Fergus Finlay: Is US society moving towards a total embrace of culture of killing?

Nineteen children and two teachers lost their lives in yet another school shooting and yet the NRA continues to enjoy the support of politicians terrified of losing their lucrative funding

Children pray and pay their respects at a memorial for the 21 victims of last week's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Picture:Dario Lopez-Mills/AP

Once, many years ago, I was taken hunting for a day in the Pacific Northwest of America. With a shotgun in my arms. It was one of those guns that had to be reloaded after every shot, and there was a terrible kick to it when you pulled the trigger. Because of my inexperience, I didn’t know how to hold it right, and three or four shots left my arm black and blue for days.

But I can still remember the feeling of power from holding that thing. And the feeling of shame afterwards. I’ve been opposed to blood sports all my life, but I came close to being easily converted when given the chance to shoot at a flock of harmless ducks.

Parents and other members of the community weep as a teenage gunman shot and killed 19 children and two adults last Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Picture: William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News/ AP

So I sort of understand, as repellent as it is, the attraction of guns. It’s still a struggle, though, to get my head around America’s passion for guns, and its blind refusal to make the connection between guns and death.

I think I know America well, although it’s years since I’ve been there for any length of time. I associate Americans with generosity and warmth, because that was my experience time and again over years.

It’s a place of glorious countryside and magnificent, unforgettable cities. It’s easy to see, when you spend any time at all there, why they would come to see themselves as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But they’re killing each other, day after day, with unspeakable weapons. The weapon of choice is a gun — or rather a range of guns — called the AR-15. These aren’t shotguns that have to be reloaded every time the trigger is pulled.

I saw one doctor describing an AR-15 as a gun that has three main characteristics. Its high-velocity bullets will go through a child’s body so rapidly that they destroy tissue six inches around a bullet entry. It is semi-automatic, which means it will fire as fast as you can pull a trigger. And it has high-capacity magazines — the doctor said more than 10 bullets in a magazine is not necessary unless you want to kill humans.

It’s a killing machine. Not a hunting machine, or a defensive machine. The only purpose of an AR-15 is to kill other people. There are different types of AR-15 (the most popular apparently is made by Colt, a company whose website features the strapline ‘Legends Never Die’). But they all do the same thing — they fire volleys of bullets at enormously high speed into their targets. And increasingly those targets are other people.

They were banned for a period, under temporary legislation steered through by Bill Clinton. Most of the commentary I’ve read suggests that a temporary ban only gave the weapon mystique.

In the wake of the Uvade school shooting, a protest rally took place outside the US National Rifle Association's annual meeting in Houston, Texas, last Friday.  Picture: Michael Wyke/AP

In the aftermath of 9/11 and with all the heightened sense of patriotism that attack engendered, sales of the gun went through the roof as soon as the ban was lifted.

Some people think the letters, AR, in the AR-15 range stand for ‘assault rifle’. Others associate the letters with one of the original manufacturers, Armalite.

According to the National Rifle Association, however, the letters stand for only one thing. ‘America’s Rifle’.

The NRA boasts about the fact that there are perhaps 20m of these things in civilian hands in America. They publish a lot of articles about the joy of owning one, and the sense of safety it can give to homeowners and anyone who is vulnerable to attack. A lot of the material they publish about these murder machines goes under the heading ‘Let Freedom Ring’.

But they never, ever refer to the other side of the AR-15. It’s not just a gun that wounds or kills. It destroys. It tears human flesh and organs apart, especially at close range or in a confined space. It can make a victim almost impossible to identify, and it can do that in less than 10 seconds.

And it has done that. In Uvalde. In Boulder, Colorado. In Parkland Florida, in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Las Vegas, in the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Sutherland Springs in Texas.

Those seven places alone featured seven emotionally damaged or psychiatrically ill men, most of them young. And more than 170 victims, many of them young children, some old and vulnerable. And seven of America’s Rifles. Seven AR-15s.

In the vast majority of democratic countries in the world, there are strict gun controls.

Most of us would regard it as simply unthinkable that weapons with unlimited capacity to wipe out human lives would be easily available to any deranged man — and 99% of these mass killers are men — who want to shoot and kill whatever is in their way.

The US is a global outlier in terms of domestic gun ownership, and an average of 124 Americans died from gun violence every day in 2020, up 15% from 2019. Picture: Graphic News

Throughout the entire world of left and right politics, there is no division on that issue. But in America, it’s one of the three things that defines the difference between left and right, along with abortion and tax breaks for the rich.

The NRA describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization”.

It is, however, the only “civil rights" organisation that funnels millions of dollars directly to politicians — and if those politicians don’t behave themselves, it funnels millions more into unseating them. Some US politicians as a result live in fear of the NRA, while others decide early on in their careers to pander to them for ever.

Look, for instance, at the speech made by Donald Trump, the great phoney of the right and the far-right in the US, when he spoke at the NRA convention a few days after the massacre in Uvalde.

We all know by now that Donald Trump doesn’t believe a word out of his own mouth. But it doesn’t stop him saying things like: “Every time a disturbed or demented person commits such a hideous crime, there’s always a grotesque effort by some in our society to use the suffering of others to advance their own extreme political agenda.”

He went on in his deranged and cynical speech to say (by way of a solution): “Clearly, we need to make it far easier to confine the violent and mentally deranged into mental institutions.”

And then he advocated turning schools into impenetrable fortresses. He called for metal detectors, armed security at the only
entrance (all other school doors to be locked). And armed teachers, trained if necessary to kill.

Addressing the NRA in Texas days after the Uvalde shooting, former US president Donald Trump claimed the campaign to curb gun ownership was exploiting 'the suffering of others' to pursue an 'exterme political agenda'. Picture: Michael Wyke/AP

Of course, anyone who has followed Trump’s career knows he has never cared what damage his words do. But try to imagine a situation where America’s education system is modelled on that kind of approach. Schools — the places where children should be enabled to play, to grow and develop, to
experience the freedom and joy of childhood — becoming heavily armed prisons instead.

Try to imagine the damage that would do to the social and emotional development of children. Try to imagine the adults they could in turn become. Try to imagine the world they might create.

In the end, there’s a simple choice. Make it impossible for dangerous people to have access to dangerous weapons. Or force an entire society over time to embrace a culture of killing.

Only in America, it seems, can the second alternative even be contemplated.