In my defence

Columbine. Sandy Hook. Santa Fe. Uvalde. Now Nashville. Devastated families, traumatised schoolchildren. A community caved in on itself. Flowers, vigils, tears. Again, and again, and again, and again.

For many, there is a depressing fatalismThe belief that all events are predetermined and cannot be changed. around the shooting that took place at Covenant School in NashvilleThe capital of the state of Tennessee, USA, known for its music history. , Tennessee on Monday, claiming the lives of six people. It is the 452nd school shooting in the USA since 2000. It is starting to seem as if they will never end.

As ever, there are calls for change. After the tragedy, President Joe Biden renewed his demand for a ban on the sale of assault weapons. But this is unlikely to happen, because the Republican PartyAlso known as the Grand Old Party or GOP, it is one of the USA's two major political parties. Its first president was Abraham Lincoln. It sits on the right of the political spectrum. now controls the House of RepresentativesThe lower chamber of the United States congress. There are 435 representatives, with a certain number allocated to each state based on the state's population..

Perhaps just as importantly, no-one seems to expect anything to change. Even if the USA could pass a ban on certain guns, they say, it is not clear it would have any effect.

Gun bans only work, they say, when people are largely willing to give up their guns. For example, Australia introduced gun control after a shooter killed 35 people in 1996. About 650,000 guns, 20% of all privately-owned firearms in the country, were peacefully handed over to the government.

This is unlikely to happen in the USA, where gun ownership has become yet another part of the country's fractured politics. Gun owners are disproportionately white, rural and right-wing. Some 44% of Republicans own guns, compared with just 16% of DemocratsMembers of the Democratic party, the left-leaning US political party. Joe Biden and Barack Obama are both Democrats. .¹

A significant minority of Republican voters accuses the Democratic Party of trying to establish a tyrannicalExercising power in an oppressive and cruel way. government. That means they are extremely unlikely to hand their guns over to a Democratic government peacefully. 

And no Republican government is likely to propose restricting gun ownership, because they would be rejected by their own voters.

So why has shooting after shooting failed to change those voters' minds on guns? They say they need guns for self-defence. Around two-thirds of gun-owners cite "protection" as a major reason for owning a gun.

It is a romantic ideal that goes to the heart of American identity. In the 19th Century, thousands of Americans started migrating westwards across the continent. The settlements they established became known as the "frontier", a space that had little by way of law and order. Only those who could defend themselves and their property would survive.

A century later, the frontier's pull on the American imagination is huge. Many Americans trace their values of self-reliance and individualism to the frontier. Some even call it the cradle of US democracy.

But critics say this is just mythology. In fact, most frontier towns had strict gun control. Guns were most widely used not for self-defence, but for theft and banditry, and for massacring Native AmericansThe indigenous people of the Americas, who lived in the region before settlers from other places. and seizing their land.

Little surprise then, they argue, that guns are still ineffective for self-defence. In fact, the rate of deaths in school shootings is almost three times as high when there is an armed guard present.

Yes: Self-defence is the right on which all other rights rest. We cannot exercise any of our rights if we are dead. An armed people is the best deterrent against both crime and government power.

No: There is no evidence that carrying weapons makes you any safer, and plenty of evidence that being around people carrying weapons makes you less safe. Self-defence is a dangerous myth.

Or... Self-defence can be understood as a collective right. We all agree to entrust our right to self-defence to the government, which then protects us from criminals so we do not have to.