New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is stumped as to why the United States continues to put up with mass gun violence. Join the club, prime minister.
"Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States," she said.
This is a point of confusion, internationally, so as diplomatic service let me explain it in at least rough outline: The difference between the United States and other nations, the ones with sensible gun laws, is not rooted in our Constitution but in a fundamental cultural belief that it is sometimes Good to Murder People—and that it is in fact a right to murder your neighbors, if you believe your neighbors have done something that now justifies their murder. None of the gun fanatics of the United States cite the Second Amendment in arguing that they should be allowed to purchase, collect, and display guns as cultural or historical artifacts. The difficulties all arise when you suggest limits on the ability to load those guns, carry them around in public, point them at others, and pull the trigger if the American on the other end deserves the bullet.
This cultural tradition stems from multiple of our national myths, and is therefore quite ingrained. The Revolution is cited, but without the bits about assembling an army to fight off a ruling despot; in the modern interpretation, it will be Biff, his neighbor Biff from down the street, and three more Biffs that live vaguely near the supermarket who will be single-handedly defending the sovereignty of their neighborhood from the overwhelming military might of the United States or whatever military power was able to thrash the United States thoroughly enough to now be threatening their quiet suburbia.
Stories of the gunslinging American West feature prominently, but not the actual events so much as a small set of television shows that burrowed deep into the national brain. You can hardly call yourself a man if you cannot fight off a "bhaar" with knife and rifle, and on the tumbleweed-strewn parking lots of the local outlet mall you cannot count on a badge-wearing sheriff to arrive to save you from trouble. In the television version of the American West, you pick up the badge and you wear it yourownself; any townsfolk twitching about due process might want to hitch up the wagon and flee to another show on another channel.
But none of this was ever enough to turn this nation truly loopy until the advent of leaded gasoline and a resultant outbreak of mass stupidity, which at its peak transformed the nation's foremost hunting and shooting club into a frothing mass of proto-terrorist lunacy. It was the National Rifle Association that put its massive funding to the notion that guns were now not for sport: Guns were for murdering your neighbors and/or rioting minorities and/or agents of the government, good and hard, and with whatever ammunition was necessary when the fated day came.
The militia movement, a movement of violent racist Biffs who organized their very lives around the notion that they would someday need to kill their fellow Americans in gaudily large numbers and would be hailed as heroes once they had done it, moved out of fringe cult status and into the realm of communicable disease, something the new NRA leaders would spread like syphilis to a nation of Biffs feeling thoroughly emasculated by new rules putting new limits on how racist and sexist a Biff could be, on the street or in the lunchroom, before the courts would get involved.
It was the money that led to everything else; once the National Rifle Association put their fortune toward the syphilitic militia version of "gun rights," it took little time for lawmakers to start repeating the same refrains. The ones that would not were disposed with. So now it is the militia version of "gun rights" that is the defining version, the one predicated on the need for assembling roving militias on a moment’s notice and on the God-given right of every last Biff to be his own one-man militia, if he sees a non-deferential teen boy carrying a pack of Skittles in a non-deferential way, and render immediate sidewalk judgment on the child who has thereby enraged him.
That is the short version, anyway. The longer version would add notes about rangeland Biffs of a certain sort and their firm belief that they, by nebulous right, are the only true heirs to their dibs-called federal lands and are therefore entitled to shoot at every other human, government-employed or day hiker, who might set foot on them. It would include the brief bit in which sacrosanct gun “rights” were hurriedly carved up—by Ronald Reagan Himself, no less—when black Americans began to show up with rifles in the same manner previously deemed to be a show of earnest patriotism when white Americans had done it, and would probe the long modern history of the NRA using the imagined threat of armed black Americans coming toward your neighborhood as a primary reason armed white Americans need to not just own guns, but stockpile them in ever-greater quantities and be privileged with newly slackened laws defining new rules of engagement that consisted, for the most part, of if I feel like it.
It would sketch out the weird pseudo-religious origins of the whole sorry enterprise, the campfire stories told in every magazine of an encroaching armageddon in which government will collapse, non-white Americans will roam the streets looking for food that the Good White People have stored in their bunkers (an invariably ultra-racist reimagining of the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper) and the most current of international enemies (once the Soviet Union, now China or Cuba or the massive private armies of international climate research—it makes not a bit of difference) seizes the opportunity to capture Biff Meadows, the small-town jewel of Biff County, as foretold by the ammunition-sellers' third-quarter prophecies.
But the core of it is that it is not guns themselves that have embedded so deeply into the American soul, but a national obsession with "good" murder, and an absolute conviction that the Day of Good Murder is forever creeping closer, and closer still, and in that inevitable future moment it is the Biff with the most guns who will win the day. That is what the United States has that Australia or New Zealand or Europe lack: a newly modernized cultural identity in which the law is whatever the most-armed person says it is. You do not merely have a right to own a gun. You have an absolute right to pull the trigger, whenever you like, and let God and a courtroom sort out the remaining details.
If it is incomprehensible, then good. That means you have not contracted the prion disease, and your personal civilization remains intact. Would that all of us were so lucky.