Keeble McFarlane

Once again, the gun fetishists who with their overflowing coffers and braying voices tend to drown out anyone who tries to talk reason in the United States have won out over common sense. On Monday of last week, two days after what's become a new annual tradition of wallowing in grief over the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the US Congress let a 10-year-old law banning the sale of certain types of guns lapse without so much as lifting a finger to renew it. The law banned the sale of certain types of military assault weapons, such as Uzis, AK-47s and AR-15s, which are capable of firing multiple rounds when the trigger is squeezed.

The day before the September 11 commemorations, residents of Washington and New York found full-page ads in their morning papers to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary, arguing that lifting the ban makes it easier for organisations like Al Qaeda to obtain guns for their terrorist purposes. The ads featured a picture of Osama Bin Laden holding a Kalashnikov with the caption in bold letters: "Terrorists of 9/11 can hardly wait for 9/13." The second figure refers, of course, to Monday, September 13, when the law expired.

President Bush had said he would have signed the law if the Congress had passed an extension. But, to no one's surprise, both houses of Congress, dominated as they are by Bush's party, the Republicans, were in no mood to even address the question. In fact, the majority leader of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay described such legislation as of the "feel good" variety with little practical impact and therefore not worth the exertion to try to get it passed. And not many of his colleagues in that chamber seemed to want to go near such legislation.

Americans, as we know, have a kind of love affair with guns, and have incorporated that sentiment into many aspects of their popular culture. Sadly, it has seeped in to other cultures, such as our own. And sadly also, the United States is the only serious source of the firearms which are the modern scourge of Jamaican life, and which this year will claim a record number of victims.

I read in the paper the other day some reactions to a campaign stop by Bush's opponent John Kerry in Wisconsin, which political observers believe is an important swing state for the carrier of the Democratic Party's presidential election banner. One man accused Kerry of all kinds of things, not the least of which was that he would ban guns if he were elected in November. "This country would become like England or Canada," he continued. Both of those countries have strong strictures on the sale and ownership of guns and, not surprisingly, have extremely low rates of gun violence. Our man from Wisconsin grumbled further that in Australia they even ban swords.

Aside from the gun culture, there's a lot of politics in all of this. Perhaps the most influential by far among the many organisations which campaign for public policy in the United States is the National Rifle Association. It always has lots of money available to conduct advertising campaigns, both in magazines and on television. Its membership includes influential figures in public life, including business tycoons, show-business personalities and, of course, politicians all the way from city and county councillors to members of the federal cabinet. Its political support cuts across party lines, with influential members of both the Republican and Democratic parties being vocal gun advocates. Likewise, the anti-gun faction contains politicians from both parties.

They all, of course, trumpet the provision in the US constitution that guarantees the "right to bear arms" without mentioning the important codicil that this should be done in the context of "an organised militia".

One of the people lamenting the sorry state of affairs is Jim Brady, who was Ronald Reagan's press secretary in 1981 when a young man tried to assassinate the president in Washington. Brady himself was seriously wounded in the head during that attack, and since then has had to use a wheelchair to get around. He and his wife have been vocal campaigners for gun control, and had some success in achieving the ban which expired last week.

People in Canada and Mexico don't like the easy availability of guns in the US because many of them leak across the border into those countries and cause havoc on the streets of major cities. And, as the advertisement as well as many gun control advocates point out, making rapid-fire weapons more easily available is one more thing terrorists find attractive about the United States. We should not forget, too, that part of the reason things have quieted down in Northern Ireland is that the gun supply from the United States became extremely tight in recent years.

I, for one, am not sanguine about the demise of the gun culture in the United States, but the beast can be tamed if other countries which suffer from the carnage caused by guns exported from the US put pressure on the administration in Washington to do something about it. It's not easy to tell an arrogant, self-centred and self-willed superpower what to do, but America runs on business, and anything that disrupts the smooth operation of that business gets results.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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