and Port Arthur, Tasmania – humanity's crooked timber will occasionally prove devastatingly warped in any setting. But even before Friday's cinema massacre in Denver, Columbine, Virginia Tech and Tucson had already given America more than its share of slots on this grisly list. Every murder requires its means as well as its perpetrator, and these are more reliably at hand in the US.

It is not a hard argument to make, and yet it is devilishly difficult to do anything about its conclusion in American politics. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, immediately called on Barack Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, to respond to the massacre by detailing gun-control plans, but he shouldn't hold his breath. The National Rifle Association's lobbying, a Republican House, a Senate that filibusters as a matter of routine, and a conservative supreme court which recently committed itself to a particularly full-blooded interpretation of the second amendment's "right to bear arms" – any one of these would be a challenging obstacle to surmount, and every one of them stands in the way of using the law to restrict the flow of weapons.

Washington's paralysis problem is familiar in contexts from climate change to debt. With guns, however, the difficulty is not just checks, balances and partisanship, it is a great swath of voters. The one recent politician to have taken a small step towards control was Bill Clinton. He signed into law the Brady bill, which mandated background checks on gun purchasers, or at least it did until it was somewhat neutered in the courts. Even this modest move drained such energy that the president would later blame the Democrats' loss of Congress on the battle, claiming rifle toters "could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker".

But in the 1990s, public opinion was in fact running roughly two-to-one in favour of gun control. More recently – and especially since the great recession took hold – the urge for arms to protect oneself in a rough old world appears to have spread. Before Friday's massacre, the polls were suggesting something close to an even split. While the right's wilder voices continue to claim that President Obama is secretly plotting to trash gun rights through UN treaties or some other back-channel means, his legislative agenda has in fact meticulously avoided the subject. The most fitting tribute to Colorado's innocent dead would be a change in this position. Sadly, there is scant hope of that.