Rights and wrongs

A week after a lone gunman perpetrated the worst mass shooting in US history, the politics of America’s gun control debate remain baffling. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, the general public, including much of the NRA’s membership, seemed receptive to the idea that dangerous or unstable individuals shouldn’t be able to by assault weapons so easily. But when Democrats in the US Senate tried to adopt measures that would block gun purchases to terror suspects  – last year 244 tried to buy guns; 233 succeeded – these were quickly resisted.  Republicans argued that the proposed legislative amendments would give the government too much power. As one Republican Senator explained, the prospect of an armed terror suspects could too easily be abused to deny “an innocent law-abiding citizen [his] Second Amendment rights because he’s on a list with a bunch of terrorists.”

The Orlando shootings were carried out with an AR-15, a light weapon that can fire up to eight rounds a second. It is popular with many young gun owners who like its resemblance to weaponry used in first-person shooter video games. (The National Rifle Association likes to call the weapon “America’s rifle.”) By contrast, soldiers who have used the military original of the AR-15, the better known M-16, have no illusions about its use in the real world. In a recent New York Times essay, a former soldier recalls his colleague’s grim description of the weapon: “ARs cause horrific damage to humans; that’s why the military developed them. If you want to shoot an AR so bad, please feel free to join the fight against ISIS in the military.” And yet, fully aware of the ease with which a single gunman can inflict mass casualties with such a firearm, its manufactures continue to market the weapon, very lucratively, as a legitimate product for recreational hunters.

Four years ago, an AR-15 was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed 26 victims, most of them young children. Since then the children’s families have mounted a legal challenge against a 2005 federal law that shields gun manufacturers from liability claims when their products are used in a crime. The Newtown families argued that the gun should be restricted to military use and that selling it to civilians is tantamount to criminal negligence. Although the suit remains, at best, several years away from an actual trial, its progress does offer the hope that America may, eventually, adopt common sense gun control laws.

The nationalistic fervour with which gun rights are defended in the US is not dissimilar to the passions within the UK’s Brexit campaign. In both cases, highly motivated minorities have insisted that regulation from above – the federal government, Brussels – tramples on time-honoured freedoms. They also argue that the public at large would be much better off if smaller groups (individuals, states) were allowed to regulate themselves. Appeals to a collective interest are rejected as irrelevant impositions by corrupt and remote authorities. Yet, as the horrified response to the murder of the Yorkshire MP Jo Cox suggests, Britain’s strict gun control laws have clearly established a culture in which such terrible killings are far from routine.

In her maiden speech to the House of Commons last year, Ms Cox spoke warmly about the cultural diversity of her constituency, which contains both Irish Catholics and Muslims from Gujarat and Kashmir. She noted that “While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.” This inclusive spirit made Ms Cox an ardent supporter of “the security and stability of Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.”

Part of what has made both the arguments over US gun control and Britain’s role in Europe so painful to watch is the narrow, self-interested way in which both conversations have been hijacked by irrational partisanship. Too often, common sense has been subordinated to abstractions which obstruct political decisions which are clearly in the public interest. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them” wrote the great American writer James Baldwin. At their best, this allows them to draw on the wisdom of their forebears and repurpose old precepts and institutions for new circumstances. At its worst, however, as in the US gun control debate, it becomes a licence to appeal to anachronistic fears and an obsessive desire to keep things as they were simply for the sake of doing so.