Guns, American Style: In Black and White

This is the fifth and — for now at least — the last in a series of posts about the blight of guns in America. (For those of you desperate to catch up, here are the first, second, third, and fourth installments.)

Shortly before the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama observed that many of the people left behind in rural and small-town America cling to “guns and religion.” This applies especially to White America. Had the reference been to religion alone, it could have applied equally to African Americans, but with the addition of guns, White America was particularly implicated.

There is indeed a racial slant (actually, several) to the firearm-fueled bloodbath in the US, rarely mentioned but statistically real, namely that Black Americans die from guns at more than twice the rate of Whites.[i] At the same time, Whites are more than five times more likely than blacks to commit suicide with a gun, while for every black who suicides with a gun, five are killed by a gun wielded by someone else. Whites are far more likely to have guns; Blacks, to die by them, a result of homicide. (And all too often, those killings are done by White cops.)

Why do Whites keep so many guns? Nostalgia? A cultural signifier? The primary issue here is not .30-06 hunting rifles, but revolvers and military-style assault weapons.

What sort of hunter would use an AR-15 automatic assault rifle to shoot a deer? Or to murder six-year-olds in a first-grade class? Are guns the White person’s security blanket? Is it perhaps racial fear, White anxiety of being threatened by Blacks? Racial guilt over a long history of slavery plus more recent years of differential access to the American Dream, combined with a kind of subconscious fear of Black retribution—a Nat Turner’s rebellion for the 21st century?

A legally confirmed private right to bear arms in the home didn’t exist until 2008, with the Supreme Court case of District of Columbia vs Heller, decided 5 to 4 and written by Anthony Scalia, after which this “right” was suddenly traced back to 1776 or thereabouts. Since then, second amendment rights have trumped children’s rights not to be shot.[ii]

Many people thought that the horror of nearly two dozen young children murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012 would mark a turning point in the US; it may have been just that, but not as gun-control advocates had hoped. Rather, when this extreme provocation did not cause a change in national gun laws, it showed that in the US, murdering children was preferable to instituting even such common-sense controls as universal background checks, keeping firearms from people known to be violent, outlawing military-style assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and the like.

As of 2019, assault weapons such as AR-15s and AK-47s were legal in 43 states, while high-capacity magazines were legal in 41. Despite regular calls for restrictive, common-sense initiatives after each mass murder outrage, as of 2020, the federal government has not passed any gun control legislation in a quarter-century, following a ban on the sale of assault weapons in 1994 – which the George W. Bush administration allowed to expire in 2004. ("Hopes and prayers," sure, but anything substantive and legislative, no.)

Once again, evidence for an effect is correlational, but nonetheless highly suggestive. During the decade of the assault weapon sales ban, the number of mass gun killings dropped by 37 percent by contrast with the ten preceding years when the ban was not in effect. Then, in the next ten years, when the ban expired, mass gun murders skyrocketed, with an increase of 183 percent resulting in an increase in deaths by an enormous 239 percent.[iii]

Assault weapons are specifically designed to fire many bullets in a short period of time; not surprisingly, their use in mass shootings results in mass casualties. In a 2019 report, they were employed in “at least 11 of the 15 gun massacres since 2014; at least 234 of the 271 people who died in gun massacres since 2014 were killed by weapons prohibited under the federal assault weapons ban” but which were once more legal after 2004.[iv]

Thus far, data of this sort has been ineffective in moving Congress to consider re-imposing the assault weapons ban. In fact, the only federal legislation concerning gun violence in the last 25 years made things worse: a 2005 law immunized gun manufacturers against legal liability for homicides or accidental deaths in which their products are employed. Interestingly, makers of children’s pajamas, for example, can be sued if their product is found to be flammable and associated with burns or death; guns, by contrast, appear to be the only consumer item which, when used as intended, result in killing people.

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To summarize material developed in my earlier posts: The US experiences substantially more gun deaths per capita than any other developed country. This unenviable record is not readily attributable to a generally higher crime rate, nor to a higher rate of mental illness, violent video games, or to any identifiable cause other than the fact that the US is awash in guns. This abundance and the resulting “American carnage” appears to result from a confluence of threats – both perceived (by citizens) and, to some extent, real (by politicians, who feel threatened if they stand athwart the NRA and some voter preferences).

In the process, the gun culture in the US has counter-productively generated an especially gruesome array of its own threats, driven in large part by ethnic, racial, cultural, and tribal insecurity. As I promised, this is the last of my anti-gun posts (at least for now); but alas, it won't be the end of our ongoing national gun travesty and tragedy.

David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Threats: Intimidation and its Discontents (2020, Oxford University Press).