A Gun to Our Head
Paranoia fuels America’s gun culture. The Green Party must not let it halt progress on preventing mass shootings.
One objection that has been raised in response to the gun control statement that the New York Greens are considering releasing is concern over its second recommendation, which states that the “mental hygiene” of gun purchasers must be taken into consideration before a store owner puts a high-powered weapon into the hands of a potential mass shooter.
The intent of this recommendation is that US law should follow the standard set by most other prosperous countries to ensure that gun purchasers are of good character and have no history of violence or dangerous mental health episodes. However, several Greens I have spoken with fear this will be used as a means to discriminate against people with autism or a history of minor mental distress which should not prejudice them against owning a firearm.
The need to protect the interests of responsible Americans to freely exercise their rights under the Constitution is, without a doubt, essential. However, in this moment where it is evident to everyone that our country’s laissez-faire gun control philosophy is a catastrophe, those concerns over hypothetical acts of discrimination cannot be paramount.
The United States is an extreme outlier among the Western democracies that allow their citizens to own firearms. In most of Europe, for example, citizens must jump through considerable hoops in order to legally own a gun, and this holds in countries where a hunting culture exists that is just as robust as the one in America’s hinterlands.
In Germany for instance, which has a population roughly 1/4 of America’s (of whom about 1.5 million are registered firearms owners), their public somehow manages to endure common sense legal scrutiny that can cause a person to have to wait for over a year before taking possession of a firearm. The German philosophy, unlike ours, begins with the premise that self-defense is not a valid reason to own a gun, and presumes that a person who wants to purchase a tool designed to kill had better prove that they have no intention of becoming a killer.
The result? Germany has perhaps 50 gun homicides a year, and 764 gun related suicides, meaning that even if Germany’s population were greater than China’s and India’s combined, their yearly gun fatalities would not even begin to approach America’s annual death toll, currently in the tens of thousands.
Germany puts civic responsibility and the safety of her citizens first. Not so America. Here, the profits of the weapons industry are the top priority. Offloading Big Gun’s superabundance of mass-produced weapons is the unspoken requirement that handicaps the public’s efforts to restrain people like Andre Bing, who, in late November, purchased a gun in a fit of pique and 24 hours later arrived at the Virginia Wal-Mart that employed him to slaughter anyone he could draw a bead on. In the end, he killed six people and wounded three others before taking his own life.
This was just the latest outlandish example of how America’s gun shops are deregulated to the level of dolling out weapons the way Hickory Farms passes out sausage samples. But guns are like no other technology being sold on the open market. They are incredibly dangerous tools that require a maximum of responsibility to both sell and own.
America has forsworn its duty to protect the public by shrouding its defense of the gun industry’s greed in rhetoric about patriotism and individual liberty. Add to this the concerns of people who fear that they will be stigmatized for the quirks of their personality if our country decides to take mental illness into consideration before selling a Bushmaster and a barrel of ammunition to a man who just lost his job, and you can see how onerous the burden of changing our gun laws will be.
Nevertheless, we cannot allow concerns over the wording of the laws of the future to deter us from taking the first crucial steps towards our goal. There will be plenty of time to make sure that the needs of the neurodivergent are accommodated along the way. What cannot be accommodated any longer are the deadly whims of white supremacists and undiagnosed psychopaths, the people that our current legal framework has made unbelievable concessions to.
Jason Yungbluth writes comic books, including one called Weapon Brown.
Previously: Only the Greens can turn the tide on mass shootings
