Every day 38,826 people die from gun violence in the United States. As of this year, there are 393 million privately-owned firearms in the US, and about 331 million civilians in total; in other words, there are 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Many people blame the extreme gun violence in the United States on the country’s loose gun control legislation, but fail to consider the fact that many other countries, such as Canada or Norway, have similar gun ownership rates and yet experience significantly less arms-related violence. For example, Canada has a pretty high degree of gun ownership, with about thirty-five firearms per hundred residents, and experiences only about 170 gun violence-related deaths per year, compared to 13,000 deaths every year in the US. In this article, we are going to take a look back at the United States’ tumultuous history and find out the true story behind the Americans’ right to bear arms and the way it has spiraled into today’s disturbing reality.
The main reason for the high ownership of firearms in America is the country’s severely embedded gun culture, which dates all the way back to the old days of the Wild West and the mythology associated with it, which generally tends to over-romanticize firearms and vigilantes. Surprisingly enough though, gun control laws in the Wild West were significantly stricter than the ones of today. Today, you are allowed to carry a gun without a license, but back in the 1880s, you weren’t. Apart from the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, a majority of gun control laws were actually adopted at a local level rather than by Congress-and very few Americans were against them.
Americans have owned guns since colonial times, however, it wasn’t until the Civil War that gun culture really began to take off. During the war, over 1.5 million guns were produced, most of which were kept and brought home by the former Confederate soldiers. After the war ended in 1865, nearly half a million Confederate soldiers returned to their homes in the South only to be met with a shredded economy and a misguided governmental authority. All of these factors enabled people to become more violent and the South quickly came to be the most dangerous place in America. It is estimated that its crime rate was 18 times higher than the one in the North. The Emancipation Era, which endorsed the liberation of all former U.S. slaves, also saw the rise of Southern White supremacists, which began using armed vigilante groups such as the infamous Ku Klux Klan in order to regain political power. One century and a half after the Civil War, people started to migrate from the rural South to the urban populations in the North - and took gun culture along with them. It was around this time that attitudes towards guns began to shift significantly; they were no longer perceived as hunting tools, but rather as weapons to keep households safe.
Interestingly enough, it seems that today’s attitude towards guns has not particularly changed. Even though there is no such thing as a Civil War on the horizon, self-defense still represents the top reason why Americans buy guns. For many of them, the gun is not just a symbol of protection or comfort, but an integral part of their self-identity. This is precisely the reason why gun control has been such a struggle for America in the past few decades, issues will continue to persist unless people begin to prioritize gun violence protection over their right to self-defense.
Bibliography:
More guns than people in US: How easy is it to buy firearms in other countries? (clickondetroit.com)
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