There are complicating factors when looking at this phenomenon. For one thing, a mass shooting is only one form of mass killing. Bombs, knives, axes and motor vehicles outshine guns as the preferred means of bumping off people in various countries, and comparisons based purely on incidents of mass shootings may be misleading.
For another, there are different contexts in which mass shootings occur – family blood feuds, rival gang shoot-outs, terrorist hit-squads, and lone killers opening up on people at random all present very different scenarios, and there is a strong case to be made for separating some of these categories out – terrorist attacks by trained operatives, for instance. But for now I’ll focus on all situations where guns are used to kill a number of people.
Mass killer Patrick Crusius earlier this year caught
on CCTV. He is armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle – one that fires as
rapidly as you can pull the trigger
Most ‘mass’ shootings actually involve
numbers of fatalities in single digits, but there are notable exceptions (e.g.
the Christchurch shootings earlier this year). Needless to say, fatalities are
higher when automatic or semi-automatic weapons are involved.
Over the past 50 years (mid-1969 to
mid-2019), there have been 213 mass shootings in the US. Next door, in Canada,
I came across 32 over the same period. For Australia, the number is 26. NZ
comes in with 5 mass shootings over the past half century.
These figures need to be adjusted for
population sizes. I carried out a little number-crunching exercise in which I
set the US rate as the benchmark. On the basis of that population-adjusted
rate, Canada would be expected to have seen 24 mass shootings over that period;
Australia, 16; and NZ, just 3. All three exceeded those expected frequencies – Canada
by 8 (+33%), Australia by 10 (+63%), and NZ by 2 (+67%). Suddenly, the US
doesn’t look too bad compared to the other three.
I hear someone saying, “There are three
kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" (attributed to Mark
Twain, but some trace it to Disraeli). I entirely agree, and would add that
this kind of sorcerer’s arithmetic using raw frequencies is rather wobbly from
a statistical point of view, especially when dealing with very low tallies which
may lead to gross exaggerations when extrapolated from. Still, this little exercise
draws attention to the need to take population size into account when making
inter-country comparisons. “Yet another mass shooting over in the US,” we think
when so informed by the tele, “It happens all the time there, I’m so glad we’re
safe here.” But if the US experienced the same rate of mass shootings as
Australia and NZ, there would have been 350+ mass shootings there over the past
50 years – a lot more than there actually were.
Looking now at Europe, the UK (population
about one and three quarters that of Canada) barely enters the picture with 3
mass shootings over the past 50 years (at the US rate, that should be 43;
–93%). Germany, with a population more than
double that of Canada, comes in with just 9 (at the US rate, expected 54; –83%).
The place I hail from, the Netherlands, with a population a bit under
three-quarters of that of Australia, has seen only 2 (expect 11 at US rate;
–82%). The picture emerging from other Western European countries is similar.
Clearly, there is a distinction to be made between
the four ex-pioneering societies and the European countries from which those
migrants were drawn: the former as a group have much higher rates of mass shootings relative to their populations.
The British have long been a gun-happy lot
but they are no strangers to gun control either – James II disarmed English
Protestants (the right to own firearms was restored to them in 1689). Firearm
ownership tends to be tightly controlled in continental Europe, especially
Western Europe. Most Western Europeans
do not regard guns as a normal household item. Very few Europeans today hunt. It
is fine for the police to carry them, but that’s because some of the crims do.
In the past, guns moreover tended to be associated with the landed gentry –
they were the ones who hunted for sport and settled disputes through duelling.
But guns were not part of popular culture and gun ownership was certainly not
regarded as a right (with the arguable exception of the UK).
It was a very different story in the
colonies. Settlers had to deal with indigenous peoples who didn’t take kindly to
their lands being invaded, and banditry was rife. The rule of law was tenuous
at best in areas well away from major population centres. Where there was no
law, the gun became law. Solving problems with a gun was widely accepted as
legitimate, even if the law proper didn’t quite see it that way (but all too
often turned a blind eye – after all, that guy was cheating at cards or had
jumped another man’s claim, so he deserved it). Being tooled up became ‘macho’
– guns enhanced the ‘he-man’ image of the pioneer. Gun-toting baddies who
thumbed their noses at the authorities such as Ned Kelly were secretly admired
by many people. Guns were an integral component of pioneer society culture, and
time has not flushed them out of the psyche of later generations.
 |
| Daniel Boone |
 |
| Davey Crockett |
 |
| Ned Kelly |
The
stuff of pioneer society folklore –
men with guns and who weren’t afraid to use them
The right to carry firearms was largely
taken for granted by the pioneers – in many instances, their lives depended on
them. In the US, the right to bear arms was written into the Constitution (2nd
Amendment, 1791):
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.
‘Arms’ in the context of the late 18th
century refers to powder-and-ball firearms – muskets and pistols. To ‘bear (thesaurus entries include ‘carry’)
arms’ moreover implies light hand-held weapons only – it does not extend to
heavy weapons such as artillery pieces.
The musket had undergone considerable
development during that century and was a fairly sophisticated weapon by the
time the Second Amendment was written. A trained man could rattle off three
rounds a minute if he had to do his own reloading. An emerging tactic was for soldiers
to form rows which would rotate, the front row firing while the rows behind
them reloaded. A common procedure used by settlers in North America was to form
a defensive ring with the men on the outside and the women, kids and servants
in the centre doing the reloading – there would be three or more muskets per
man so the defenders could keep up a concentrated fire against any attackers. Used
en masse in an orchestrated manner,
the musket was thus a highly effective defensive
weapon. What the Second Amendment comes down to in practical terms is that
every man could carry a musket or two and a pistol or two for self-defence whether
as an individual or as one of a collective.
I believe one of the keys to averting mass
shootings is to qualify the right to bear arms (where recognised as such) by
restricting this right to hand-held, single-shot weapons, in line with the
spirit of the 1689 and 1791 declarations and the technology of the day that
informed them. An automatic or semi-automatic rifle is a military weapon with a
mostly offensive rather than defensive purpose (hence often called an ‘assault
rifle’), and its availability should be restricted to members of the military
and perhaps special armed police units. An ordinary citizen, even if an avid
hunter, has no conceivable use for such a weapon – except as an instrument of
mass murder.
Ultimately, though, it’s a matter of
popular attitudes towards firearms in general. These have been changing over
time, but it will probably take several more generations to eliminate the gun
from the cultural mindset of ex-pioneering societies and see the figures for
mass shootings come down to Western European levels.
For the record, I was a keen member of the
Queensland Rifle Association while living there in the mid-1980s. I owned a
7.62mm Mauser 98 bolt-action rifle with O-Mark sights. My views on gun
ownership have changed little, if at all, since that time: I was aghast when
people could start buying assault rifles, and I still am.
Barend Vlaardingerbroek BA, BSc,
BEdSt, PGDipLaws, MAppSc, PhD is an associate professor of education at the
American University of Beirut and is a regular commentator on social and
political issues. Feedback welcome at bv00@aub.edu.lb
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