America's gun culture and the terror within

Meidyatama Suryodiningrat , Cambridge, Massachusetts | Tue, 02/19/2008 11:40 AM

A room full of bright young people in America's oldest university is asked why the U.S. has one of the highest gun-related homicide rates among industrialized countries.

Hands shoot into the air and answers flow, attaching the cause to economic disparity, social disunity, racial tension. Not a single one questioned America's penchant for guns.

It's a situation many of them fear but that few understand. Friends lost, lives changed, futures squandered. The impact of last week's shooting at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb was sadly familiar.

Firearms continue to feature in American school grounds. In the past 12 months 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech, four at Mount Vernon Elementary, another three at Louisiana Technical College.

To be fair these dozen or so shootings is, thankfully, are not indicative of violence in American schools. Nevertheless, no matter how occasional, there is something guttingly heinous when hope is violated in sanctuaries of knowledge.

The saddest part, perhaps, is that despite the carnage the response towards gun control likely to be the same: Little to none.

Some blame groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, who outspend gun control advocates 10-to-1 in millions of dollars lobbying against firearms control.

Politics aside, the underlying pretext is the acceptance of guns as a "normal" part of life.

A queer aspect of the American psyche, it is incomprehensible to foreigners. Guns are to individual liberty what porn is to free speech.

From the muskets of the revolution, the Winchester rifle in the Wild West, to a gunslinger's Colt .45, guns are as American as democracy and baseball.

The right to "keep and bear arms" comes second only to free speech in the Bill of Rights.

A Tommy Gun and a 1920s gangster felt hat go together like Dirty Harry and his Magnum .44. They are inescapable images of American folklore and carry the same meaning bamboo spears (bambu runcing) had for Indonesian freedom fighters.

So conforming is this way of life that a video question from a man touting an assault rifle and a shotgun submitted during a presidential debate is as legitimate as a suburban mom concerned with her children's future education.

Arguments over gun laws are far less divisive than those over abortion. Not surprisingly the U.S. Supreme Court, over the past two centuries, has rarely reviewed cases related to the right to keep firearms.

Many hope the shooting in Dekalb may prompt the Supreme Court to support a Washington DC law restricting gun ownership which it is about to be reviewed. But the historical trend is not encouraging.

Pro-gun advocates equate the right to be armed as a "liberty". A guarantor against the tyrannical tendencies of government and gun-control but a measure to restrict freedom.

They further contend there is no evidence that stricter gun laws reduce crime.

Statistically that may be true. However countries which have tightened gun laws in the wake of shooting massacres -- Canada after the 1989 shootings in Quebec, Britain after the 1996 school slaying in Dunblane, and France after the Nanterre incident of 2002 -- have yet to see a recurrence of violence of the same magnitude.

American society, on the other hand, is adamant about upholding individual liberties and the Bill of Rights to the extreme, arguably farther than even James Madison envisioned when he drafted the amendment.

Until America's next generation can understand that embracing weapons which discharge 100 rounds per minute is irrelevant to civil liberties will carnage be a question of "if" rather than "when".

One of America's favorite Westerns, High Noon, tells the tale of Gary Cooper's inevitable gun duel. However the movie's most ironic line goes to Grace Kelly, whose plea reverberates today: "I've heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns... I don't care who's right or who's wrong. There's got to be some better way for people to live."

The author, a staff writer with The Jakarta Post, is studying at Harvard University as a research fellow with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

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