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US gun laws: don't expect reform despite the grief



Private equity firm Cerberus is selliing its stake in gunmakers – instead of leading a campaign to clean up gun laws
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The Newtown school shootings have sparked renewed calls for gun control. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA


I thought BBC Radio 4 showed commendable delicacy on day four of the Newtown school massacre story when it placed an unrelated news item within its wall-to-wall coverage of the dreadful slaughter of 20 children and their teachers from a report that nine Afghan girls had been killed when they stumbled on an old landmine when foraging for firewood.

Though no offence was meant, the contrast between the coverage of the two incidents was painful. The grief of the American parents, the shock that went through wider society, so powerful that even the powerful and complacent National Rifle Association (NRA) noticed by day five, was heart-rending and distressing. But to my mind the coverage was excessive, with the multiplier effect caused by modern 24/7 media, relentless and intrusive. Though some do it with grace and sensitivity, reporters who cover these events know they are recycling cliches.

But the grief of the Afghan parents will have been no less profound. Whatever the differences of belief and culture, our shared humanity must make it so. But we cannot identify so easily with peasant girls from an ancient society as we do with the kind of kids we all know, attending an elementary school in a country with which we are intensely familiar.

So such incidents in a dangerous country far from the TV studios generate little coverage unless they can be pushed through a political prism by one interested party or another. In this case it was not clear whose landmine – lethal things which the British army left in still-murderous quantities on the 1942 battlefield of El Alamein in eastern Libya – caused the deaths when a child struck it with an axe.

Soviet? Taliban? I heard it attributed to both, but not on this occasion to the Americans. Perhaps that's why there was no political mileage in it for the usual suspects this time. But that doesn't end the fallout. In a tribal society – I hesitate to call it anything so sophisticated as a failed state – riven by war and foreign invasion landmines are an inevitable hazard. Everyone wants to outlaw them, but they're too handy for armies, including ours.

Weirdly enough to most people, in the United States the same considerations are deemed to apply to guns of all shapes, sizes and lethal capacity. They do so for historical reasons which have been wrenched out of their 18th century context – the constitutional second amendment right of citizens to serve as armed militiamen – and wrapped up in the spurious rhetoric of liberty for millions of otherwise decent people.

Countless words have been written in the past few days about this strange and destructive anomaly which costs so many lives – by suicide as well as murder – each year, but which political leaders feel unwilling or unable to do much about. Believe it or not, sales of weapons for private use have risen since the killings in Newtown because some Americans fear a crackdown.

Cerberus, the private equity firm that currently owns what it used to boast is the world's largest collection of commercial gunmakers – famous names such as Remington, Marlin, Bushmaker all packaged under the name (wouldn't you guess?) the Freedom Group – now says it's selling its stake because the father of Cerberus's founder lives in, yes, Newtown, Connecticut.

That response is about as irresponsible and sentimental as we can imagine. Leadership? No. Followership is more like it. The private equity crowd could have shown its repentance for peddling weapons of death to people with little use for them by leading a campaign to clean up US gun laws. But no, its PR people say it's better to cut and run while the heat's on.

With even the NRA expressing sorrow and offering a "meaningful contribution" to preventing future massacres of innocent children, the talk is that the US will finally move to end the madness. Democrat congressmen with NRA "A ratings" as sportsmen and hunters, even a few Republicans, are stirring uneasily and saying something must be done. President Obama, a very cautious fellow, is saying it too. The president's cerebral Mr Cool facade cracked a little in the emotion of the moment – he's a father too – and expressed the national mood of sorrow and dismay. Yet we should remain detached enough to note that the drones Obama dispatches in such large numbers against terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan sometimes kill children too. Truly, the human capacity for disassociation is remarkable.

Will anything much happen? Here I beg to differ from the "this time it's different" optimists and say "I'll believe it when I see it". Thus the ban on assault rifles of the kind used by the wretched and unhappy Adam Lanza in Newtown, which the Democrats enacted in the Clinton era, was allowed to lapse under George W Bush. To help them regain control of the House of Representatives – the US lower house – the Dems too recruited some pro-gun candidates in swing states.

So they're all at it? Actually they're not. Most Americans don't own guns, though those who do often own a lot – like Adam Lanza's "survivalist" mum, Nancy, who did not survive when her theories that one should be armed and ready in case of trouble were put to the test from a direction she hadn't expected. Adam shot her.

But the larger problem is that US politics are routinely gridlocked by both the political structure bequeathed by the sacred constitution and by the increasingly polarised political culture in the republic – driven by the atavistic lunge to the right by the dominant faction within and beyond the Republican party, but not exclusively their fault. No longer moderated by "blue dog" rightwing Dems from the Old South (they're mostly Republican now), the party has drifted to the left.

Guns are just one symptom of the way powerful lobbies with lots of barely visible corporate and financial clout behind them intimidate elected politicians and prevent them doing urgent and necessary things for the wider benefit of society.

The "fiscal cliff" which still looms – 10 days to go and they're still haggling – over taxation and public expenditure is another such problem which could damage both the US and wider global economy if the White House and Capitol Hill cannot behave like grownups. Republicans are strong on tax cuts (the theory is that freedom will cure the country's economic woes) offset by spending cuts.

What they do in practice is cut the taxes but keep on spending alongside the Democrats. Bill Clinton was the last president to get it under control, George W Bush was, rhetoric nothwithstanding, a big spender. Hence the ballooning debt and deficit. You can opt for a small state/low tax model or a high tax/big state model as the Swedes do. You can't have it both ways.

Israel's foolish intransigence over a two-state deal with the Palestinians, the widespread denial of climate change problems as the water rises and the wind blows stronger, the list is a long and urgent one. A significant slice of US public opinion – fomented and funded by shadowy corporate interests whose right to make undisclosed donations was upheld by a reactionary supreme court bench in 2010 – firmly puts its collective head in the sand.

So one recurring response to the Newtown massacre is that the blame lies with those who banned the carrying of guns in schools – just as one response to an earlier high school massacre was to blame the long coats under which the teenage killers hid their weapons. "Arm the teachers," I heard one wacky old boy say on air this week. I'm sure he felt it quite sincerely.

To talk people off that crazy kind of ledge requires political leadership and courage. It requires responsible media debate and corporations willing to put wider obligations to society above short-term profits and even shorter media attention spans.

It would also help if the "guns and God" lobby – strong among poor people – were given some more tangible hope of a better future in the here and now, not after a neighbour has blown them away when they came across the yard to borrow a cup of sugar. I can't see much prospect of any of this happening. Let's hope I'm wrong.

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