Both Europeans and Australians never seize to be amazed by how attached Americans are to “their right to own a gun, or two” and how much blood and death they are willing to put up with to own all kinds of fire weapons with as little restriction and inconveniences such as background checks as possible. Strictly speaking this isn’t true for all Americans, as some polls (CNN/ORC in January this year) show that 67% of Americans are in favor a series of specific executive actions to expand background checks which Obama proposed at that time. In fact “[n]ational polls conducted in 2015 consistently show that around 90 percent of Americans support some sort of expanded background checks for gun purchases.”
So why do foreigners have the idea that all Americans are cowboys and –girls at heart? The never ending reports on shootings in the US in our news may have something to do with it, as does the fact that Congress fails to pass anything that even hints at gun control after any of these incidents, but more states come up with “open carry” laws instead. And we are well aware of how strong the influence of the National Rifle Association is on both individual and political level and that this influence starts at a very young age indeed, as Maartje Somers commented on an article I found in my Dutch newspaper (translated from NRC Handelsblad, 4/6/2016):
“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS… A GUN
Fairy Tales
What if Red Riding Hood's grandmother had had a gun? The US gun lobby believes that fairy tales can be improved.
Devoured grandmothers. Cooked children. Fairy tales are actually much too gruesome. High time to put an end to those medieval situations. Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel must be updated in a way the delicate soul of a child is no longer damaged. The National Rifle Association, the US gun lobby, comes up with the solution how to make Grimm's fairy tales safer for children.
Once upon a time there was… a gun.
In the family segment of the NRA website author Aurelia Hamilton has considerably improved the fairytales Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Her mother no longer just sends the defenseless Little Red Riding Hood into the forest where the wolf is hiding. She has given Little Red Riding Hood shooting lessons ‘to be sure that she would always be safe.' And off she goes, Little Red Riding Hood, into the forest. Basket on the arm. Rifle over the shoulder.
Grandmother also is careful with her own security in this release. She is lying passively in her bed waiting for the wolf to come and euthanize her. No, soon enough the Great Eyes of the wolf are looking straight at Grandma's double-barreled gun and its sharp teeth begin to chatter. ‘Oh, how he hated when families learned how to protect themselves.’
And Hansel and Gretel? Because they have a gun, they do not need to go hungry. Gretel, who can shoot better than Hans, kills a buck with one shot between the eyes. Then they free two other children from the witch’s cage.
The author is obviously not very impressed with this attempt to safeguard children’s tender souls and get them interested in guns at a very young age, and neither am I. She concludes the article with some advice of her own:
Dear children, it cannot have escaped you. These fairytales have more guns and less violence. (Aurelia Hamilton does not tell what happened to the wolf) So the NRA is telling you stories. Because where there are more guns there usually is more blood, and there is no happy ending.”
Not everyone was as courteous about this adaptation of our most well-known fairy tales and weren’t convinced that the NRA didn’t have ulterior motives for these re-writes. In the New York Times Mr. Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has no doubt that “The intent here is to create future customers” [for the gun industry] “I think it is wholly a marketing thing.” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, was of the same opinion and called these stories “a disgusting, morally depraved marketing campaign.”
Europeans may think that cutting gun crime by implementing more gun control is impossible in a country where the gun-lobby is that powerful, but Australians know better. They’ve done exactly that in 1996 when a violent decade of mass shootings that killed nearly 100 was capped by Martin Bryant, who shot more than 50 people in six locations in Port Arthur, killing 35, with a semi-automatic rifle. Twelve days later, Australia’s conservative PM pushed new gun control laws through parliament, and perhaps most important of all the most the most ambitious gun buyback program in recent history. Hundreds of thousands Australians voluntarily giving up their guns was a vital aspect of the plan. According to Rebecca Peters, one of the world's leading experts on gun control: "If you're serious about preventing violence, you need to go about it in a comprehensive way."
Gun rights advocates maintain that Peters and other gun control advocates are trying to strip the right of self-protection and are infringing on Australian freedom, but she will have none of that. "In fact, people are more free in Australia. People are not afraid to express their opinion because they're not afraid someone near them might take issue and want to pull a gun on them. You can walk on the streets and know you're your chances of being shot are 1/30th the chance in the USA."
Of course not everyone was delighted with the new laws in 1996, but many have accepted them over time and some have even become their advocate like gun lover Peter, who in What it’s Like to Own Guns in a Country with Strict Gun Control finishes his rather long exposé (sorry about that) on his beloved guns with: “Australia is a great country. You can go hunting, you can go shooting. And as long as you hurt nobody and abide the law you can continue to do it. That to me is freedom. The idea of having people own guns with no concept of gun safety and no reason to have a gun? That is not my idea of freedom.”
Peter’s hobby holds absolutely no interest for me and there will never come a day that I will join him at his club and pick up a gun, even if it’s only to shoot clay pigeons with – as if I would hit any – but he makes a splendid case for gun control. And so do Jon Stewart and John Oliver in The Daily Show:
