America's problem with gun ownership - 29 October 1993

Before we get on to anything else, I hasten to apologise for a couple of slips in recent talks. A letter from a member of the London Chambers Society reminds me that Don Giovanni's 1,003 seductions were performed in Spain, I was actually chanting to myself "Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre", but then accountably I said "Italy".

The other correction came from a close friend, surely he said it was the St Valentine's Day Massacre was it not. Oof course it was the shooting down in a Chicago garage of seven of Bugs Moran's gang on the orders of Al Capone in 1929. That's what I was deploring, but I called it the St Bartholomew's Massacre – that was of course the ferocious massacre of about 50,000 Huguenot protestants on the orders of Catherine de' Medici in 1572 an act for which Catherine received a special medal and congratulations from Pope Gregory XIII.

Some rather bewildered listeners may wonder how such horrors 1,003 seductions, 50,000 murders got into this normally temperate chat. Don Giovanni came in when we were discussing the bombarding of the courts with lawsuits from women claiming sexual harassment. The St Valentine's Day mistake was aside to a recent depressing talk on crime and a Senate committee's recent hearing on the social effects of television violence.

With all this talk about guns, there is now a likelihood that at long last the Congress will pass the so-called Brady Bill and the first federal attempt to control guns. Mr Brady was President Reagan's press secretary when in the spring of 1981 pistol shots from a demented young man wounded the president and three others. Mr Brady suffered brain damage and has been paralysed ever since, but ever since also he and his wife have laboured against the opposition of six Congresses to fashion a gun-control bill. It is a very modest proposal in the main, requiring people wanting to buy a gun to wait five days till their past has been looked into. People for and against gun control have pointed out for years that anyone intending to commit a murder or even to possess a weapon as an intimidating cover for a burglary is the last sort of person who is going to wait five days or even to put in an application.

I think that once such a bill is passed or even one much more stringent, there's a good chance of a repeat performance of the social calamity that followed on the passage of the prohibition amendment to the Constitution. That was ratified in 1919 and became law one year later; it was called at the time the noble experiment though pretty soon it became painfully clear it did not end how American's with more nobility than they already had.

People who'd never drunk were tempted to try the forbidden fruit and to the amazement and then the despair of the general population, a whole underground industry arrived to bottle and provide the fruit, it spawned of course the whole savage and squalled era of the bootleggers, the emergence of rival warlords, petty crooks turned into millionaires from their remarkable initiative in developing a far-flung transport system recruiting armies of agents bribing police and on the side making an even more profitable living from squeezing regular protection money from small shopkeepers, laundries, groceries in exchange for protecting them from the protector's own guns and arsonists.

At the moment, there's been surprisingly little speculation by people who are for gun control about the methods of evading a new law likely to be devised by the types who shoot each other down. For the most part, random murder in this country is performed by street gangs run amok and whatever the law they will certainly know where to get guns and surely their new sources of supply will mushroom.

Most crimes in the home, 85% of all shootings are done by one member of the family or a relative against another. I should have reminded you that most states, I think 38, have their own form of gun control laws, but I noticed that the governors do not make a habit of boasting that the laws have made a striking difference in the number or frequency of homicides. The disparity in numbers follows rather disappointingly the difference you might expect: large population many shootings, small population – Wyoming, Vermont – few.

This brawl over gun control, it's rarely achieved the civility of a debate, has been going on for 30 years ever since the assassination of President Kennedy and throughout that time two forces have accidentally combined to defeat any national gun control bill. First is the almost holy power over popular opinion of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, it consists of one clause, one sentence to do with 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 National Rifle Association is the second defeating force and it has that sentence chiselled or used over the entrance to its national headquarters or, wait a moment, not the whole sentence, not the whole reason for allowing the people to keep and bear arms, just the right of the people.

Now that amendment was written at a time when the new nation the United States had no standing army and it was the intention of the founding fathers to see that it never had one because standing armies were either the private possession of monarchs or they could be commandeered by upstart dictators. You simply had to look to Europe and to the country they'd broken away from to see the universal truth of this, so they naively thought the country could be made safe by a militia on call, by allowing every man whatever his trade – farmer, mechanic, parson, lawyer, butcher, baker – to keep by his fireside a rifle. When there was an uprising a succession is moved, an Indian raid, a tax revolt whatever, the militia would be called.

And when it was all over, the man went back to his trade and the gun went back by the fireplace, so the Constitution says because the security of a free state needs a militia, then you should be able to keep and bear arms. Of course this beautiful system couldn't last long especially against warlike threats from abroad.

Today, need I tell you, the United States has a standing army, navy, air force and marine corps, voluntary to be sure, but recruited, permanently organised, paid and uniformed. The one condition the founding fathers set to allow the keeping of guns is no longer there. Nevertheless, not only the National Rifle Association but the great majority of the American people defend your right and mine to possess guns because it's there in holy writ, the right to bear and keep arms shall not be infringed.

I do believe that an overwhelming majority of Americans both educated and illiterate simply do not know that the Constitution does not proclaim any right to have a gun to protect your family, to shoot an intruder even to shoot a deer or a rabbit. The condition that allowed private ownership of guns is either ignored, forgotten or by most people not known about.

I've called the National Rifle Association the second force always mobilised to resist any form – local, state, national – of gun control. The association's argument has been from the beginning first that the Constitution gives Americans the right to keep guns. Secondly, that 99.9% of Americans who own guns have them for shooting animals with and this point is a very strong one. In this country, this continent, whole communities of rural folk depend on their rifles to help feed the family and shooting, hunting as it's called, is a sport among all classes. No bill now being proposed and no bill likely to be proposed as far as thought can reach will ban guns for sport anywhere in the United States.

The solution of the problem is quite simple to state and probably quite unobtainable, how to keep guns out of the hands of people we would once have called mad and now call unstable, disturbed, psychopathic.

In the meantime, there's been a large penitential movement in popular opinion, the solid opposition to gun control is dissolving fast to the satisfaction of the pollsters and the alarm of the National Rifle Association, there is now a firm majority of citizens in favour of a gun control law.

The National Rifle Association futilely points out the truth that the homicide rates have dropped in the past three years but throughout this year people have been subjected on their nightly television news to episodes of random slaughter among the young, especially in many cities and small towns. And the grisly statistics have been widely published and confirmed that one American schoolchild in five carries a gun that among all the American young between the ages of 15 and 24 the leading cause of death is homicide. Enough people are saying is enough.

So what does the National Rifle Association do in this critical situation? The association has mounted a powerful drive to have women buy guns. Says one actress posing in an arms industry television commercial, "I refuse to be a victim, you can too". "Tip the odds in your favour," says another, glancing at the gun on the night table. These dramatic messages will I'm afraid reach and impress many more people than the readers of the New England Journal of Medicine, which has just published an elaborate study whose conclusion is that keeping a handgun in the home just about triples the chance that someone will be killed there.

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