In 2003, the British journalist Gary Younge moved from a country with roughly seven firearms per 100 people to a country with around 101 firearms per 100 people, from a country with an annual rate of .04 gun homicides per 100,000 people to a country with an annual rate of 3.43 gun homicides per 100,000 people, and from a country with strict gun laws and unarmed police to a country with neither. Younge, who writes for The Guardian, had relocated to the United States. There, he was as likely to be killed by agricultural machinery as he was to die from gun violence back home in the United Kingdom. [...]
I knew there was a lethal element to social violence [in the United States] in a way there isn’t in Britain. I think Britain’s more violent. I think in Britain you’re more likely to be beaten up. If you go to many towns on a Friday or Saturday night, when the pubs close, they can be quite violent. I’ve just always felt like in America I’m more likely to get killed. [...]
I went to my first [National Rifle Association] convention in 2012 in St. Louis. I would say, “I’m British. I don’t understand this (which was true). Explain it to me.” The first thing they would say is, “Are you married? Do you have children? Imagine someone broke into your house. What are you going to do? You’re going to just sit there and wait for the police?” It was this brazen appeal to masculinity. It wasn’t anti-government, but [the notion was] you wouldn’t want to rely on your government for that. [It was an] almost vigilantist appeal. [...]
Something else that has intrigued me—and this is less an observation than a political point—is that the NRA people who talk about tyranny, [are paradoxically not] insisting on the mass armament of the black community to protect themselves against the tyranny of the police. I know the police aren’t the federal government, but the notion of gun ownership as invoked to me was to protect your individual rights against the state and others. So here’s the state killing people in cold blood—sometimes undeniably. How does that rationalization of gun rights stand in that moment if you’re not calling for the mass armament of black communities? Which I’m not. But one would have thought [gun-rights activists] would have been rather by [black communities’] side. That to me is an illustration that the case that they’re making for gun rights isn’t quite as complete as they think it is. [Their] vision of America doesn’t really include everybody.
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