I've an op-ed ($ may be required?) in Wednesday's edition of The Scotsman in which I try to persuade a generally sceptical readership that, whatever they might think, the United States is unlikely to give up on its gun culture any time soon and that, more importantly, there are well-established cultural and historical reasons for American's lov affair with guns. It is, briefly, part of the American id.
An extract:
By road, Blacksburg is only a few hundred miles from Washington DC; psychologically, it belongs to a different America altogether. This was once frontier territory, the front line of the American colonies as the fledgling republic began its relentless expansion west. These hills - the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Smoky Mountains and the rest - were largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants whose ethos and culture played a still under-appreciated part in the formation of the United States. If America's gun culture has a spiritual home, it is to be found in Appalachia.
As Jim Webb, the Vietnam hero who was elected to the Senate last November, writes in Born Fighting, his history of the Scots-Irish in the US, the people here "are a culture founded on guns, which considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct, while literary and academic America considers such views not only archaic but also threatening". It's not, of course, only "literary and academic America" that struggles to understand this proudly redneck culture; the rest of the world does too.
If Webb is right - and I think he is - then the gun is an inescapable part of America's sense of itself. If the colonists had not been armed, they could not have rebelled against King George. Such sentiments may seem anachronistic or even callous in the wake of the worst mass shooting in US history, but no attempt to understand why America, alone of western countries, remains an armed society can hope to be successful without appreciating the historical - and constitutional - place the gun has played in its history. Wishing it otherwise is not enough to wish it away.
That culture still thrives. Three summers ago, I attended what proudly billed itself as "America's Largest Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show" in rural Kentucky. Guns from all over the world were on sale, while patrons could rent .50 calibre machine guns to blast away at wrecked cars, buses and boats. Time after time, I was asked if there was anything like this in Scotland. "No, not really," I would say, mustering as much understatement as seemed sensible. "You could see how people could twist this into something it's not," one sub-machine gun wielding man told me. "But," he insisted, "these people are just average Joes having fun."
And for the most part, he was right.
Recent Comments