When a public crisis is nearing the point of no return and no escape, when it towers like a breaking tidal wave over everything sane and civilized, signs of the peril we face seem to come at us from every side, at every moment. There’s no looking away. In America St. Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, is remembered for the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” in 1929, when the bullet-riddled bodies of seven rivals of the mob boss Al Capone were found in a Chicago garage. On St.Valentine’s Day in 2018, a former student named Nikolas Cruz walked into his old high school in Parkland, Fla., and opened fire with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 students and teachers and wounding 17 others.
On St. Valentine’s Day in 2020, I picked up a review of a biography of the flashy Vegas gangster Bugsy Siegel, who was shot dead in 1947 at the age of 41. According to this review, it was the biographer’s opinion that “the American dream is in reach of ‘anyone with guts, good taste, and a gun.’”
Good taste is in short supply in 21st century America, and the American dream was redefined to extinction by Donald Trump. If your dream is to own Mar-a-Lago, you deserve whichever nightmare comes your way. But in the three-quarters of a century since Bugsy bit the dust, the number of Americans who own guns and employ them recklessly has multiplied beyond our wildest, weirdest dreams. The psychosis behind the American gun cult is documented by statistics so shocking that the rest of the civilized world, friends or enemies, tends to dismiss them. They think we’re just trying to frighten them into submission.
If we go by the numbers, all the fear seems to be on the home front. When has there been a nation of civilians so fully armed and thoroughly petrified? Which statistic is the most terrifying, when there are so many to choose from? One hundred Americans are shot to death every day, and 230 others wounded. An American commits suicide with a firearm every 22 minutes. Though fewer than 30% of Americans own guns, those gunmen own nearly 400 million of them. That’s five or more apiece. How does that compare with other nations? In the United States there are more than 120 guns for every 100 citizens. The only countries who approach even half that number per capita are Yemen, site of an active civil war, and Serbia, site of a recent genocide where every citizen knows a war criminal or one of his victims.
Sweet company. Besides the USA, the only nations with constitutions that can be interpreted as granting gun rights are Mexico and Guatemala. Our troubled neighbor Mexico is a special, tragic case — with 34,000 homicides last year, its murder rate rivals our own, yet nearly all the weapons used to kill Mexicans originated in the United States. The Mexican government legislates the strictest forms of gun control, but has failed miserably to slow down the black market in American guns that arms its drug cartels and their assassins. In the decade that ended in 2019, 164,000 firearms seized from Mexican criminals were traced to gun shops in the United States — a small fraction of the estimated 2.5 million illegal weapons that crossed the border during those years.
Thanks to the industry-funded NRA and its captive choir of eunuch legislators, trigger-happy America has become the arms-dealing scourge of the planet, and especially of North America. Even Canada, which bans all automatic weapons and strictly controls handguns, has been compelled to draft new legislation — even allowing cities to ban handguns — because illegal weapons from the USA were traced to notorious homicides and mass shootings. “When it comes to keeping Canadians safe from gun violence, we need more than thought and prayers,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Joe Biden knows that his first priorities are to slow down the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic and to shore up the shattered economy this national disaster has left behind. He also knows that those challenges, and even a serious effort to tackle climate change, will be easier than moving the needle on gun control, which under Trump was set at cringing submission to NRA extremists and arms dealers. Even with two-thirds of gun owners (and NRA members) now polling in favor of tougher background checks, recent history warns us that the Democrats’ razor-thin margins in Congress may not grant Biden a green light for sane gun control.
His opposition is just so damn crazy. It’s our unique national pathology, this creepy paranoia, this blind faith in the logic of bullets. The coronavirus may be more contagious, but it’s hardly more lethal and nowhere near as chronic or incurable. Americans bought 22 million more guns during the 2020 pandemic, a 64% increase from 2019. What kind of bullet stops a deadly virus? The virus year inspired 8 million new gun owners who purchased 2.5 million semi-automatic handguns, along with 16 million boxes of ammunition. The other hot item at the gun shops was the AR-15 assault rifle. Americans own 15 million of these non-hunting rifles that no civilian anywhere, ever, should be allowed to purchase. Forty-one of our 50 states allow concealed-carry handguns, and three million Americans are packing them every day. A wild-eyed micro-minority, a mere 3% of gun owners, is estimated to own 133 million weapons. What could they be so afraid of, besides each other?
Any citizen who’s marginally sane — and I make no extravagant claims for myself, after a year of virus lockdown — reads some of these gun news stories and goes “What? No. You can’t be serious.” There’s the Gen. Patton wannabe who bought 30 acres of rural Vermont and turned it into his own private Fort Benning, a tactical combat fantasy camp with live weapons where seriously disturbed paranoiacs could blast away at imaginary enemies, including carjackers, home invaders and even farm-pond “pirates.” It was all going great guns (excuse me) until local residents objected to a ballistic sound level that must have rivaled the Normandy invasion. And what about the AP report that 21 states currently allow firearms — in eight cases, concealed only — inside their capitol buildings?
“A person needs to be able to protect themselves (sic) no matter where they are,” explained Don Spencer of the Second Amendment Association. But when it comes to locked-ward lunacy bonded to moral leprosy, no one can compete with the alt-right conspiracy goons who claim the Newtown and Parkland school massacres were faked with actors and video, just to discredit the NRA. Some of these ogres have actually taunted parents of the murdered children. At least one of them, a woman, was just elected to Congress.
Who are they, these most extreme of the extremists, the ones who worship firearms, walk in trembling fear of their own shadows and represent a clear and present danger to everyone armed or unarmed? How do we recognize them, aside from the weapons strapped to their hips? The ragged army of rightwing thugs who invaded the US Capitol on Jan. 6 offered a fairly accurate cross-section of the unhinged ultra-Right, at least the downscale segment President Trump deplored as “low-class.” The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the QAnon believers and neo-Nazis. Since the Republican Party annexed these warriors of the fringe and began to devolve into something like a white nationalist militia, it’s become easier to locate democracy’s armed archenemies. Sixty-one percent of gun owners voted for Trump in 2016, and his share must have been higher in 2020. But gun enthusiasts come in all colors, faiths, genders and sexual orientations. Gun sales to African-Americans were up 58% in mid-pandemic. The NRA’s campaign to arm more women was considered a great success. Among the many organizations that take the Second Amendment seriously are Black Guns Matter, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and a gay self-defense group that calls itself The Pink Pistols.
With 400 million guns, a historically polarized electorate and a monochrome party selling racism and xenophobia, High Noon in America is fast approaching. President Biden, the oldest and perhaps the most experienced individual who ever won the White House, knows all about the gun lobby’s death grip on Congress. What he can achieve is anyone’s guess. Since the NRA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, gun control groups like Everytown have endeavored to alienate the NRA’s rank and file members from its executives, focusing on reports that Wayne LaPierre and his minions have spent most of their members’ dues on private jets, luxury hotels and bespoke tailoring.
The disarming of America remains a pipe dream, probably an impossible dream. The best we’re allowed to hope for is a sensible system of background checks, a fighting chance to prevent every junkie, child molester and psychotic loner from purchasing an arsenal of his own. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, until you come eyeball-to-eyeball with a gun freak who disagrees. Mental patients with loaded pistols and Nazis marching with AR-15s are a part of life and death in America, an abiding disadvantage of living in a country where we take so many advantages for granted.
The uphill battle for saner gun laws has been characterized as a battle for the soul of America, and not many of us who have been fighting it for decades would claim that we’re winning. But the stakes seem much higher, and the need for engagement much greater, when gun fever strikes close to the place where you live and the people you care about. My daughter and her family live in Wake County, N.C., where the sheriff’s office issued 57,791 new pistol permits in 2020 — a 373% annual increase, more permits than in the three previous years combined. In the first 20 days of 2021, the sheriff received 5,000 more requests for permits. At one of Wake County’s busiest gun stores, the owner reports that he has 30 to 50 buyers lined up every morning when he opens his doors.
This frightens me. But the local statistics that depress me the most come from Durham, N.C., a mid-size city (230,000) just 10 miles from where I live, where an old friend and colleague of mine is the mayor. Steve is one of the most progressive, trustworthy and idealistic public servants you will ever encounter, a rare paragon of civic responsibility. And the city he loves, in the year 2020, became a kind of urban Afghanistan of gun violence — 976 gunshot incidents reported, 318 people killed or wounded, 37 homicides. Ten people were shot at one birthday party. Three-quarters of those shootings are unsolved crimes; requests for gun permits nearly tripled during the pandemic, and the new year began with gunmen committing a pair of conspicuous murders. Durham likes to call itself the Bull City, but Bullet City is the nickname no one wants to hear.
Good luck, my friend. “Democracy can’t function at the point of a gun,” as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post concluded in a recent column. Neither can civilization, or any human life of enduring quality. What can you say to Lady Liberty, after you’ve said “Freeze!!”?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021
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