There are many things about the United States of America that I admire: they are what attracted so many millions of emigrants, mainly from Europe, Central and South America and Asia, over the last few centuries. In many cases, war, economic hardship and religious persecution drove them to seek new opportunities in the US.
The upholding of individual freedoms, including freedom of worship and of expression, the enormous economic opportunities, where there is no limit to realising one’s ambitions, no matter your means or where you came from, are some of the advantages which this wonderful country offers.
The US is also considered to be the world’s leading democracy. Indeed, its constitution strikes a near- perfect balance between the three branches of government: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary. Within this great federation there are 50 states, each with their own government, parliament and judiciary.
However, no human institution or nation is perfect and there are aspects of life in America that I find deeply troubling. There are some great inequalities and, despite this being the world’s richest nation, there are thousands of homeless and others living in poverty.
There is a still deeply ingrained racism which often is violent, as we have seen with the recent spate of killings of blacks by trigger-happy police officers; there is widespread racism against blacks, descendants of millions of slaves rounded up in Africa and transported on ships, with up to a third of them dying on the way; there is racism also towards other minorities, mainly Asians and Hispanics and Native Americans, descendants of the original inhabitants of the New World.
Then there is another aspect of American life that I find deeply troubling: the proliferation of firearms, which can be bought practically from anywhere by anyone with hardly any restrictions. The result of this is spine-chilling, although hardly surprising.
According to a recent issue of Time magazine, every single day of 2020, more than 100 people died and 200 were injured because of firearms. That’s more than 36,000 gun-related deaths a year. Most of these, as in every other year, were suicides.
Almost every day, we hear of a mass shooting in the US, in which a good number of innocent people are killed by what are often described as mentally unstable people: last Tuesday’s massacre of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers by a deranged 18-year-old youth in Texas is but the latest example.
Many Americans still believe that owning (and using) a firearm is a sacrosanct right- Laurence Grech
So we have youngsters shooting up fellow students at school, a young man killing six Asian women at massage parlours and a 64-year-old man who fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from a hotel room on to a crowd attending a concert in Las Vegas, resulting in a veritable massacre of 60 people and injuring over 800 on October 1, 2017. About an hour later, the man was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Some 24 guns were found in the man’s room.
How does one begin to explain America’s obsession with guns? I think that the reason is that those who can own guns – and that is practically everyone – has a constitutional right to do so! The second amendment to the US constitution – which is, in practically all other respects, admirable – states: “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.”
That amendment was ratified in 1791, that is, 15 years after the US declared its independence, when only 13 states made up the Union and when most of the country was still unexplored and still engaged in combatting rebellion/hostilities.
One would think that, according to the second amendment, it is members of a “militia” who have the right to bear arms, yet, in 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed for the first time that the right belongs to individuals, for self-defence in the home, while also declaring that the right is not unlimited and does not preclude the existence of certain long-standing prohibitions such as those forbidding “the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill” or restrictions on “the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons”.
Fortunately, public opinion seems to be turning against the uncontrolled availability of firearms. President Joe Biden, in the wake of the most recent mass shootings, seems intent on restricting sales and making background checks tighter. However, many Americans still believe that owning (and using) a firearm is a sacrosanct right. Their views are supported by former president Donald Trump who once reacted to a school shooting by saying that all teachers should be armed!
No wonder that the most powerful gun lobby in the US, the National Rifle Association, was one of Trump’s staunchest supporters.
My view is that unless the second amendment to the US constitution is repealed (35 of the 50 states need to support the repeal), the country, which most of the world otherwise admires so much is not likely to give up its murderous ways soon.