A GUN CULTURE

On March 24, 1998, these two boys aged eleven and thirteen set off the fire alarm at their school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and then shot at the other children as they filed out of the building. Between them the boys had three rifles and seven pistols. In less than four minutes, they fired twenty-two shots, killing eleven-year-old Brittheny Varner, twelve-year-old Natalie Brooks, Stephanie Johnson, and Paige Ann Herring, and their young teacher Shannon Wright, who was shielding one of her students. Golden and Johnson wounded ten other people, mostly children.

The questions asked repeatedly after the Jonesboro tragedy — as after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, and after every similar mass shooting — seem depressingly familiar: How did we get here? How did the United States reach a point where children shoot and kill? How did we acquire a culture in which Santa Claus gives a six-year-old boy a shotgun for Christmas? For Christmas!

An astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States from every other industrial nation. To find comparable levels of interpersonal violence, one must examine nations in the midst of civil wars or social chaos. In the United States of America in the 1990s, two million violent crimes and twenty-four thousand murders occurred on average every year. The weapon of choice in 70 percent of these murders was a gun, and thousands more are killed by firearms every year in accidents and suicides. In a typical week, more Americans are killed with guns than in all of Western Europe in a year. Newspapers regularly carry stories of shootings with peculiar causes, like the case of the Michigan man who shot at a coworker who took a cracker from him at lunch without asking. In no other industrial nation do military surgeons train at an urban hospital to gain battlefield experience, as is the case at the Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital. It is now thought normal and appropriate for urban elementary schools to install metal detectors to check for firearms. And when a Denver pawnshop advertised a sale of pistols as a "back-to-school" special, four hundred people showed up to buy guns.

The manifestations of America's gun culture are well known: the sincere love and affection with which American society views its weapons are demonstrated daily on television and movie screens. Every form of the media reinforces the notion that the solution to your problems can be held in your hand and provides immediate gratification. Just as there are flight simulators that re-create the experience of flying a plane, so do video games make available to any child in America a killing simulator that will train him or her to shoot without a moment's hesitation. An entire generation, as Dave Grossman has astutely argued, is being conditioned to kill. And since the United States does not register guns, no one knows how many there are or who actually buys them. The FBI estimates that there are 250 million firearms in private hands, with five million new guns purchased every year.