I left the US because of its gun fetish – what would you do?

For those of us who reject such values, self-imposed exile seems to be the only option

Most Americans are still unarmed (Marco Bello/Reuters)

I moved from the United States to live in Britain partly because of the insanity of gun laws in my native country. On a trip back in December 2012, I viscerally remember the Newtown shooting, when a 20-year old murdered twenty children at Sandy Hook elementary school. Like millions across the world, I will never forget thinking, “If this doesn’t change gun laws in the US then nothing will.”

How naïve I was then. But I know better now. It didn’t then, and this most recent shooting in Uvalde, Texas, won’t either.

The only thing that changed after the Sandy Hook massacre, quite literally, was that bulletproof chalkboards and backpacks began to be marketed at Christmas for parents and teachers.

Nearly ten years on, all that may change this time round is the arming of elementary school teachers.While the bodies of bullet-ridden 10-year olds were still warm, the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, suggested as much. Proudly. In fact, his blood-soaked stance on guns likely contributed to his landslide primary victory yesterday.

Between Sandy Hook and Uvalde, reports The Washington Post, the US has invited more than 3,500 mass shootings – an average of one a day, every day, for almost ten years. And I say “invited” because there are more than six guns for every five Americans today (up from only 88 per 100 Americans a decade ago). And that’s in a population of nearly 330 million. It’s as if Freud’s “death drive” is having a wet dream.

Mind you, only about 40 per cent of Americans own those guns. Most Americans are still unarmed. That still leaves millions, like the deceased Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos, owning multiple guns. Like a fetish. Except that in 2020, that gun fetish took 45,222 lives through suicide, murder and accidental shootings – the latter also frequently including children.

While the motive for Tuesday’s mass shooting remains speculative at the time of writing, some things are not. The reinterpretation of the Second Amendment “militias” to include individuals owning as many weapons, of as high a calibre as you want, seems reckless to the point of being criminal. So too are the “thoughts and prayers” brigade, who have long refused – and will continue to refuse in the coming weeks – to even countenance a scintilla of gun reform. If the 1994 assault rifle ban saved lives, what do we call those doing resolutely nothing in June 2022?

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

Will there ever be 66 Senators willing to tackle changing the Second Amendment? Or a Supreme Court willing to reinterpret the law in an Eros-friendly way? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours.

To repurpose a favourite phrase from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.”

Don’t expect changes after this most recent massacre. It’s far more likely we will get more guns in more schools, and statistics be damned.

For those of us refusing such rule, self-imposed exile is the only way out. What would you do?

Professor Matthew Feldman is a writer and consultant, and director of Academic Consulting Services.