It is impossible to write anything about what happens in America without being accused of some nefarious bias. It is almost as bad as writing about Israel. So let me start with a little story.
When I was about six weeks old I was taken to Westminster Cathedral to be baptised. This sounds rather a grand place to be baptised, but my father was working there as the assistant organist at the time so I suppose this was a perk.
The event was intended to be a tandem christening – I have a twin brother – and our uncle Philip was going to be godfather to both of us. At the last minute the officiating priest announced that it was against the rules for both of us to have the same godfather. No other men were present except my father, who then ran outside in search of a man — any man — who would be willing to stand in at no notice as my godfather.
The man who answered the call on the pavement outside was an American serviceman by the name of Floyd Puckett, who was still in London having done his bit in the licking of Hitler. In honour of his kindness I was given his name as my middle one. So I am reminded of the American gift for spontaneous generosity every time I look at my full name.
Having said which, you guys are crazy about guns. Have you noticed, by the way, that while “mankind” has been outlawed as a bit of male chauvinism, “guys” has become a perfectly acceptable downmarket replacement for “people” even though in its original usage it meant men. In “Guys and Dolls” the women are the dolls.
But I digress. Guns. The latest school massacre brought bubbling to the top of my Youtube feed some things I had not realised were going on before.
Many American schools now hold an “active shooter drill” about as often as they hold a fire drill. In an active shooter drill you rehearse procedure for shots being fired in your school.
The teacher is supposed to lock the classroom door, block the window in it, if there is one, and usher you all to the far side of the room. This does not actually guarantee safety. The high-powered rifle sported by serious active shooters will put a bullet straight through the door and anyone who is cringing on the far side of the room behind it. But at least he has to guess.
The problem with this is that the active shooter drill is the converse of the fire drill. In case of fire you are to leave the building as quickly as possible. In the active shooter incident this is a possibly fatal mistake. In the latest case the active shooter took advantage of this by setting off the fire alarm before he started, thereby creating what might in less lethal circumstances be considered an interesting dilemma.
A more developed variation on the “active shooter drill” is the “active shooter exercise”, a dress rehearsal for the local police force. This has teenagers splattered with stage blood playing dead in the school corridors while cops in full SWAT gear stride over them in search of a culprit.
I find all this quite shocking, to be honest. Nothing at all like this went on in the rural grammar school where I passed my high school years. The depths of Sussex are quiet. But is there another country in the world where schoolchildren are prepared as a matter of course for the arrival of a deranged gunman in the hall?
Watching this buzz-cut Pasionaria tearing verbal lumps out of her local politicians through a veil of tears – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxD3o-9H1lY – I felt the distant internal disturbance of a few long-neglected memory cells climbing reluctantly to their feet.
After a few days I remembered that when I was roughly her age, I also participated in a school protest. This was against the Cuban missile crisis, which is now a distant piece of history for most people but at the time was seasoned with the knowledge that if it all want pear-shaped we on the wrong side of the Atlantic would get four minutes warning of the arrival of Russian missiles.
Of course this was in a sense not so personal. We had not lost friends . But I think there is a common underlying theme. If adults are going to exhort us to plan and work and sacrifice for the future then they have an obligation to ensure with some degree of certainty that there will be a future and we will be in it. Otherwise what is the point?
Well it would be an abuse of language to imply that America’s schools are a war zone, despite the President’s appalling suggestion that the answer to the active shooter problem is to arm teachers. Florida is not Syria.
But then you look at calm collections of the facts like this one: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17028930/gun-violence-us-statistics-charts – from which I purloined the following chart:
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And the interesting additional snippet that according to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”
You then have to conclude that America’s gun laws are crazy. Then you will be told that it is none of your business, that you don’t understand American culture, and the right to bear arms is protected in the Constitution, so that is that.
Well it is none of our business. But then the way things are in Hong Kong is none of your business. Generally we both enjoy the right to comment, subject only to the hope that the comment will be well-intentioned.
This is not really a cultural matter. The obdurate fact is that international comparisons show very clearly the incidence of gun violence in a country is directly proportionate to the number of guns in circulation. If you have on average more than one gun per person then the levels of gun violence will be stunningly high. There is nothing cultural about this. The workings of cause and effect are obvious.
I understand people who find guns exciting and interesting, as I do myself. But if this thought leads to the conclusion that everyone should have one then it’s a killer.
As for the Constitution, well, nothing is perfect. Amendments can be amended. Laws can be changed. Numbers can be reduced. Lives can be saved. And until, that happens I am afraid overseas observers will look at your beautiful country, shake their heads, and say, “wonderful place … nice people … pity about the gun thing.”
tim's experiment 
Mr. Hamlett,
I believe you are wrong on this article, both on a factual level and on a level of principle. I hope my comment will affect your view on this topic.
There are a number of inaccurate and misleading statistics that you give to support your view, the ones that you copied from Vox and CNN. Firstly, the Vox statistics about per-capita gun violence. It is certainly true that on average per-capita gun violence is relatively high in countries that have freer access to guns, but that in of itself doesn’t indicate anything. Countries with more cars have higher rates of car accidents. Places with more swimming pools have higher rates of drowning. I doubt, however, that you would use that as an argument to ban cars or swimming pools.
Also, it is important to note that gun violence also includes suicide by gun. These need to be separately correlated with suicides overall.
The key figure we should be looking at is whether more gun control correlates with less OVERALL violent crime. And the answer to that question is that there is no statistical evidence that tighter gun control correlates with less violent crime. It is at best inconclusive or leans toward less gun control leading to less violent crime. You don’t even need to be a statistician to understand this, the U.S. has one of the most liberal gun control policies in the World, yet the violent crime rates are nowhere near being the highest in the World. You would expect the opposite if a correlation existed. It is also very difficult to compare violent crime rates between countries or even states, since every region can have different definitions of what violent crime is.
One also has to take into account that when a criminal is stopped by the deterrence factor of a gun, it is very difficult to quantify. For example, if someone stops a crime by simply pointing a gun at the criminal and telling them to back off, this is never added to number-of-lives-saved-by-guns statistics, only when a gun is shot at the criminal are gun self-defence statistics counted. If someone is carrying their firearm openly on their belt and a criminal sees that person and decides not to attack them because they see the gun on their belt, this is also never added to statistics. It is difficult to say how many lives have been saved simply by the deterrence factor of a gun, and the people who are the biggest benefactors of this deterrence are always the most defenceless among us, such as seniors and women, who, thanks to the gun, can effectively protect themselves from being mugged, raped or harmed otherwise, as police, no matter how hard-working they may be, can never be at all places at once.
With regards to the CNN statistics, they are simply deceitful. Mass shootings World wide are tallied on the basis of a mass shooting being equal to more than 4 people dying in a single shooting. Under those statistics, the US is only 12th in the World. Way behind even developed countries like Norway and France. CNN specifically manipulated the statistics and changed the definition of a mass shooting to be 6+ instead of 4+, and that put US on first place. This is certainly not the first time CNN bent the facts to fit their agenda, and I doubt it will be the last.
I am just as heartbroken as you are about the tragedy of the recent shooting. I am not by any means discounting the suffering endured by the survivors and their relatives. But I believe that their suffering alone does not make them right on this extremely complex issue. Gun control, in this particular case, I believe, wasn’t the failure. I believe the failure was in the actions (or lack thereof) of the local police department, who have, on literally dozens of occasions, received calls about the shooter’s unstable behaviour, about his obsession with guns, about his violent threats to his classmates and teachers, about his violence towards his mother and chose to do nothing to stop him. In addition to that, the were four (4) armed policemen at the school when the shooting incident started, and they did nothing to stop it until backup arrived. Who knows how many lives would have been saved if the policemen at the scene, who were posted at the school specifically for protecting the children against threats, including threats like these, rushed in at the first sign of trouble? And you want Americans to hand over their guns to these people?
Finally, as someone who is, I am sure, just as worried as me about Hong Kong’s future, I believe you will agree with me that government tyranny is by far the biggest thread any citizens of any country face. We have seen in the 20th century the full extent of how far and deadly it can go, and we are still living down the aspects of it today. Indeed, a lot of places are still under tyranny. Freedom is a rare and precious thing, not the norm.
I ask you this: don’t you think that those governments would be much less likely to succeed if their populace was armed? Wouldn’t you, if you were a ruler wanting to go despotic, be deterred by a threat of an armed resistance to your despotic will? Surely, if you’re a would-be dictator you must be very certain of your victory, because the price of defeat will almost certainly be your public execution. The difference in the risks and returns from violence against an unarmed population versus an armed one is enormous, and this calculation will enter in any would-be dictators mind. As evil as they may be, they aren’t suicidal.
Perhaps, you’re thinking that an organized, technologically sophisticated army with tanks, planes, bombs, drones and warships would make easy work of a population armed with small arms, even if they are outnumbered 300 to 1. The Americans thought the same when they entered Vietnam. The Soviets thought the same when they entered Afghanistan.
I hope you can at least see that this is not as simple as “pity about the gun thing”. I am not American, I am from a country where people can’t own guns, and yet I completely support the “gun thing” in America.
Detractor, you made some valid points about the authorities failing to do something about the Florida shooter when warned, as well as a couple more at the end, but I don’t think you’re getting the whole picture either.
Since you’re not from the U.S., I wonder if you’re aware of the gradual erosion of Americans’ rights since 9/11. In the last 16+ years, the government passed the PATRIOT Act, militarized its police (which essentially relegated Posse Comitatus to the dustbin), stepped up its secret surveillance of its citizens (made possible by the PATRIOT Act), increased its detention of suspects without charge or trial (let’s not get to kidnapping and torturing them), and made its activities more opaque than ever by denying a record number of Freedom of Information Act requests.
How many gunowners and gun rights organizations marched on Washington as a result to attempt to redress these acts? My guess is none. Instead, not a few of them approved of such acts because they mostly didn’t affect the demographic that is most likely to own guns.
Obviously, violent crime rates in the U.S. are not close to being the highest in the world when you’re comparing every single country. But take out the developing countries and the U.S. would rank pretty high among its developed peers.
If you say that less gun control leads to less violent crime, I could counter by saying that Hong Kong, where it’s practically impossible to own a gun, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. While you appear to worry about rights in Hong Kong being eroded, in which case I’m on the same boat as you, I doubt that most Hong Kong people would agree that giving them greater access to guns is the way to reverse this trend. Hong Kong is already a stressful place even without China breathing down its neck. A stressed-out population with easy access to guns is a dangerous combination.
My point is not that your point about gun control is wrong, while mine is right. We could both be right, but what I’m alluding to is that there are likely other factors at work that make gun ownership work in your example and the lack of it working in mine. Listing and analyzing all of them is beyond the capacity of this message.