When death is big business

Many Nigerians sometimes think their country’s politicians are the most impervious to reason, logic and the promotion of the public good. But they could not be more wrong. The world over, politicians and special interest groups still dictate policies that are patently against the public interest and use twisted logics, clever rhetoric, and even scaremongering to resist changes to those policies. A good example is the debate on gun violence and gun control in the United States.

To be sure, the right to keep and bear arms is a tradition in the United States. It had existed long before the creation of a constitution and is now firmly enshrined and codified in the Second Amendment to the US constitution, which reads: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Over two centuries ago, citizen-soldiers, tired of British domination and of being taxed without being represented at the British parliament, waged a successful battle against the English and won America independence. Partly due to this long-standing tradition, attempts to restrict citizens’ right to bear arms do evoke strong emotions and have pitted conservatives against liberals. For the conservatives, and in the spirit of the Second Amendment, gun ownership is not only an individual right and needed for personal protection, but also a bulwark against dictatorship and the usurpation of the rights of citizens by overambitious governments. As Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist No. 29, armed citizens forming a ‘people’s militia’ could mobilise “against a standing army if the army usurped the government’s authority or if it supported a tyrannical government”. For Hamilton, such a standing army could “never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens”. Consequently, freedom in the US is almost equated with the right to bear arms.

As a result, there is an estimated 310 million legally registered civilian guns in the United States as of 2011. This is besides illegal and unregistered guns which run into hundreds of thousands or even millions. This also means that as at 2011, there were more guns than human beings in the United States. The US therefore has the highest gun ownership rates in the world.
Of course, as research has shown, places with higher gun ownership rates also have higher firearms-related deaths. It is estimated that more than 30 people are killed daily and more than 30,000 are killed and over 100,000 injured by guns each year in the United States. The statistics for this year are even more revealing. There are an estimated 353 mass shooting incidences in the US alone since January – 62 of those at schools.

Interestingly, the response after every shooting incidence is for Americans to buy more guns. The long-standing argument of the National Riffles Association (NRA) – the largest gun lobby with over 5 million members – is that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun”. Conservative or Republican politicians also openly advocate for people to carry gunseverywhere in response to cases of mass shootings either at schools or at cinemas. For Rick Perry, a 2016 presidential hopeful, the “concepts of gun-free zones are a bad idea”.
It appears, however, that the greatest beneficiaries of the death culture in the US are the gun manufacturers. For instance, stocks of Smith & Wesson, manufacturers of the weapons used in the recent San Bernardino attacks, have surged in the days since the tragedy as people rushed to stock more guns following fears that politicians may enact gun control laws. In fact, several executives of gun manufacturing companies have been caught on tape boasting that their companies make huge profits triggered by panic-buying of weapons immediately after shooting incidences. Tommy Millner, the chief executive of gun retailer Cabela, was reported as boasting at an investor conference in Nebraska that his company made a ‘conscious decision’ to increase its weapons stock before the 2012 elections in the expectation that Obama’s re-election – since after every shooting, he calls for gun control – would result in a surge in sales. Sadly, Millner was dead right!

That is not all. The NRA alone spent over $101 million in lobbying on Capitol Hill since 2000 and there are insinuations that the gun industry actually funds most of the NRA’s operations. What is more, the gun industry possesses a unique immunity protection from prosecution – preventing victims of gun violence from holding negligent manufacturers and dealers accountable.
With the Republican control of Congress, Obama – the so-called most powerful man in the world – has been reduced to a boring and “grisly routine” of calling for greater gun control after every shooting, which happens roughly daily. In the aftermath of the Sande Hook shooting in 2012, Obama tasked Vice-President Biden to head a taskforce to evaluate how gun violence could be reduced. The vice-president did the job alright, but three years later, the proposals have been shot dead at Congress and gun violence has continued unabated.

Meanwhile, conservative politicians elsewhere, particularly in Britain and Australia, have, in response to similar cases of mass shooting, enacted laws that have almost eliminated mass shootings. Not in the US. There, both the people and conservative politicians are more concerned with terrorism – which claims far fewer lives – than mass shootings. Expectedly, after the San Bernardino shooting, people and especially all Republican candidates have cleverly steered the conversation away from guns in the US to Muslims and terrorism, with Donald Trump even going to the length of suggesting that Muslims be banned from entering the United States.