A Depraved Nation?

I was happy to see President Obama take some action this week to tighten US gun control laws, if only moderately.

Somehow in America, with 10 times more gun homicides than most other industrialized countries, taking even these small steps is considered a bold move. (Obama’s opponents consider it tyranny, but such thinking belongs to a wholly different realm of reality.)

For folks in Finland (with only one-sixteenth America’s level of gun violence) it’s probably almost impossible to comprehend what a big deal the gun issue is in the US, and how passionate – sometime hysterical, in my mind – supporters of gun rights can be. Just check the comment section of any on-line article on gun control. They are rife with excessive anger and alarm and well-worn arguments against gun control.

One pro-gun argument that you will always run across is that it’s not, heaven forbid, the easy access to guns that accounts for the high number of gun deaths in America, since guns by themselves cannot do anything.

This line of reasoning is summed up by the pithy phrase, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.

Well, duh.

Of course, in most cases, a person does have to pull the trigger, though that has been known on occasion to be done instead by, for example, a hunting dog. Dropping a loaded gun on the kitchen floor might also do the trick. Such things happen often enough.

Fleshing out the “people are the problem” argument a bit more, gun lobby groups like the all-mighty NRA would say that the real issue lies somewhere else. In a culture of violence inspired by Hollywood or the makers of video games. Or in the general erosion of society. Or – a new favorite nowadays – they would say the problem lies in the abysmal level of mental-health care that America has found itself saddled with.

To me, most of these alternative arguments are weak deflections, especially since I tend to see the problem from a more international perspective.

Countries with much lower rates of gun violence, such as most European nations, are also awash with violent Hollywood films and video games. They’re not so different from America in that sense. What they are not awash with, however, are easily available firearms, and that to me seems more likely to be the differentiating factor.

Let’s take for example a recent story in the Washington Post highlighting how on this past Christmas Day in America 27 people were intentionally killed by guns, a number that equals the number of gun deaths in eight other countries. Eight other countries combined. For one entire year.

To spell it out more clearly: a year’s worth of gun deaths in Austria, New Zealand, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Iceland (let’s call them “the Peaceful Eight”) tallied all together match America’s gun death toll from a single day, Christmas Day.

And this doesn’t include accidental shootings or suicides. Also, Christmas, being a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace, was a slow day for killing. Normally, on an average day, it’s more like 36 homicides from guns.

When I saw that dismal statistic, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (well, actually, I used excel, but you get the idea) in order to get a better comparison.

Naturally, you’ve got to account for the fact that the US is a much bigger country than all those eight nations (Bermuda? Are you kidding?) put together. The per capita gun death toll for the Peaceful Eight, comes to about 91 per 100 million inhabitants, compared to the US figure of 8 deaths (based on last Christmas’ death count).

But, of course, that’s 91 deaths spread over 365 days. When you annualize the US figure, you’re looking at a yearly toll of 3055 killings per 100 million Americans. That’s 33 times the number of people killed by guns in the Peaceful Eight. If you use the more typical daily average of 36 Americans killed by guns (a yearly sum of 4073 per 100 million population), it’s more like a 45-fold difference.

That's 45 times more gun deaths in America than in these eight otherwise similarly civilized and advanced nations. I’ve visited four of them, and they seem normal to me. Happy, even.

I should point out that the Washington Post didn’t just randomly pick those eight disparate nations to compare to the US. The Post article links to a chart produced by GunPolicy.org, a gun-control advocacy group. The chart compares annual gun deaths in 22 developed nations*.  (Of course, anti-gun control folks will immediately howl that you can’t trust data from any such site. I’m willing to believe the data are accurate enough.)

As it happens, the less-violent right-hand end of GunPolicy’s chart is occupied by the Peaceful Eight, whose total yearly output of gun murder victims conveniently (for the Post article) exactly equals 27, the US Christmas death toll. On the other end of the scale, France is noticeably bloodier, with 140, based on data from 2012, which naturally doesn't include the horrific November terrorist attack in Paris.  

Some might accuse the Washington Post of cherry-picking the data, though the fact remains that France’s "typical" 140 deaths from gunshot (210 per 100 million) is still better than America’s 4073.

The chart also indicates that Finland suffers 17 gun deaths a year*. That comes to 309 per 100 million, and 13 times fewer than in America.

So, let’s assume, as the NRA and their ilk would have us do, that the overwhelming presence of guns in America doesn’t explain the 45-fold difference in deaths compared to the Peaceful Eight. What if we take the "guns don't kill people" argument at face value? 

If we assume people are solely to blame, not the guns, then my only conclusion is that Americans are 45 times more violent than the citizens of Austria, New Zealand, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Iceland. Forty-five times more bloodthirsty than those other folks. Forty-five times more depraved. Americans apparently value human life 45 times less than people in the Peaceful Eight or, if you will, 13 times less than Finns do.

Given the history of the US, I have to concede this might be the case. America is violent place. As one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, once said, “There is nothing more American than violence”. Maybe that explains it all. Still, that is not a happy thought.

Or, maybe Americans aren’t really so exceptionally violent after all, at least not 45-times more violent. 

Maybe the average Austrian or New Zealander, or Finn for that matter, is actually just as bloodthirsty or unhinged as the average American. It’s just that they, unlike most Americans, can’t so easily reach for a gun whenever they get the urge to kill. 

I'd like to think that was true, and that Americans aren't actually that depraved. But that's not what the NRA would like you to think. 

© GunPolicy.org 2016

*The data in the GunPolicy.org chart for different countries are derived from different years, so no one single year is used for all of the comparisons.

The Parable of the Selfish "Hero"?

There are so many strange little stories coming out of the US presidential race that it’s hard to keep up with them all. However, one involving Ben Carson has stood out in my mind.

In the wake of the fairly recent school shooting in Oregon on October 1^st, Carson, the soft-spoken ex-neurosurgeon and Christian patriot, made some news by offering his advice on how not to get shot. I say “fairly recent school shooting”, since there have been at least three others in the ensuing three-odd weeks, though none as deadly.

In his reaction to the Umpqua Community College shooting spree in which nine people were killed and eight wounded, Carson instructed future victims of such tragedies to be proactive. He said that rather than waiting to be gunned down, the students in Oregon should have rushed the shooter.

On the face of it, this advice makes sense, but was seen by some people as being insensitive, as basically accusing the victims of being too passive. Others have suggested that in extreme-stress situations, such as facing an active shooter, humans often react differently than someone sitting comfortably in a TV studio might think they should. Even if that someone is a famed brain surgeon.

What is enlightening is that Carson, currently number two in the GOP race, does have some experience in facing someone with a gun. Following the kerfuffle over his remarks, Carson related a story from thirty years ago of how he himself had the barrel of a gun jammed in his ribs by an armed robber. He said it was no big deal.

It happened in Baltimore in a Popeye’s fast-food restaurant, where Carson was presumably a customer. As Carson has told the story, an armed man held a gun to him until Carson helpfully pointed out that the robber should be threatening the restaurant's cashier, not a mere patron like himself. Carson explained, no doubt patiently and with a wry smile, “I believe that you want the guy behind the counter”.

The robber apologized for his mistake and proceeded (perhaps sheepishly) to force the hapless restaurant worker at gunpoint to clear out the cash register.

To say this all sounds a bit off-kilter is not the least of it.

Imagine someone, intending to rob a fast-food joint, walks in and threatens the first customer he sees waiting in line to order his meal of Handcrafted Spicy Tenders. Maybe we can assume that the would-be robber had, in fact, never been in a fast-food restaurant. Maybe he didn’t realize how a retail business works and – unlike Willie Sutton – had no clue where the money actually was. The man’s potential for a life of crime at this point would have suffered an unfortunate setback, if not for the sage advice of the good Dr. Carson that he should instead stick up the cashier, or as Carson has phrased it the “appropriate person”.

The entire scenario sounds unreal. What’s more, reporters have not been able to find any official record of this particular robbery ever taking place. When confronted with this fact, a Carson spokesperson speculated that perhaps the police didn’t file a report. Right. Popeye’s must be a very forgiving corporation if it doesn’t require some kind of official paperwork to explain the disappearance of a whole day’s worth of receipts. With a laid-back work environment like that it's perhaps a nice place to work, though maybe prone to get robbed often, not least by its own employees. In other words, the notion of no police report being filed doesn’t ring true.

To my mind, it’s much easier to believe Carson’s little narrative never happen, or at least that it didn't happen the way he "remembers" it. It's called stretching the truth, and many a public figure has been caught out doing it (see Brian Williams, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, etc.). 

Now, of course, a narrative doesn’t have to be true to be “true”. I went to Sunday School enough to know that Jesus supposedly told many stories that were not likely true, but had a moral point to them. I’m talking about parables, such as the Parable of the Talents, which apparently illustrates the moral of compounding interest rates and investing through the tale of a servant who came to ruin by burying money in the ground rather than plowing it back into the economy. (The same moral was put to music in “Mary Poppins”, though in that case it was portrayed in a negative light compared to the simple joy of “feeding the birds”).

Maybe Ben Carson sees his Popeye’s story as a parable, not factually true, but serving a larger purpose. The trouble with that generous interpretation is the moral to Carson’s story can be summed up this way: “When faced with a dangerous criminal, it’s best to redirect the danger away from yourself towards someone else.” The Parable of the Selfish Non-hero?

It’s baffling why someone running for president would trot out such an unflattering story, even if it were true, especially if it were true. Maybe he really believes it. Or maybe he sees no reason to let reality stand in the way of a good story, even if the story's not truly that good.  

Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore.

The Police

My first job in Finland, when I finally got one, was as an English teacher. Specifically, I taught English as a second language in one of the several commercial schools catering mostly to Finnish businessmen. This was back in the day when my native tongue wasn't nearly so ubiquitous here as it is today, and many of my students were sent by their companies to improve the English they sometimes needed in their work.  

Because I am an American, I would sometimes be assigned to give lessons to students who were about to embark on their first business trip to the States. In addition to helping them brush up on their English, I was also expected to give them a little orientation on how things work in America, for example how to identify coins that have no numbers on them (maybe a uniquely American approach to money), or how to make long-distant calls on pay phones (this was, after all, a long time ago), or why it’s often okay for drivers to make a right turn when the light is red. 

One piece of advice I remember passing on to these America-bound Finns concerned what to do if stopped by the police. If they are ever pulled over by a cop in America, I would tell them, first of all keep your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t reach for the glove compartment. Don’t get out of the car. To do otherwise, could be extremely dangerous. You could easily get shot.  

I’m sure to my blue-eyed (in every sense of that word) Finnish students, this all sounded like an exaggeration, unnecessarily alarming. And maybe the only reason it occurred to me to give this particular piece of advice is a small incident that took place in a little college town almost a decade before.

After high school, I attended a tiny junior college nestled in a North Georgia valley, almost in the shadow of Brasstown Bald, the state’s highest peak. There wasn’t much to the town of Young Harris, other than the college of the same name, a Methodist school with a student body of only 600 or so. The highway running through the town passed under a single blinking yellow, not even red, traffic light at the one intersection with another highway. It was, quite literally, less than a one-stoplight town. 

I don’t think I ever knew the real name of the town cop, but to us cheeky outsider students, he was “Barney”. Not that, I guess, anyone would ever have called him that to his face. This was, of course, a reference to Barney Fife, the hopelessly inept and self-important deputy sheriff in the classic 1960s American TV series “The Andy Griffith Show”. Besides being comically bumbling, the TV Barney, unlike the show's wise Sheriff Andy always, seemed overly eager to one day, someday, finally, use his gun. He was portrayed as a fool. 

Apparently, my fellow students didn’t hold the local constabulary in much higher regard than Barney Fife, though to be honest, our collective worldview was probably pretty narrow. Looking back, our isolated mountain campus wasn’t often much different than high school, and we students may have been a little excitable and impulsive. Epic impromptu water balloon fights would sometimes erupt between dorms.  

One night, a drama developed after midnight when one of my fraternity brothers took off from campus, apparently in a poisonous state of mind over a break up with a girl or some other romantic trouble. Whether he was about to do himself any harm in reality, I can’t say. But his friends were concerned enough that the alarm went out among the frat brothers to go look for him. 

Several of us were dispatched around the valley to different spots we thought he might have gone. With a friend, I headed off in my VW beetle for “The Mountain”, one of the places where students went to party off campus. It was a Methodist school, after all, and strictly “alcohol-free” even in those days when 18-year-old college students could legally drink. Other popular spots for swigging beer under the stars were “The Dam” and “The Beach”, sites no doubt still fondly remembered by aging alumni.  

Maybe the best of all of these places, The Mountain was an airy ridge top on a broad, wooded mountainside crisscrossed by some gravel roads a property developer had built to potential house sites. Probably, it’s some kind of gated community today.  

After climbing the steep road in my VW, we arrived at The Mountain to find that not only was it completely deserted, but the surrounding forest was on fire. Well, maybe not “the forest” exactly. A campfire from that night’s party had gotten out of control and set ablaze the nearby forest floor, the thick layer of dry leaves on the ground that was now burning in a widening semi-circle. Maybe alcohol, young people, and an open fire don’t always mix well.

My friend and I jumped out of the car and started stomping out the flames, not even bothering to turn off my headlights, which in any case gave us enough light to see what we were doing. It took us a little while to get the blaze completely under control. When we were finally satisfied there was no danger of the fire reigniting, we got back in the car to leave. No such luck. The battery was dead, drained by burning the headlights too long.  

There was nothing else to do but start walking back to campus. We hadn’t gone far down the road in the dark when we were met by a car coming up the mountain. A police car. It wasn’t Barney the city cop, more like a county deputy sheriff, I think. I assume someone had noticed the fire and called the police. If he deputy had any suspicions that we had set the fire ourselves, he must have dismissed it. He gave my friend and I a ride back to town, the only time I’ve ever sat in the back of a police car. Unless I’ve sanitized it in my memory, the whole encounter was friendly enough.  

Not so for another encounter that took place that night. While I had gone to The Mountain to search for our friend, my roommate Pete was among those who were frantically rushing around to other locations. The car he was riding in, tearing down the empty highway in the middle of town, didn’t escape the notice of Barney. He was on the case in an instant and, after a short chase, pulled my friend's car over. As Barney stepped out of his cruiser to approach the stopped car, my roommate Pete, filled with the urgency of the search for our missing friend and not wanting to delay it for a mere speeding ticket, jumped out from the passenger side to explain to Barney why they were in such a hurry. It was a mistake. Barney immediately pulled his gun, pointing it at Pete. At least, that’s how I remember hearing about it later.

Luckily, Barney didn’t shoot. Luckily, he wasn’t as trigger happy as we might have thought. Still, he was twitchy enough to draw his weapon on a young college student springing out of a stopped car in the middle of the night. The fact that this could happen to someone I knew made a deep impression on me.  

(And to be fair to “Barney”, it had been only a year earlier that the county sheriff at the time had been shot to death during a similar traffic stop at a lonely crossroads in the middle of the night. Maybe, Barney had reason to be nervous.) 

Anyway, this little incident has been on my mind in light of last year’s rash of high-profile killings by American cops.  

I have a British friend who a few years ago expressed his concern that if he traveled to the US, he could be killed by the police. I was surprised by that. This was around the time that two British tourists had been murdered in a seedy neighborhood near Tampa, Florida, a story that apparently got a huge amount of alarmed coverage in the UK press.  

I would have thought that my friend instead would have feared American criminals, not American law enforcement. Maybe he had already been seeing on the Internet some of the stories of police abuse that have now become depressingly frequent.  

I have no idea whether hasty shootings, justified or not, of citizens by the police were as frequent back in the 80s as they seem to be now. What I do know is that my roommate didn’t get a bullet to the chest on that night. In the current environment, that almost seems amazing.  

Some might chalk that happy outcome up to “white privilege”, by which a white man -- especially in a rural mountain town -- isn’t reflectively seen by the police as a “real” threat in the same way that an African-American might be. I’m willing to believe that things might have been different if Pete had been black. 

Still, maybe those were just simpler times. Something that I think contributes to the way recent encounters with the police seem to escalate too often to tragedy is the pervasive gun culture in America. When cops can rightly assume that anyone they meet on the street might be armed, it’s perhaps no surprise they become trigger happy.  

That doesn’t mean they aren’t even more trigger happy when encountering blacks, but the underlying climate of lawlessness and fear is certainly a dismal background to begin with. Add to that the general animosity between black communities and the police, and the climate becomes even more toxic.  

Not that animosity toward the police is solely an issue for African-Americans or liberals. Some folks on the far right are also no fans of law enforcement. 

When Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was illegally grazing his cattle on public land, resisted police attempts last April to confiscate the cattle, he was lauded as a hero by some conservatives, while the police officers confronting him were vilified.  

That armed standoff, ended peacefully when the police backed down and allowed Bundy to continue committing his crime. Though, in the long run, perhaps not entirely peacefully. A couple of months later, two anti-government extremists, a married couple who had joined Bundy’s standoff with the law, murdered a pair of Las Vegas police officers, unprovoked and without warning, much like the recent ambush killing of two patrolmen in New York by a deranged man outraged over the recent highly publicized killings of unarmed blacks. 

Meanwhile, in Finland police last year discharged a total of six bullets while on duty. In the whole country. For the whole year. And three of those were warning shots. If that sounds like a more civilized society, it is. 

And I believe this is true, despite the sad fact that this week poliisi in Oulu were forced to use their weapons against a maniac with a hatchet who had just murdered two people. The man died, the first police-related killing since 2009 and the second since 2000. Though not a good way to start off the year, it's clearly a much rarer thing in this country than in America. 

That is something I hope never changes. 

Gun Happy?

The debate over gun control in the States is in full swing, with Congress this past week starting formal hearings following President Obama’s call for gun-law reforms.

Meanwhile, the gun incidents keep piling up.

One of the most tragic – and, frankly, stupid – of these took place in my home state of Georgia just last Saturday. Keep in mind that details might emerge that put a different light on what actually happened to Rodrigo Diaz, but so far, the facts of the case (as they say on all the TV crime shows) seem pretty straightforward.

Diaz, with three friends, was driving to pick up another friend to go ice-skating. Unfortunately, the GPS he was using directed him to the wrong house, just another one those modern-day annoyances that almost any motorist can relate to. This simple wrong turn, however, went horribly wrong.

The driveway that Diaz pulled into belonged to Phillip Sailors, a 69-year-old man who was convinced that the car-full of young people sitting in his driveway only meant trouble. From reports I’ve seen, there was no actual reason for Sailors to believe this. No one had even gotten out of the vehicle. Apparently, just the presence of a strange car in his driveway at 10 p.m. put Sailors in fear for his life.

It seems a no-brainer that the first thing anyone terrified of bodily harm from intruders should do is call the police. That and locking the doors and staying inside. That’s the obvious response, I would say. Many people would also take their gun, if they had one, and prepare to defend themselves, if needed.

Sailors' first impulse was different. Without bothering to call 911, he grabbed his .22 caliber handgun and went outside to confront the would-be “intruders”.

On Facebook, I sometimes see an Internet meme featuring a photo of a revolver and the text “The average response time of a 911 call is 23 minutes; the response time of a .357 is 1400 feet per second”. (The first time I saw this I think the 911 response time was only four minutes, so maybe police are much slower now due to cuts in government spending. Just a thought.)

The meme’s message that, in any real emergency, the police are too impotent to help you, so you have to take matters into your own hands seems to strike a chord with a lot of people. It’s an article of faith among gun rights advocates who see a weapon as essential to modern American life.

Maybe such thinking convinced Sailors that he had no choice but to dispatch with these strangers himself and skip even trying to contact the law. Who knows what he was thinking. Maybe he was just scared shitless that the kind of violent crime he’s always heard about on TV had finally reached his doorstep. Or at least his driveway.

In any case, he approached Diaz’s car and fired a shot into the air. That act was unwelcoming enough itself, not to say downright threatening, to cause Diaz to immediately start backing out of the driveway. You would think that would be the end of it, that Sailors’ menacing overreaction had removed what he perceived (wrongly, as it turned out) to be a threat. He could have left it at that.

Instead, as Diaz continued to back out of the driveway, Sailors leveled the gun at him and shot again, fatally wounding Diaz in the head. Shot dead. For simply pulling into the wrong driveway.

Sailors is now charged with murder. Whatever justification he might have thought he had for the second shot is hard to fathom. His lawyer has been quoted as saying that when Diaz started to speed out of the driveway, in reverse, Sailors “perceived” this movement as accelerating in the opposite direction, towards him. No doubt, we’ll have to wait for the trial to hear the full explanation.

I’m afraid the underlying reason might be the pervasive fear of crime, if not the actual experience of crime, that seems to grip many Americans. Still, I’ve seen no indication that Sailors has ever been a victim of a crime that could have explained his irrational bravado and lethal overreaction. Maybe it just finely tuned paranoia. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

A few years ago while visiting relatives in the North Georgia town where I grew up, I pulled off the highway briefly to do something like take a phone call. I stopped the car at a wide spot on the shoulder of the road in front of a house, less than a mile from our family home. The house was closer to the road than most. In fact, we were just beyond the edge of the house’s yard, sitting in the pullout the postman uses when delivering the house's mail.  

We sat there only a minute or so before I began to sense that the relative in the car with me was uncomfortable with us being so close to the house. I think she felt that the people inside (if anyone was home) might feel threatened by our presence. I think she half expected someone to come out and run us off, or at least ask what the hell we were doing there.

Maybe I’ve been away from the States too long. Maybe I didn't appreciate how bad crime is there now or how scared some people are. I couldn’t see how anyone could seriously be that suspicious of a car parked next to a busy public highway in broad daylight. I felt my relative was worried about nothing. And nothing is what happened. I finished my call and we moved on after a couple of minutes. No shots were fired.

In college back in the late 70s, I saw the somewhat surrealist film, “Stroszek”, by German director Werner Herzog, about an alcoholic ex-con who travels to rural America to start a new life. Of the entire movie, I remember only two scenes, one because it was filmed at a place I knew well in Cherokee, North Carolina. The other scene I recall because I felt that Herzog’s intended commentary on America was way off the mark.

In this particular scene are two neighboring Wisconsin farmers who have been feuding for a decade over the same tiny patch of ground. To keep each other from taking possession of the field, the farmers, hoisting rifles, circle the no-man’s land on tractors, glaring at each other like two scorpions facing off, not daring to let their guard down.  

To me, this absurd scene was the distorted view of an outsider trying to exaggerate how combative and gun-happy Americans are. It didn’t sound like the America I knew.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about that scene and am starting to wonder if Herzog was right after all. Maybe his dystopian vision of America is becoming all too true. Or maybe US society has always been poisonously uncivil, but only those looking in from the outside could really see it so clearly. Either way, it’s not a happy thought. 

Sandy Hook

Last summer, after the shooting death of a dozen people in a Colorado movie theater, I decided that such senseless killings on a sickening scale are perfectly “acceptable” to the American people.

There seemed no other explanation for the lack of serious response by the public and politicians. Almost no one dared speak out in favor of restricting access to the type of so-called assault rifle used in the Colorado massacre. Apparently, even that killing spree, and the one at a Sikh temple two weeks later, was too routine to spark any real outrage. It was shrugged off. I found this extremely frustrating and wrote at the time:

“There must be a frequency and scale of gun deaths at which public opinion finally turns vigorously against the gun lobby. What would be that tipping point be?”

Now maybe we know.

The tipping point seems to be the cold-blooded murder of twenty innocent children in a ten-minute rampage in a first-grade classroom in Connecticut. The horror was unimaginable. The grief has been overpowering. And the response – this time – may be different.

There are encouraging signs. A Democratic Senator has vowed to reinstate the assault weapons ban that was allowed to lapse in 2004, and President Obama, who has been mostly silent on the issue of gun control in his first term, has finally promised to do something. He has announced a commission to find solutions to this “epidemic of gun violence”.

Protests have been held outside the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, the all-powerful gun lobby. The NRA seems to be hunkering down, keeping a low profile in the face of a spike in anti-gun public opinion. It was silent for four days after the shooting, no public statements, no tweets, and its Facebook page temporarily going dark.

At the same time, support for greater gun control is far from universal. The shooting at Sandy Hook hasn’t likely shaken the firm belief of the most ardent gun lovers that the Second Amendment is all that separates them from total annihilation by criminals. Or the Federal government. Or the UN. Or Democrats. Or zombies.

Still, it seems the anguish and outrage over the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary has forced “gun rights” advocates into an even shakier defensive position than ever before.

The takeaway of some religious leaders and conservatives to the tragedy is instructive. Bryan Fischer, who hosts some kind of fundamentalist Christian radio show, blamed the massacre in Connecticut on the fact that prayer was taken out of schools in 1962. I guess the logic here is that God is willing to allow children to die in order to score political points against American liberals. God, how petty can you get.

The notion that God declined to save the children at Sandy Hook because of America’s flirtation with evolution, same sex marriage, secularism, and – I don’t know, maybe even fluoridated water - was echoed by others, including prominent conservative preacher James Dobson, morally bankrupt politician Newt Gingrich, and Erick Erickson, a leading light of the modern conservative movement and CNN contributor.

Erickson in his RedState blog went even further, blaming “the collapse of the American family”, in particular the demise of the two-parent household with “multiple children”. Erickson’s fixation on the presence of “multiple children” in a family (he uses the term repeatedly) as a way of preventing mass killings is odd. Of the nine mass shootings this year (this year alone), only two have been carried out by an only child.

It’s one thing to focus on God’s passive-aggressive behavior or America’s lackadaisical procreation as root causes of gun violence. It’s idiotic, but at least it doesn’t make the situation worse.

That can’t be said for what is emerging as gun supporters’ favorite prescription to the national malaise of mass shootings in public places, namely, we need more guns.

Many conservative commentators, and a few Republican politicians, have reacted to the tragedy last week mainly by agonizing over the fact that teachers at Sandy Hook didn’t have assault rifles of their own.

They seem to be trying to divert attention away from any possible discussion of restricting firearms by doubling down on the idea that while guns don’t kill people, they certainly can be used to kill people who have guns intended for killing people.

A common fantasy among some gun lovers is that when duty calls in a crisis situation a well-armed populace of untrained citizens will turn into natural-born Jack Bauers. I’m skeptical that such a scenario would turn out well.

At a place full of experienced gun users, like an Army base, you might think you could stop a shooter without unintentionally adding more innocent bystanders to the body count. But when an attack occurred at such a place, Fort Hood in Texas, the assailant was able to shoot 42 people, killing thirteen, before he was finally stopped. If that can happen at a place teeming with military, how effective would the armed response of a city street full of overexcited Average Joes be?

In some of the best-known cases where armed civilians were credited with stopping shooting sprees, either the “civilians” were security professionals or the gunman had already stopped shooting.

Another meme on the right is that “gun-free” zones like schools or movie theaters are perfect targets for armed psychopaths precisely because they know no one can shoot back. At least, not before the police arrive.

For this reason, many conservatives are calling for guns to be allowed in schools. Maybe there are countries where it’s normal for math teachers to show up with a sidearm – I’m thinking Yemen or the libertarian paradise of Somalia as good candidates – but I’d hate to think America has come to that. Wait, it already has. At least one school district, in northern Texas, has allowed teachers to carry guns since 2008. If some on the right have their way, many other schools would follow.

What the NRA leadership proposed today, in its rather disjointed and out-of-touch press conference, is that instead of arming teachers themselves, the US should station a police officer in every school, an excellent works program for law enforcement types.

Again, if saturating every public space with firearms would actually deter would-be mass murderers who don’t expect to survive their killing sprees anyway, how do you explain the attack at Fort Hood, which is not exactly a gun-free zone?

But then there’s the case of Kennesaw. This small city in my home state of Georgia is perhaps unique in the nation. In 1982, Kennesaw passed a law requiring all “heads of households” to own a gun. (This was long before conservatives learned to object to tyrannical governments forcing citizens to buy products like, say, health insurance.) The rationale is that if criminals know that every single family is armed, they will think twice before attempting a home invasion.

As much as I hate to admit it, maybe there is something to this grim calculation. Apparently, Kennesaw has enjoyed one of American’s lowest crime rates since the law was enacted. And, that is a sad thought.

Maybe that’s what it takes in a country like America. In other advanced western nations, people can rely on a peaceful society and rule of law to feel safe, without having to militarize their own homes. But maybe the US is different. Maybe it is already so awash with guns, with fear, with crime and lawlessness, that the “every man for himself” attitude toward personal safety is the only way to feel secure.

I certainly hope that’s not true and that the US won’t go further down that path. How the American people act in the aftermath of Sandy Hook will say a lot about how much of a failed state America really has become.