Nashville shooting: How US respond to its gun crisis

Protesters flooded Tennessee's statehouse on Thursday to demand stricter gun laws after the school shooting in Nashville that left six people dead. Photo / AP

Opinion:

All these years, we assumed the gun nuts of America were immovable. Wrongly, it transpires. This week’s mass shooting at a primary school in Tennessee inspired something so many past horrors could not: at last, a shift in stance.

Sadly, that shift was in the wrong direction.

Having failed to stem the flow of needless death with their thoughts and prayers, the foes of gun control are out of ideas. Every conceivable solution has been tried. The only option now is to give up.

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation. And we’re not going to fix it,” Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett concluded in the wake of Monday’s attack at Covenant Church School, which left six victims dead, three of them children.

“Criminals are going to be criminals. My daddy fought in the Second World War in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, ‘Buddy, if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”

Put aside the comparison of children sitting in classrooms, learning what verbs are and memorising their times tables, to soldiers under fire in history’s deadliest war. A sentiment so unfathomably perverse defies analysis.

So, disregarding that, part of you wants to give Burchett credit. Just a teensy smidgen of it. For his honesty.

Here is a rare exception to the rule that politicians overpromise and underdeliver. “We’re not going to fix it” might not inspire as a campaign slogan, nor look great on a T-shirt, but you can at least trust the man to keep his word.

Still, there are follow-up questions. Criminals are going to be criminals, yes. Do they need to be heavily armed criminals? Should the criminals who are going to be criminals be allowed to buy seven guns, legally, without arousing suspicion? Might America set stricter limits on the arsenal of military killing machines available to its citizens?

The spokesman for defeatism sees only futility in such measures.

“We pass laws, and then they really have no effect,” Burchett said.

“You have got to deal with what’s at the heart of this. It’s evil. Some people would say demon possession.”

We heard a similar line from Tennessee’s Governor, Bill Lee, who refrained from blaming demons but described the struggle to suppress gun violence as one “against evil itself”.

Of course, every society has people who are evil, or unhinged, or so wayward as to turn violent. Yet the American experience, of a dozen school shootings and 417 dead kids since the turn of the year, remains peculiar.

The gun lovers have always been careful to avoid contemplating this discrepancy and its causes too deeply. Hence the counterintuitive solutions they’ve offered: armed guards at every school, armed teachers, that sort of thing. Always arming, never disarming. Guns as the cause of, and solution to, all the nation’s problems.

Gun deaths in the United States in 2023 (up until March 9). Photo / Gun Violence Archive

We can say one thing for dumb ideas though: they are still ideas. They’re an attempt to address the problem. Even thoughts and prayers, useless though they’ve proven to be, at least contain some hope for improvement. This new strain of defeatism is worse.

In the politicians’ case, it is also a monstrous abdication of duty. They are employed by the public to enact laws, many of which are supposed to keep said public safe. That’s what their job is. It is why they receive generous salaries and pensions at public expense, to be supplemented by exorbitant speaking fees in retirement.

A politician who says nothing can be done about the daily murder of children is simply refusing to do his job. It’s like calling a plumber to your house and being told no, he won’t fix your broken washing machine because washing machines are going to be washing machines, but yes he will still take your money.

Heck, even if we accept the diagnosis of the biblical literalists, and say pesky demons are behind all this evil, Burchett should be hard at work recruiting an army of exorcists. There is no scenario, no theory of the case that makes inaction defensible.

And yet, a repulsive thought has been burrowing its way through my brain: maybe he’s right. Maybe this problem genuinely cannot be fixed.

Evelyn Dieckhaus was shot dead while trying to pull a fire alarm to warn others about the shooter. Photo / Facebook

William Kinney, another of the children killed. Photo / Facebook

The third victim, Hallie Scruggs, with her father. Photo / supplied

Americans bought 16.5 million guns in 2022 – a decline from the previous year, if you can believe it. Our best estimate is that civilians own about 400 million firearms. There are more guns than people.

Perhaps, whatever the US government does, the scale of the problem is too great. Gun ownership has snowballed to such an extent that it can no longer be restrained.

Something like our own mandatory gun buyback scheme, which involved the confiscation of just 650,000 weapons (just!), would probably be logistically impossible even without cultural resistance. And that resistance runs so, so deep.

There’s an alternate history where America never reached this point. Its relationship with guns only morphed into the current twisted obsession quite late in the 20th century.

(How twisted? This Christmas card illustrates it succinctly enough.)

Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles and his family in 2021. His district includes the school that was attacked on Monday. Merry Christmas! Photo / supplied

One of the clips that always does the rounds in the wake of a mass shooting is an interview with Warren Burger, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Justice Burger, a conservative, was appointed by Republican president Richard Nixon. After retiring he spoke out publicly against the gun lobby’s brazen, shameless, and wildly successful “distortion” of the Second Amendment.

That amendment, which underpins US gun rights, reads: “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.”

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment,” Justice Burger told PBS in 1991.

“(It) has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

“‘A well regulated militia.’ If the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn’t 16 and 17 and 18 or any other aged persons be regulated in the use of arms, the way an automobile is regulated?”

If we accept it was fraudulent to reinterpret an amendment written in the 1700s, when “arms” meant muskets, to let civilians own recreational assault rifles, then the fraud worked. Millions of Americans still believe it now, and use it to justify an obscene tolerance for atrocity.

“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights,” Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a fleeting political celebrity better known as Joe the Plumber, said after one shooting in 2014. Blunt, horrendously immoral, and very much a mainstream view.

So perhaps the war over guns has already been fought, and irrevocably lost. America will keep wounding itself, and its politicians will feebly staunch the bleeding. If they can even be bothered to try.