Gun Fight
By: John Philp
Tags: Coronavirus, President, Biden, Gun Control, Guns

I wrote about how Joe Biden plans to tackle gun violence. But for a different perspective, I wrote it as a foreign dispatch, as if the United States is one of those far-off, little-understood worlds. Please enjoy.

GUN FIGHT

Gun deaths plague this young nation. Can a new leader stem the bleeding?

By John Philp

November 11, 2020

NEW YORK, United States — A new leader is vowing to curtail rampant gun violence in the troubled North American republic of the United States, amid the fallout from a contested election.

Joe Biden, head of the center-left Democrat party, ground out a sizable victory last week over strongman Donald Trump, standard-bearer of the hard-right Republican party. Trump has disputed the result, without evidence, while Biden’s victory led to disruptive celebrations in liberal enclaves across the country.

A man sprays a jubilant crowd with champagne to celebrate Joe Biden’s presidential victory on Saturday, November 7, 2020 in New York, America’s largest city. (Photo: John Philp)

Biden, a centrist widely seen as a caretaker president, will face a range of challenges. The coronavirus has overwhelmed this upstart nation’s rickety public health system. Riots over lethal, race-based policing continue across the country. And the number of gun deaths, already far higher than in rival countries, has spiked during the pandemic.

“It’s long past time we take action to end the scourge of gun violence in America,” Biden tweeted two days before the election, as he detailed some of his proposed gun reforms.

The reforms include a ban on civilian ownership of some assault weapons, a ban on felons owning guns and background checks for all gun purchases, changes that would bring America’s gun laws more in line with the developed world.

Many Hurdles Ahead

Gun reform will not come without a fight. Congress, the country’s legislative branch, has been reduced by decades of dysfunction and gridlock into a mostly symbolic institution. While Biden’s Democrats control the House, Republicans dominate the Senate, and compromise is unlikely. Republicans reject almost all restrictions on gun ownership, including the newly-elected representatives who are beholden to Q-Anon, an insurgent wing within the party that believes Democrats control a sex ring of pedophile cannibals.

Biden may also face violent pushback from the heavily-armed militias that roam much of the country. Comprising right-wing paramilitary operatives, rogue law enforcement agents, religious fundamentalists and others, the militias derive their power through terror tactics such as intimidation and kidnapping. The groups control vast arsenals of military-grade weapons, and members vow that they will fight to keep them.

“With Joe Biden as President, our right to bear arms will systematically be taken away,” one user wrote on the MyMilitia forum, an online gathering place for hard-right groups, adding that militia members should be prepared “to defend these rights with our lives”.

Members of far-right militias and white pride organizations gather near Stone Mountain, in the country’s southern region of Georgia, on August 15, 2020. (Photo by Logan Cyrus / AFP)

The militias are most active in the autonomous regions that defy central rule, including parts of the Midwestern territories, and in the breakaway South, where resentments over losing a brutal war against the North more than 150 years ago still simmer.

The militias have the backing of influential groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA), a sportsman’s association with ties to Russia that favors gun rights for felons, domestic abusers and the blind. Under an idiosyncratic system that allows unregulated financing of political candidates, the NRA spent over $30 million to help elect Donald Trump in 2016. But it’s influence has waned amid infighting and a corruption probe.

Following An Imperfect Blueprint

Gun reform may also be stymied by the nation’s high court, the Supreme Court, a partisan body largely seen as supplicant to right-wing ideologues, and whose members receive lifetime appointments through careful legal posturing. Controlled by Roman Catholics, the court has struggled for legitimacy in a pluralistic nation. The court’s most recent appointee, a relative judicial newcomer, has ties to a fanatical Catholic sect.

The Court’s most influential decisions regarding firearms rest on an uneasy interpretation of America’s Constitution, a blend of Enlightenment-era ideals and revolutionary fervor written by white slaveholders who deemed those they enslaved to be worth three-fifths of a free person. The Court has read the Constitution’s Second Amendment literally in order to expand gun rights, even though it’s a grammatically ambiguous and disorderly clause. The Court has suspended that literalism when ruling on other hot-button issues.

Incoming American president Joe Biden speaks at a forum hosted by gun violence prevention advocates while campaigning in August, 2019. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

An Evolving Message

While gun violence has shaped the republic’s short history, guns have only been a significant political issue in America for the last five decades, roughly the same amount of time Joe Biden has been a legislator. Elected to the Senate in 1973, Biden’s early positions were largely pro-gun.

“I have never believed that additional gun control or federal registration of guns would reduce crime,” Biden said in 1985.

Biden’s evolution on guns mirrored the shift in public sentiment during the eighties and nineties, as violent crime ticked up. Biden was a key supporter of the 1993 Brady bill and the 1994 crime bill, both of which included restrictions on guns. As Vice President, he led the push for more constraints following the massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in 2016, part of a school shooting epidemic. But those proposals failed to win over legislators.

Despite a mixed record of achievement on the issue, Biden has the support of many gun violence victims and advocates. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in a high school shooting in 2018, campaigned for Biden, and celebrated his win.

“Gun safety won and we will now be able to start saving lives,” Guttenberg tweeted a day after Biden’s win.

The Fight for Validation

Gun violence is just one issue that has given this brash republic a black eye on the world stage. Of perhaps more concern to international partners is the country’s chaotic political system. With a weak central government that seems unable to corral the restive states it oversees, power has instead consolidated among a small number of warring clans. For example, Trump’s combative oldest son Don Jr., a gun owner who enjoys trophy hunting, is now positioned as his father’s heir apparent. (Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, is facing possible charges of tax fraud, and considered a less likely heir. Another son, Eric, is seen as unfit for office.)

An intensely proud nation, America has struggled with skyrocketing Covid-19 rates, lethally aggressive policing, racial turmoil, brutal factionalism and plummeting trust in institutions. It outspends all other countries combined on its military, yet is stretched past capacity in skirmishes beyond its borders.

America is also well below first-world standards when it comes to access to health care, access to education, election integrity, literacy and press freedom. It scores higher on other metrics, such as inequality, infant mortality, deadly domestic violence, religious fundamentalism, incarceration rates and use of the death penalty.

The fight against gun violence is just one of many challenges Joe Biden now faces. But there is a bright spot. Despite the fear of violence at the polls, and even as Trump continues to undermine the electoral process, monitors have concluded the 2020 election was safe, free and fair. International observers agree this is an encouraging step for a country inching toward true representative democracy.