The brutal murder of 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Connecticut, has shaken US society to the core as individuals and requires a response as US citizens. The US seems to reel from one mass gun killing to another — roughly one per month this year alone. Easy access to guns in the US leads to horrific murder rates relative to other highly educated and wealthy societies. The country needs to find a better way.
Other countries have done so. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, Australia had several mass shootings. After a particularly horrible massacre in 1996, then-Australian prime minister John Howard declared that enough was enough. He instituted a severe crackdown on gun ownership, forced would-be gun owners to submit to a rigorous application process and to document why they would need a gun.
Conditions for gun ownership in Australia are now very strict, and the registration and approval process can take a year or more. Howard’s government also implemented a rigorous “buyback” policy to enable the government to purchase guns already owned by the public.
The policy worked. While violent crime has not ended in Australia, murders are down and, even more dramatically, there has not been a single mass shooting since 1996 in which three or more people died (the definition used in many studies of mass shootings). Before the crackdown, there had been 13 such massacres in 18 years.
Yet the US still refuses to act, even after this year’s string of shocking incidents: the massacre in a movie theater in Colorado, an attack on a Sikh community in Milwaukee, another on a shopping mall in Oregon and many more before the ruthless slaughter of first-graders and school staff in Newtown. The gun lobby in the US remains powerful and politicians are afraid to counter it. Given the shooting of then-US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords last year, perhaps they even fear that they too might be targeted.
There can be little doubt that some societies are more steeped in violence than others, even controlling for obvious factors like income levels and education. The US homicide rate is roughly four times that of comparable societies in Western Europe and Latin America’s homicide rates are even higher than in the US (and dramatically higher than Asian countries at roughly the same income level). What accounts for staggeringly high rates in the US and Latin America?
This violence is rooted in history. The US and Latin American countries are all “conquest” societies in which Europeans ruled over multi-racial societies. In many of these countries, including the US, the European conquerors and their descendants nearly wiped out the indigenous populations, partly through disease, but also through war, starvation, death marches and forced labor.
In the US and many Latin American countries, slavery fueled mass violence as well. The slaves — and generations of their descendants — were routinely murdered.
The US also developed a particular populist belief that gun ownership constitutes a vital protection against government tyranny. The US was born in a citizens’ revolt against British imperial power. The right of citizens to organize militias to fight government tyranny was therefore a founding idea of the new country — enshrined in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution — which declares that, because a country needs a well-regulated militia, the people have the right to bear arms.
Since citizens’ militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing US Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast, gun-owning US subculture.
However, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear. The claim that gun ownership ensures freedom is especially absurd, given that most of the world’s vibrant democracies have long since cracked down on private gun ownership. No tyrant has risen in Australia since Howard’s gun control reforms.
Simply put, freedom in the 21st century does not depend on unregulated gun ownership. The US’ gun culture is a threat to freedom, after the murder of a president, senator and other public leaders, as well as countless assassination attempts against public officials over recent decades.
Yet US gun culture remains as pervasive as it is unrecorded. The US reels from one shooting disaster to the next and on nearly every occasion, politicians dutifully declare their continued devotion to unregulated gun ownership. No one even knows how many guns Americans hold. The number is estimated to be about 270 million, or almost one per person on average. According to one recent poll, 47 percent of households have a gun at home.
The shooting in Newtown was not only especially horrific and heartbreaking, but is also part of an increasingly common pattern — a specific kind of murder-suicide that has been carefully studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. Loners, often with paranoid tendencies, commit these heinous acts as part of their own suicide. They use carefully planned and staged mass murders of innocents in order to take revenge on society and glorify themselves as they take their own lives.
The perpetrators are not hardened criminals; many have no previous criminal record. They are pathetic, deranged and often have struggled with mental instability for much of their lives. They need help — and society needs to keep guns out of their reach.
The US has now suffered about 30 shooting massacres over the past 30 years, including this year’s deadly dozen, and each is a gut-wrenching tragedy for many families. Still, each time, gun owners scream that freedom will be eliminated if they are unable to buy assault weapons and 100-round clips.
The bloodbath in Newtown is the time to stop feeding this gun frenzy. Australia and other countries provide models of how to do it: Regulate and limit gun ownership to approved uses. The US’ real freedoms depend on sane public policy.
Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of sustainable development, and health policy and management, as well as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a special adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs