This weekend we celebrate with family and friends our Canadian Thanksgiving. As is the custom, we reflect upon the things for which we are grateful, and duly give thanks for them. This day, I am particularly thankful for what I am not - a resident of the United States.
The benighted nation south of us, which calls itself, without a hint of irony, "the greatest country on earth," suffers from a serious rupture from reality. To me, it is an egregiously failed country, one so foreign from my experience and understanding of what constitutes a civilized and mature society that it might as well exist on a another planet. It is truly an alien nation.
In today's Star, Daniel Dales writes about the most conspicuous aspect of the United States' moral sickness: its insane gun laws which, signs suggest, are about to go even further down the rabbit hole.
Even with so many deaths and grievous injuring marring the American landscape, including the latest massacre of 58 people in Las Vegas, the full-court press to make guns even more accessible proceeds apace:
This year, for example, Missouri Republicans allowed people to carry guns without obtaining a permit. Georgia Republicans allowed permit-holders to carry on college campuses. Ohio Republicans allowed gun licence holders to carry their guns at daycares that don’t put up No Guns signs and to store their guns in their cars on school property.While a few states have slightly tighted rules, most are embracing, even extolling, looser restriction:
Before the Las Vegas shooting, House Republicans had been pushing a bill to make it easier to buy gun silencers [the euphemistically-titled Hearing Protection Act] . They have now delayed that effort a second time. The first delay came after a shooter attacked party congressmen on a baseball field in nearby Virginia — which, tellingly, prompted some to talk about loosening gun laws, for self-defence.
Charles Heller, a spokesperson for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group, said Arizona has passed “58 positive bills, signed by three governors, over 13 years.” He is pushing for more — such as a law allowing people with gun licences to bypass metal detectors at government buildings, as at the Texas state capitol, and a law making it legal to brandish a gun against assailants who have not yet caused physical harm.Americans, it seems, have become inured to statistical evidence of the carnage caused by guns:
More than 33,000 Americans were killed by guns in 2014 — more than 90 per day. In 2015, the Washington Post found, 23 children were shot every day. Almost two-thirds of the gun deaths were suicides, which tend to receive the least attention.One always reads that the main obstacle to passing laws controlling and restricting these weapons of mass destruction is the NRA. Of that I am not so certain. Sure, that dark organization has an almost unlimited war chest when it comes to influencing and buying legislators, but I doubt its agenda could reign supreme without one other element: a citizenry so deeply flawed, so deeply divided and so deeply fearful of their neigbours that only brute force and personal arsenals can offer a balm to their deeply, deeply debased psyches.
Unfortunately I think you may be right. While gun laws are absurd they are simply a symptom of the real problem - gun culture.
ReplyDeleteIt is a shame, Anon, that they seem unable to break free from that culture.
DeleteAmericans have always loved the myth of the Wild West, Lorne. They now seek to make that myth a reality.
ReplyDeleteFailure to confront the real truths about their society may very well be dooming them, Owen.
DeleteIs gun culture a standalone disorder or perhaps merely a component of a broader malaise, one most prominent in the United States but present in less obvious fashion in many other societies? When a society becomes rent as severely as we see in today's US, what becomes of that nation's culture? Social cohesion, the very foundation of culture, is lost. Americans have always prided themselves on their supposed individualism, perhaps not understanding the consequences of allowing it to triumph over community. Without cohesion, social bonding, the powerful can readily have their way over a corral of individuals. Perhaps it's a pre-condition for the implementation of a neo-feudal reality. Everyone may have a gun that everyone may live in fear of threats real and manufactured.
ReplyDeleteThere have been many explanations for the dysfunction that is known as the U.S., Mound, including the famous Turner Frontier Thesis. I'm not sure that any of them fully explain our southern neighbours, but the atomization that comes from the individualism you describe surely has played a role. Perhaps this is what happens when a nation prefers myth to truth; its refusal to come to terms with the racism and genocide upon which the country was founded and prospered, and the racism that still permeates the land today can only get worse for a people desperate to keep truth an ideal few seem to aspire to.
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