Explaining America's Love of Guns to British People

My friend John and I like nothing more than to teach each other about our respective countries’ ways. I’ve explained British TV and real football to him, he’s explained US politics and fake football to me. What’s normal to him seems amazing to me and vice versa. We’re basically those really funny, profound people you hear in pubs loudly bonding over different meanings of the word “pants”.

Photo via.

Watertown, Massachusetts is currently on lockdown as police chase one of two brothers suspected of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings (the other brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is already dead after a shoot-out with police). The lone gunman on the loose – identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – is also thought to have shot a police officer working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This isn’t the first time in the last year that heavily armed individuals bent on destruction have wreaked havoc on American communities, as anyone who remembers the shocking scenes from Newtown, Aurora and Oak Creek will attest.

President Obama's push to get more control over Americans' gun use was set back on Wednesday, when the senate defeated a gun-buyer background check bill. Obama spoke candidly about the gun lobby, who he said “wilfully lied about the bill”. Flanked by the families of shooting victims, the president told the media that “this was a pretty shameful day for Washington”. So, with the gun debate raging on, I decided to get in touch with my Yankee pal John to see if he could explain a few things.

THE REQUEST Dear John,
When I decided I wanted to ask you about this issue, a montage of me reading in libraries, high-fiving professors of American history and meeting guys who like guns to find out “how they think” played in my mind. I wanted to go in with some knowledge, I wanted to get a hold of something that raised my questions above the level of “concerned, condescending European liberal” to the level of, I don’t know, “Gun magi”. But I gave up, so here are a bunch of questions on gun control from a condescending European.

THE RESPONSE

Dear Oscar,
I do not recommend you meeting with gun guys to find out "how they think". They would dress you in camouflage and attack you with a sour concoction of constitutional originalism, government paranoia, cliff-note Ayn Rand dogma and lite beer. Someone would compare Obama to Hitler and you might have to pray. Better to let me have a crack at it, I've been shot a bunch of times. I've also seen all the Die Hard films more times than is really necessary, so yeah, I'm basically Jesse James. 1. The Constitution Limey Oscar says: Most of this “right to bear arms” stuff is founded on your sacred Constitution, right? Because, as much as I love a good, two-century-old parchment written by slave-owning white men, I kinda think it might not be a bad idea to review the situation as it develops. Also, and it’s not really the same, but we don’t go nuts about the Magna Carta. If the shop refuses to stock my favourite brand of toilet roll, I'm prohibited from mustering 12 good men, rushing to the local armoury, procuring a dozen muskets and returning to seek justice at gunpoint. And to be honest, that's fine; those measures never strike me as being particularly necessary. Yankee John replies: Okay, so the pro-gun argument tends to go something like this: America is the greatest country ever in the history of the Earth and we've had the same basic set of rules for like, 250 years, so there's no need to go mucking about with things. The Constitution says we can have guns, the Supreme Court agrees and we're just gonna keep on shooting each other until we run out of bullets. This doesn't look like happening any time soon, despite the fact there are about 11,000 gun murders in the US every year. Look at what is happening in Boston right now, and you'll see that shit has gotten out of hand, but as a country, the Constitution has weaned us off the idea that guns could ever be banned outright, and no one really fights for this any more.

Photo by Dustin Fenstermacher.

2. Mental Health Limey Oscar says: After Newtown and the Arizona theatre shooting, it seems to be fashionable to blame gun violence on people’s mental health as opposed to guns themselves. Apart from this being insulting and insensitive, the issue is surely that background checks are rubbish and that even Bane himself could wander into a gun mart and walk out with an arsenal to be proud of. Yankee John replies: It's became fashionable for those on both sides of the debate to blame gun violence on whatever they can that won't involve them having to change their behaviour. Pro-gun people blame video games, Hollywood and the mentally unstable. Anti-gun people blame gun sellers, gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association. It's like they're saying, "These things are separate from me and lower than I am, so I am rewarded for my disgust with a sense of superiority." In truth, it is all these things. It is too easy to buy a gun, period. I could go to a gun show tomorrow and buy a pistol from a private seller, legally, without ever showing ID. You needn't have a licence and there isn't a national registry. There are so many guns on the streets (roughly 270 million) that Mexicans come here to buy them, then return home to shoot each other for the right to run drugs back across the border. Meanwhile, the media traffics in violent imagery and combativeness. You talk about mental illness, but guns aren't used solely by people with lower than average sanity ratings – there's a plain old dull acceptance that guns are a part of normal life. It would not be terribly surprising if I heard gunshots out my window tonight, and I wouldn't bother calling the police if I did.

3. Guns in Mad Places Limey Oscar says: I understand that a trip to the local church is probably one fraught with danger but do you really need to pray with a concealed weapon? Or is it necessary to have a semi-automatic assault rifle on you in case the minister pulls out a gat or a pack of wild coyotes besieges you in the queue at the drive-in McDonald’s on way home? I hear also, that the NRA, who say that the “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, want armed guards in schools. I remember taking a knife that I stole from my kitchen to school once (I was such a badass) because kids like me were getting beaten up on the bus. When I got home, I realised that whoever I imagined myself stabbing would probably be tougher than me, so they'd be able to steal it and either stab me with it or hold it back to stick into some other poor fucker who didn't deserve to be murdered. Yankee John replies: Each state has its own laws – DC, for example, outlawed all guns for many years, whereas Kentucky will loan you one at the airport if you forget to pick one up at Walmart. What happens is that all these dumb issues like guns in churches become proxy battles in the larger pro- versus anti-gun fight. It pains me to report that despite Boston, Newtown, Aurora and Oak Creek, there won't be any major change in the nation's gun laws. The anti-gun lobby wanted, at the very least, expanded background checks and a limit on magazine sizes, but nothing is going to pass, all of the bills have stalled. Lots of people will still die in terrible ways, in places they should never have been in danger of dying in.

4. Piers Morgan Limey Oscar says: While he might be a confusingly smug boil of a man, Britain's least favourite television personality does seem to mostly be right on this issue. It's just a shame that he's ended up becoming the poster boy for gun control, because I have a vague understanding of the human brain, and I know that a decent wedge of Americans may end up ignoring what a pompous, non-American is instructing them to do.

Yankee John replies: No one in America listens to Piers Morgan about anything. We like Adele, Cowell and Cumberbatch, but we would like to return Piers if possible. There's a show on basic cable about a family of duck hunters that has higher ratings than him. This one's null and void, I'm afraid.

5. The President

Limey Oscar says: A couple of months ago, the White House released an image of Obama firing a shotgun. That was presumably because, as every rational person knows, no one – not even the President – can form a valid opinion on gun control unless they've mastered using their hand to squeeze a trigger. I couldn't shake the sense that his bootlicking endorsement seemed to be reneging on the emotional (and apparently committed) stance he took on gun control after Newtown. I was glad to hear that Joe Biden's going to put his back into it, but it's worrying that the actual President seems to be saying one thing then doing another. Or is that just a naive way of looking at what is a very complex political issue?

Yankee John replies: You might not like it, but it's not duplicitous since he's never claimed to be dovish and can't run for re-election anyway. He's a bit like George W Bush, in that he's going to do what he thinks will "keep us safe". As a US politician, you have to be who you are, just so long as who you are is an assertive man of action who's most definitely not a pussy. And I'd argue that calling out both the gun lobby and the US Senate over the fact their opinions on gun control don't match his are the kind of things an assertive man who isn't a pussy would do.

Photo by Isaac Simpson.

6. Statistics

Limey Oscar says: In the UK, we can’t legally carry guns, so there's barely any gun crime. In the US, you can and, in many cases, are encouraged to carry guns, so there's loads of gun crime. Is there any argument here besides the glaringly obvious one?

Yankee John replies: Yes: "That doesn't mean Americans are more violent than other people; we're just better shots." No, we actually are the most trigger-happy developed country in the world by a stratospherically depressing amount. But we Americans don't like to compare ourselves negatively to other countries, so that argument is generally swept under the carpet, along with Michael Bay and our history of systematically slaughtering America's indigenous people. A politician will never start a sentence with, "In Europe…" We only ever compare ourselves to Canada, and that is to make fun of them.

7. European Snobs Limey Oscar says: All of this, I'm sure, has come across as the self-satisfied lecturing of a European. And, for that, I can only be proud of myself. Perhaps we don't understand your frontier spirit or Crockett-inspired sense of self-determination. Or maybe we don't get why watching people shoot each other dead is aspirational. Or hey, perhaps your bears, coyotes and deer really are one piece of gun legislation away from taking over the country. I don't know. But it does seem to me that, while the rest of the world is also guilty of tearing itself apart, you guys are doing it with the most amount of automatic weapons, and that can't be a good thing.   – Oscar

Yankee John replies: The long and short of it is that guns have always been a part of American culture, and culture is hard to change. I know I've probably made it seem like my country is a Wild West shoot-em-up with mob justice bullets whizzing by dudes in ten-gallon hats, but guns are for fighting and we like fights. We are determined and self-sufficient, pig-headed and proud of scars. The setup is harsh for the slow and needy, but rewarding for the agile and prepared (or simply the rich). So I think, as a nation, we tacitly accept violence as natural. It is, after all, why we've been so successful as a country – battering everyone else until we get our way. Our military is as big as all the other militaries in the world combined and we're constantly at war. It's a warrior culture and gun violence is a by-product of that – it's what we're used to and what makes us who we are. The tragedies happen and everyone freaks out for a while, but then everything goes back to normal and nothing changes. Yes, it's a shame, but the whole thing would be eternally more depressing if part of the process weren't the forgetting about it.

– John

Follow Oscar and John on Twitter @oscarrickettnow / @jasperjohnny

More transantlantic conversations:

Explaining American Politics to the British

Explaining British TV to the Americans

Explaining Football to the Americans

Explaining American Football the British