John Lennon’s assassination

It may be, I say it may be, that the Carter administration is overreacting with a violent dying kick when it warns us, and the Russians and the Poles, of the gravity of a situation in which Soviet and Czech and East German forces are massing in response to the labour troubles in Poland.

We read, too, that several of the Western allies are... – exasperated is the word – by the arrival in Brussels of the Secretary of State, Mr Musky, and the Secretary of Defence, Mr Harold Brown. Mr Brown, in particular, will not be received with love and kisses since his very frank public statement about the way in which America's NATO allies are, in his opinion, dragging their feet in their own defence. Mr Brown would never have talked this way in public a year ago, but he's only going to be in his job for another six weeks and he evidently felt that he had nothing to lose or fear from a bout of brutal honesty.

The sentence that must have riled the allies was the one in which he defined the shared responsibility for Western Europe's defence. Too often, he said, the NATO allies seemed to be saying, "We agree to share the responsibility, we'll sell goods and arms to the Soviet Union and you defend us". It was predictable that Mr Brezhnev would say in India what he's been saying to his own people, namely that the Soviet Union poses no sort of threat to Poland or, for that matter, to any country in the Persian Gulf and that the Americans are being hysterical in thinking so.

However right or wrong, for better or worse, the Americans constantly look back to the late 1930s, they recall, as one timely reminder, the way a groan used to go up in the House of Commons whenever Winston Churchill got up to call off the statistics about the scope and pace of German rearmament. And we've not heard of anyone in the present Congress of either party who has accused President Carter and Secretary Musky or Secretary Brown of overreacting.

This whole issue of threats and counter-threats, especially as it applies to Poland, is one of the two issues that most trouble most Americans: certainly the outgoing and the incoming Congresses. The other, of course, is the economy, the tumbling of the stock market, partly – the experts say – as a reaction to the news from Poland, partly as a response to the alarming rise in the banks' prime lending rate to 20%, which is putting manufacturing firms out of business and has led responsible people in and out of the government to declare that a new recession is already underway.

This has so alarmed the Reagan transition team, which is working on plans for the economy, that two of Mr Reagan's closest advisors and Senator Dole, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, have urged him the moment he's sworn in as president to declare a state of economic emergency.

Well, until last Monday night then, there was little doubt in my mind as to what A Letter from America ought to be about. But just before we went to bed, the television networks interrupted or suspended their regular programmes as they haven't done, to my recollection, since the assassination of President Kennedy.

And for the rest of the night and on Tuesday and Wednesday throughout most of the nightly news programmes, Poland and the crime rate and the new recession were either forgotten or tacked on to the end of the overwhelming news story. The cameras roamed over crowds around an apartment building on Central Park West and then on more crowds around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and out in Hawaii and in London and Amsterdam and San Francisco and Tokyo. John Lennon was dead.

Since I don't belong to that generation that spent so much of its energy and idealism crying "Make love, not war" and tramping in protest marches against the tragedy of Vietnam, I cannot pretend to understand the phenomenon of a singer whose death has produced, as it undoubtedly has, a worldwide outpouring of grief, a grief of identity with the lost cause of peace and brotherhood through the simple chanting of peace and brotherhood.

But John Lennon's murder came on the heels of an equally senseless and casual murder, that of Dr Michael Halberstam, a distinguished doctor and writer who one night last week walked into his home in Washington, tangled with a burglar, and was shot on the spot.

President-elect Reagan was in New York the day after Lennon was shot and was stopped long enough for a reporter to ask him if gun control wasn't the answer. He said, "No, if somebody commits a crime and carries a gun when he's doing it, add five to fifteen years to the prison sentence; it may be a way out." At any rate, I don't think there's any doubt now that one of the first Bills that somebody will put up to the new Congress will be yet another proposal for a federal gun control law.

It has happened, and always in the first shock of a spectacular murder – John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy – that Congress is momentarily outraged, a strong Bill is drafted, it is weakened in committee, it's feverishly debated on the floors of both Houses, it is as vigorously opposed as it is advocated and, in the end, it is shelved.

Now, since the United States is the most lax of all the Western nations in controlling the possession of guns, of handguns especially, you may wonder at the strength or the rationale of the opposition to a federal law. Well, first throughout at least two-thirds of this country, everywhere in the South and the south-west and all across the west, shooting or hunting, as it's called here, is an immensely popular sport among all classes.

And there is by now a huge and profitable gun industry. The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, its slogan or text is taken from the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which says, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". Many a good American parrots that line with a kind of wry fatalism, as if to say, "I don't know why it's there, but it is there and we should respect it".

What these patriots never point out, and rarely seem to know, is that that quotation is only the second part of the sentence, the first part gives the reason in full. It says "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". This prescription was written for a nation that did not yet have a standing army; it relied on a citizens' militia to be made up of every male householder who could snatch the gun by his fireside whenever the call to duty came.

The founding fathers thought only of that threat to the security of a free state, they were not thinking of individuals, or of any right to shoot a pheasant or defend yourself against a burglar, let alone to go out and shoot a popular idol, whether a president or a singer.

However, while there are otherwise intelligent citizens who like to hunt and who, in passing, mumble about a Constitutional right, they strongly support the National Rifle Association and its concern with rifles and their use in sport. It is handguns that cause something over 10% of the homicides in the United States and it's the control of handguns that has been the issue in the many fractious debates in and out of Congress since the assassination of John Kennedy.

Congress acted for the first time in 30 years within a year of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. At the urging of President Johnson in 1969, it passed a Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which banned the mail order sale of guns across state lines, forbade the sale of rifles or shotguns to anyone under 18 and forbade also the sale of guns to out-of-state residents, but it fell far short of Lyndon Johnson's appeal for the national registration of all guns and the national licensing of all owners.

It was and is still easy, deadly easy, to buy a handgun if you want it and any criminal, any disturbed person, anybody can still, in many states, buy one of the so-called "Saturday night specials" on the most offhand showing of a driving licence.

The laxness of this federal law moved various states and cities during the 1970s to pass their own, harsher laws. In Kansas and Maine a prison sentence is compulsory for anyone committing a crime with a gun irrespective of the damage done. Mississippi, denies parole to people convicted of using gun. In Utah, the penalty for any use of a handgun is entirely at the judge's say-so.

Among the city remedies, two are worth mentioning since they have proved a striking decline in shootings. The city of Cleveland, after a police battle with an irregular Muslim sect, passed a Bill banning the sale under any circumstances of cheap handguns and required the registration of all others. Baltimore, Maryland, I think, can claim the most effective law, one that banned the private possession of handguns. The police department paid $50 for every gun turned in once the law was passed and $100 for information leading to the arrest of possessors.

I questioned whether one's own safety as an informer is worth only $100, but as for the other provision, 7,000 handguns were turned in the first week and Baltimore maintains that there has been a dramatic drop in what it calls "gun-related crimes". But the laws vary greatly in toughness and in enforcement; it's probably true that anybody who wants a gun hard enough can get one and across the whole country, there is a vast silent opposition to gun control from householders who believe their first duty is to protect their families.

Like it or not, great numbers of Americans are closet vigilantes. Until this uncomfortable fact is recognised and exposed as a form of fear breeding fear, I don't think there's likely to be a national gun control law.

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