Barreling into gun culture
H e picked up the gun and took a deep breath. His hand curled around the grip and his fingers slipped easily into the trigger guard. It was a 4.5 mm BB gun with zinc plating and a shooting range of up to 480 feet per second. The other Cub Scouts in his pack were already firing at any target they saw (paper targets mostly), while the rangemaster kept a firm eye over the boys. Almost all Cub Scouts came to the Firestone Shooting Reservation in Brea to learn how to use a gun, and eight-year old Nick Ryti’s pack was no different.
He took another breath and scanned the dirt trail for a target. Where would he shoot? What would he shoot? He was nervous — his Scouts pack had a rivalry with a nearby pack on the Reservation and they were determined to appear as intimidating as possible. Then Ryti steadied his hand, pulled the trigger, and fired a shot.
At 11, Ryti, now a junior, joined Boy Scouts, and once again they went to the Firestone Reservation. This time, however, the Scouts would use .22 long rifles, one of the most common in the world today in terms of units sold, according to Gunner’s Den, a gun-manufacturing site. The rifle was trickier, Ryti noticed. It felt awkward to hold in his arms.
The rangemaster walked over to him. “The trick to this big guy,” he said as he kneeled beside Ryti, “is to lean the stock against your shoulder. It shifts the weight.”
Ryti adjusted his stance accordingly. He raised the rifle into position, pulled the trigger, and fired.
At 14, his dad let him use his pistol for the first time. He was surprised at how heavy it was — not as heavy as the rifle, of course, but still, heavy. Again, they went to a shooting reservation and again he fired the gun. Before long, he earned a pistol certification by the National Rifles Association (NRA). Ryti practiced every month with his Scouts, whether it was at the Firestone Shooting Reservation or at Boy Scouts camp. And the more he practiced, the better his accuracy became.
“I’m not a master at it yet, but I’m a pretty good shot,” Ryti joked.
But although Ryti was comfortable, adept, and now certified to use a gun, there were still some restrictions for him: he can only shoot at an appropriate shooting range under expert supervision, and at home, his father locks up their guns every night in a safe location that only he knew of. “For safety and protection,” Ryti said.
The latter ensures that the guns don’t accidentally go off or that a thief doesn’t break in and steal them. While these are only a couple of safety precautions, they’re “significant and necessary” nevertheless.
Like most gun advocates, Ryti supports gun control. He believes that gun regulation, especially expanded background checks, is important to ensure that a gun does not “fall into the wrong hands.” And in America, Ryti’s view is fairly common among most gun owners.
In a 2014 poll by Quinnipiac University, 92 percent of gun owners and 86 percent of Republicans support expanded background checks. But according to the Washington Post, their middle-of-the-road voices often go unheard in the left-versus-right debates, leading to a misconception that all gun owners are strictly against gun control.
“It’s not just guns that hurt people — people hurt people,” Ryti said. “Guns aren’t weapons. They’re tools. It just depends on how you use them. And regulations like background checks reduce the chances of a gun being shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun. It doesn’t mean that the government will take away our guns, because that’s against the Second Amendment. It just means we have to take steps and measures to prevent more violence.”
Such steps and measures were taken when President Obama announced his executive order on gun regulations on Jan. 4, including expanded background checks, extra funding for mental health departments, and research for advanced gun technology.
“Guns aren’t weapons. They’re tools. It just depends on how you use them. And regulations like background checks reduce the chances of a gun being shot by someone who shouldn’t have a gun.”
However, President Obama’s speech was met with a firestorm of controversy, again leaving out the gun owners who approved of gun control. Progressives applauded the President, saying his gun reform was “about time,” or even claiming it wasn’t enough, while conservatives, including some Republican candidates, criticized his executive order as an abuse of power and argued that this was a small step closer to federal confiscation of arms, according to the New York Times.
Even when the President held a town hall meeting later that week to discuss questions and concerns about his executive order, the NRA refused to attend, citing they did not want to participate in “a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,” according to NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. President Obama later called out the NRA, questioning why an organization that’s founded on guns would not want to sit down for a debate concerning the subject, according to the Times.
But this is only one example of how difficult it is to get one side to listen to the other. According to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center, the partisan gap over gun control has widened increasingly over the past decade. Why exactly is it so hard for advocates on both sides of the issue to agree, or even listen, to each other?
One factor is the uniqueness of gun culture in the U.S. As of Jan. 8, the U.S. holds the highest rate of gun ownership in the world with a staggering 112 guns per 100 civilians, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This statistic translates into an estimated 270 million civilian guns. The next leading country, India, doesn’t even come close, estimating a total of 46 million. And in a 2007 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, although the U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population, it has about 35–50 percent of the world’s civilian owned guns.
“America’s love for guns is historic,” Jeff Sink, history teacher, said. “We still see ourselves as a cowboy and Indian nation. If you look at all the periods of time for the Great West, the Indian Wars, World War I and II, Vietnam, and in Desert Storm, we see ourselves as the police of the world. We still view America as the nation of the frontier. It’s in our culture. It’s a love affair. It’s like the car. We love the car and we love our guns. In most places in Europe, very few people drive cars; they have mass transit, they have the subway system. We don’t in America, because we don’t want it. We want to drive our own cars and we want to defend ourselves. And that’s part of our cultural heritage.”
The roots of gun culture date back to the American Revolutionary War, where the American colonists were often stripped of their right to bear arms under the British government. Thus, when America created their own government, they ensured that this right remained an integral part of the U.S. Constitution.
“America’s love for guns is historic,” Jeff Sink, history teacher, said. “We still see ourselves as a cowboy and Indian nation. We still view America as the nation of the frontier. It’s in our culture. It’s a love affair.”
“The second amendment was important in 1787 when the Constitution was written because guns were important for self-defense against hostile Native Americans and for Americans who hunted regularly. During this time, guns were a way of life,” Sink said. “Plus, we knew we were on the edge of a civil war. After the Revolution, we still had enemies with England and the Ohio valley, we’ve got the French, we’ve got the Spanish, so an armed population was important.
“But when they wrote the Second Amendment there was one viable weapon — a musket. It fired one shot, it wasn’t accurate, and it took minutes to reload. And I’m not sure they would’ve considered the guns that we have today even guns. They would consider them massive weapons of war. So I think, when we talk about the Second Amendment, we’ve forgotten that it was written in 1787. Times have changed. Weaponry has changed. And thus the needs of the individual has changed.”
Today, the NRA’s role in gun culture is apparent in its influence in Congress. According to Think Progress, an independent editorial site, the NRA spent $19.7 million on Republican candidates in previous elections who now tweeted “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the San Bernardino shooting, instead of calling for a legislative change or solution, like their liberal counterparts.
The NRA even spent $984,152 on campaign contributions during the 2014 election cycle, more than $3 million on lobbying in both 2013 and 2014, and over $28 million on outside political contributions during this period, including ads paid for directly by the NRA. That makes it the tenth biggest spender in political spending.
“The NRA is one of the most powerful political lobbies in America,” Sink said. “They are probably 80 percent upper class white men. They have a lot of money and they feel that the second amendment and gun rights are absolutely essential to their well-being and the well-being of the country. They have lots of political power because they have so much money. And what they’ll do is they’ll back political candidates who run for local office, state office, and national office, even up to the presidency, as long as those candidates are willing to support gun rights for them.
“[The actions of the NRA] [are] legal, everything they do is legal. And I would not want to see them limited in what they can do. I just wish the nation was more educated to the power that the NRA has so that counter points of view can be heard.”
But America’s love for guns comes with a price — human lives. According to a 2004 Harvard study, there is a direct relationship between the amount of firearms in high-income countries and the rate of homicides in those countries. Not only does the U.S. have the highest gun ownership in the world, it has by far the highest level of gun violence among wealthy countries such as Britain, Canada, and Australia. Another 2011 study looking at the 23 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that U.S. homicide rates were 6.9 times higher than rates in other rich countries.
Every day in the U.S., nearly 90 people are victims of gun violence, resulting in approximately 32,000 deaths every year, according to the Violence Policy Center. In addition, none of the states in the U.S. with the most gun violence requires permits to purchase various gun types, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Therefore it is proven that easy access to guns in the country are putting people more at risk of gun related violence.
As for states with strict gun laws, gun violence still occurs. California, for instance, a state with one of the strictest gun regulations in the country in terms of background checks and firearm training, faced dramatic increases in gun sales compared to prior years in the gun market. This especially so on Black Friday events as well as the immediate days after the San Bernardino shooting. These new sales for 2015 even broke gun purchasing rate records in California, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Yet, in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting, the state legislature failed to pass laws on expanded background checks and on preventing names on the no-fly list to purchase arms, fearing that doing so would infringe on gun rights.
While the far left may call for more regulations and the far right may call for more gun rights, the voices of the middle ground, voices of those like Ryti’s, will continue to be left out of the conversation, the arguments, and the statistics when politicians debate on the issue.
For Ryti, a gun is more than just a gun. The safety lessons he learned from his days in Cub Scouts have stuck with him throughout the years along with his respect for gun regulations in the U.S. He understands that a gun can easily be used to hurt just as easily as it can be used to help, but it is up to the person holding the trigger to be responsible, law-abiding, and mentally-sound.
