Abhishek Kumar Singh
America, which claims to be the most powerful and developed nation in the world, is battling domestic violence these days. Although incidents of racial violence and shootings in public places from schools and religious places are common in this country, but the rapid increase in them in the last few years has shaken both the American administration and society.
Recently, an eighteen-year-old teenager opened fire on a school in the state of Texas, killing nineteen children and two teachers. In such a situation, once again the question has come to the fore that why this violence is happening? Is it because the public is allowed to bear arms under the constitutional provisions? If so why not repeal this law? After all, how to get rid of this gun culture?
The foundation of gun culture in America was laid in the year 1791. The second amendment to the constitution made that year gave citizens the right to purchase and possess small arms. Then America was under British rule and there was no permanent security force. Therefore, the government and the administration decided that common people should be given the right to keep arms for the safety of themselves and their families. But how many problems this authority has created there, it was estimated fifty-five years ago during the era of then President Lyndon Baines Johnson. At that time, about 90 million guns were with the common people in America.
In view of the problems arising in the society due to the self-sufficient people in the matter of weapons, Lyndon Bynes was forced to say that behind the deaths due to guns in American society, there is a careless attitude of heritage and culture. Twenty-seven such incidents have taken place so far in this year alone (2022), an example of how deadly this self-reliance of small arms like guns, rifles and revolvers has become.
Under this right to have small arms under the law, every hundred citizens in America have more than one hundred and twenty weapons. The Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based organization, presented an estimate four years ago that the number of small arms held by civilians in America’s population of 33 million has reached about 400 million. There is also an assessment related to this that Americans alone have forty-six percent of the world’s guns, while America’s contribution is only five percent in terms of population.
It is also worth mentioning that apart from America, Guatemala and Mexico are two more countries where the public was given the right to possess guns under constitutional rights. However, even in these two countries, very few civilians have weapons. This is because small arms are not openly sold in Guatemala and Mexico. There is only one store in Mexico that sells guns, and that too is controlled by the military. Whereas in America there are hundreds of shops from where guns can be bought like fruits and vegetables.
To buy weapons, people there have to give their name, address, date of birth and citizenship. The information about who bought these weapons is shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which apart from checking the background of the buyer, only ensures that no dangerous criminal, drug addict or fugitive or mentally ill person buys such a weapon.
Significantly, due to the fear created in the society during the Corona period, Americans bought such weapons in more numbers. According to a report, between January 2019 and April 2021, seventy-five lakh adults bought guns for the first time. In the recent two-and-a-half years, another 10 million people in America have had guns, of which about five million buyers were minors.
Half of such arms buyers were also women, which shows that women are not able to rely much on the police and law there for their safety. But how serious this arms purchase has become for American society and government, it can be understood in the context of the 1.5 million deaths in shootings between 1968 and 2017. These guns are not only being used to kill others, but are also becoming a cause of increase in suicides.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that of the forty-five thousand deaths in the US in the year 2020 due to gunshots, more than half, or fifty-four percent, were suicides. This concern was already expressed in a study conducted in the year 2016 in the US that the main reason behind the increasing suicide rate there is the presence of guns in every household. Clearly, when such a huge stockpile of weapons is openly present in a country and society, the dangers associated with it will be equally great.
US President Joe Biden may have expressed concern and raised questions about such incidents, but one of the facts is that this gun culture there is largely politically protected. There are some factions active in American politics that maintain heavy political pressure to continue the open-trafficking of guns.
This group, called the National Rifle Association, is so powerful that it manages to influence the members of the US Congress with the help of money. It is also said that this group spends huge money even in the US elections. This is the reason that the desire to change the relevant law and such efforts do not come to fruition, while the American public itself is a supporter of changes in the law related to it.
It is worth noting that in a survey conducted there two years ago, fifty-two percent of the people voted in favor of adopting strictness in the law related to the purchase and sale of guns. Ninety-nine percent of the supporters of the political party Democratic Party also supported such strictness, while only twenty-four percent were in support of such strictness from the Republican Party. The percentage of those who did not want any change in the law was only thirty-five.
An important question is, why do people in America do not trust the police-administration? Why do they feel that keeping a weapon is the best way to keep themselves safe from any crime? A year ago, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center to find an answer to this question revealed that this problem is also bothering Americans themselves.
Gun violence is as big as the country’s budget deficit (49 per cent), the rate of violent crimes (48 per cent) and the coronavirus crisis (47 per cent). Since the governments are continuously failing to overcome all these problems, the public’s trust in the administration and the government is going down. That’s why they are taking refuge in guns.