In search of the source of America’s gun obsession

Brian Till

Saturday, April 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.

I love to shoot guns as much as the next red-blooded American — hunting rifles at home in Vermont with friends, Glocks in Pittsburgh with cousins; I understand the excitement and the rush and the eventual calm that shooting enthusiasts so enjoy. But at no point in my life have I ever felt compelled to carry or own a gun.

Since Barack Obama has taken office, gun sales across America have surged. Firearm purchases under a Democratic president appear absolutely recession proof.

What is this American fixation with firearms? Is it similar to the macho car fanaticism that’s so prevalent here but rather absent elsewhere in the world?

It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times, and one that is nearly impossible to answer. Is it the lasting bloodline of a nation of frontiersmen, born from armed struggle against an empire? Is it the legacy of personal determinacy, of a bootstrap nation that’s obsessed with self-sufficiency?

FBI background checks required to purchase firearms numbered 7 million from November to February, up 1.2 million from a year before. The surge may be in part be fueled by the collapse of the economy and fears of more prevalent crime, but many are tracing the increase to expectations of tighter regulation emerging from the White House.

The anxiety, many on the left contend, is being unjustly fueled by the National Rifle Association. Regardless of the source, the American affinity for guns baffles me and many in the broader world.

The chances of an armed gunman laying siege to a college- or graduate-level class that I’m part of are small enough that I’d prefer that my classmates and nearsighted professor not have 9 mms lurking in their waistbands. I trust the odds — as I do when boarding a plane — more than a nerd’s marksmanship and tactics. I know the most likely situation in which I’ll be confronted with an armed rogue will be if he’s robbing a local store or place I’m staying — a situation in which all involved are likely best off if he leaves with some cash and all weapons are kept from discharging.

With 250 million guns owned in the U.S. today — it’s as if we’re permanently awaiting a siege that will never come — there’s simply no hope of eradicating arms from the American equation.

To the chagrin of conservatives, Nancy Pelosi recently said that Obama doesn’t want people’s guns, only that their guns be registered. That’s a crucial first step. But it only has consequences if it’s coupled with exceedingly thorough crackdowns on possession of unregistered firearms.

In theory, criminals are the only ones who should have such unlicensed goods. Why not raise the marginal cost of gun crimes substantially? Why not make possession of an unregistered firearm, whether one brandishes it or not, a sentence punishable by life in prison?

Avid supporters routinely point to those rare instances in which gun-toting citizens have stopped gunmen amid their rampages, such as in Pearl, Miss., in 1997 — where an assistant principal wielding a handgun stopped a student assassin midrampage — as the rationale for a greater share of society carrying weapons. They also point to statistics in which tens of thousands of Americans allege to have drawn a gun in self-defense each year.

In how many of those instances were lives truly in danger, though? And how many of such occurrences would have come to be if it weren’t so easy for criminals to acquire arms? And do those rare successful heroes really offset those thousand-plus accidental gun deaths per year?

Somehow, the Second Amendment, to my ear, rings of the needs of an agrarian society that knew it would likely find itself under empirical siege once more in the years to come: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The framers, I imagine, weren’t likely thinking of a nation armed with B-2 bombers and assault rifles that fire 50 rounds per second when they drafted the amendment. But if they had the foresight to imagine such weapons, wouldn’t they have perhaps written the Second in a deft manner that would lead us to question its applicability? Perhaps putting the clause in reference to a broader context?

Brian Till, a columnist for Creators Syndicate, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.