Looking Lunatic

Lately, I've been getting a lot of my world news from the BBC. As a news source, it's got a lot of merits: it's free, it's generally insightful, it's used as a primary news source by much of the world, and it gets high marks for accuracy. You could do a lot worse, so long as you don't mind getting your news from what is, deep down, an organ of the British government.

One oddity for an American viewer, though: it's a foreign (if friendly) news source with a foreign (if friendly) perspective that closely monitors, and informs much of the world about, domestic American affairs. It's like going to your neighbor's house and looking, from there, back in through your window to see the state of your own living room. This being the United States we're talking about, this is presuming that your own house is a grand but decaying edifice and that your family is making an art form out of dysfunction. It's a fascinating view, not least because you get a sense of exactly what the neighbors find most fascinating about being your neighbors.

In our case, I get the impression that they're pretty damned fascinated by our love affair with the personal arsenal. At time of writing, this has been dominating the "most read" column on the BBC website for the last couple of hours (it just dropped from #1 to #2, actually, unseated by the latest from Libya).

I was about to write that the U.S. is not unique in the world in terms of gun ownership, but it turns out I'd have been dead wrong, there. With 88.8 privately-owned guns per 100 residents as of 2007, we lead the world in guns per capita, though I have to wonder how accurate the statistic from Yemen (54.8 guns per 100 residents) can possibly be.

American justifications for widespread private hand-cannon ownership are well-documented, well-debated, and, at this point, well-entrenched. Self-defense, self-reliance, protection against an overreaching national government-- we're kind of big on the "well-armed individual self-determination" thing right now, and the recent Heller decision confirms that the Supreme Court is following this same political script. Somewhere in all of this, we as a culture seem to have lost interest in the debate. It's decided: private gun ownership is a public good, and the occasional massacre no longer seems to stir much debate on the subject-- except, perhaps, whether we should be opening still more venues (college campuses, political events, national parks) to the carrying of firearms.

It really makes me wonder what would be necessary to turn this particular tide-- and to what extent the feeling in much of the rest of the industrial world, which seems to have come down on just the other side of the debate (as with the death penalty), makes us dig in our heels even more. It also makes me wonder just how blind the British must think we are, to be able to undergo these sorts of incidents almost without comment.

I guess we just accept the odd massacre as the price of doing business, these days.