If the U.S. ever erupted in civil war again, gun rights would likely be the cause

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A few days after the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs‘ victory parade on Feb. 14, which killed one person and injured about two dozen others, I found myself in a California bar having a conversation with an older couple from Minnesota.

The subject was gun violence.

I mentioned that I had long ago become fatigued by the platitudes from politicians and commentators about the need to do something about gun violence in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting. Most every one of them knew nothing would be done. Ever.

I mean, if the slaughter of innocent children in U.S. schools wasn’t enough to get people to drop their objections to halting the sale of AK-47s at their local gun store, nothing would.

“Honestly, it would literally take a civil war to address the problem,” said the man. “Guns have become so ingrained in our culture, it’s impossible to see how you fix the issue. When lockdowns at school become routine, then you have normalized the crisis. It’s truly sick and quite embarrassing for a so-called civilized nation.”

As demoralizing as his words were, I agreed with each one of them.

Everytown Research and Policy (ER&P) estimates that 120 Americans are killed with guns every day – roughly 57 per cent of these cases are suicides while 40 per cent are murders – while another 200 are shot and wounded.

Black Americans, meantime, represent the vast majority of gun homicide victims and are 12 times more likely than white Americans to die by gun shootings, according to ER&P. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and teens. Nearly 2,500 of them die by gun homicide every year, frequently in their own homes. Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries, again often in their own residences.

The U.S. gun-death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. That compared to 2.1 per 100,000 for Canada, 1 for Australia, 0.9 for Germany and 0.6 for Spain, among other countries.

Two new books out on the subject of gun violence in America are depressing reads. What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms by Jonathan Metzl, uses the 2018 shooting at a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville – in which an AR-15-toting white man shot and killed four people of colour – to explore just how broken gun laws are in the States.

The man who did the shooting had his firearms seized in his home state of Illinois because of a criminal history associated, in part, with mental health issues. However, the guns were handed over by authorities to the shooter’s father, who promptly returned the firearms to his son before he moved to Tennessee. After the shooting, Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation making it easier – not harder – to carry a handgun in the state.

A second book, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain, is an equally distressing (and yet fascinating) examination of the Second Amendment and other gun laws. It is Mr. Erdozain’s contention, backed by some solid research, that the founding fathers never intended “the people” mentioned in the Second Amendment – the right of “the people” to bear arms – to be individual citizens. Rather, it was supposed to refer to the U.S. citizenry as a whole – the right of the federal government and states to have the authority to call up a militia of citizens to fend off threats to their existence.

In the early years of the American experience, various courts viewed the Second Amendment the same way, and prohibited private citizens from carrying guns in public or using them against other people. Eventually, however, some courts (sometimes overseen by racists) came to a different conclusion. Eventually, the Supreme Court in 2008 affirmed the view that individuals had the right to bear arms.

And here we are today.

A Gallup poll taken last October showed 56 per cent of U.S. adults surveyed were in favour of stricter gun laws, while almost 44 per cent either wanted current legislation left alone or weakened. Inevitably, support for gun crackdowns spikes in polls conducted after mass shootings, but then that backing falls in the intervening time between events.

In other words, the country is almost split on the matter – like it is on so many things. Guns in the U.S. are here to stay. Like my friend in the bar said, any broad ban would likely provoke a civil war.