Tuesday, June 14, 2016

This is not a post about taking away your guns.

This is not a post about taking away your guns.

In fact this isn’t a post about how I think guns laws should be overhauled. Because that isn’t a particularly powerful argument, especially not on social media where the moment people think their ideas are going to be challenged profoundly they run away or throw out an insult (I’m including myself here minus the insult part these days).

I’m just going to tell you what it’s like to live in England where the vast majority of people don’t have guns. Because until I moved here from North Carolina, USA, I didn’t really think it would be too different. I didn’t think that an absence of guns would be detectable in the same way I assumed the absence of drive-thru fried chicken would never really cross my mind - but I feel these missing pieces of my in-America life regularly.

When I drive my kids to school in the morning and the news comes on I often change the channel before they even start on the headlines, just as I did in America. But on the days I don’t realize the news is on until it’s too late, particularly if I’m listening to “local” London radio, the lead stories after the international ones are stabbings. On a Monday morning in particular, after a weekend of parties, highly contested sporting matches, and other events wherein people drink too much and argue, there tend to be a fair few stabbings reported. Some fatal, some not.

After I take my kids to school, I go about my day and often hear and/or read the news via local and national sites. I tend to get news on events going in the US that aren’t of international consequence via a news app local to my previous home state, Reuters, and, of course, whatever shout fest is happening on fake-book and twitsville. It didn’t become clear to me how heavily gun violence is reported in the US until I’d been away, without visiting home, for about six months.

If I see a police officer, which I often do, they are usually just walking around. Police here have guns, but beat cops on the street do not carry guns. Honestly, this didn’t really seem change anything as far as I could tell. But last week I heard the police chief who liaisons with the French police explaining why the way the French deal with football hooligans (no, these are seriously violent dudes who pretend to give a shit about soccer), something that apparently had been reported in the press as overly harsh. The chief made the point that because the French police carry guns they cannot speak to hooligans the same way British police do. They can’t approach them. Can’t converse. And I just had the lightbulb moment of “well of course!” I’m not offering this as a model, I’m simply realizing what a difference it makes when dealing with typical rowdy, drunkard issues to not have the implied threat of a gun on your hip and how police can talk - like I’m always scolding my boys to do - about the problem at hand and seek a solution instead of bashing their brothers in the head.

My routine changes slightly day to day and month to month, but since I have been in the UK for a little over two years now I don’t know anyone who has been killed or assaulted with a gun during that time nor do I know anyone who has had a family member or friend killed or assaulted with a gun - the same cannot be said, over the same period of time, of the people I am in touch with in America. My cousin lost a friend in Orlando. A friend lost a co-worker to a domestic shooting.

Note, I don’t watch or read stories from the 24-hour news networks in the US. I knew before I moved away that those guys were just fear mongering berserker machines. So when I did feel like that gun violence was perhaps being over reported in America, I dug around a bit in statistics. Overall, as many people already know, gun violence is actually down in the US by and large from ten years ago along with a down turn in violent crime. But then I looked at gun-death instead of gun-violence and found that basically there’s not been much change there in ten years. Basically, 2 out of every 3 murders in the US is committed with a gun whereas in the UK that number is closer 1 in 10 - yet I pose that all those murdered people are still quite dead.

I feel like when people hear the statistics about gun violence in the US versus the rest of the “developed’ world that it just doesn’t connect. People, and I used to be one of them, say that the UK is so much smaller than America so that comparison doesn’t work. Australia is just as big but has a much smaller population. This is called being terminally unique in my opinion - no one can say they’ve had it as hard or as complexly as us ol’americans *wrist to forehead*. How about bare numbers?

In England and Wales in 2011/2012, with a population of about 56 million people, there were 553 murder/homicides and of those 39 were caused by guns/firearms. (see here) Now that level of population spread of a similar amount of land with similar socio-economic distribution is hard to get exactly in the US but I thought I’d compare Virginia (very wealthy in the north, like London, and also close to the capital) plus North and South Carolina to get the population up and be closer to the rural distribution of people outside London and surrounds. That’s about 24 million people. Total number of murders is 1108, of those 766 were carried out with guns (got those stats from the FBI spreadsheets). I’m just going to let those numbers speak for themselves.

I’m seeing and continue to see or have revealed to me what life can be like without *feeling* like there is the constant threat of gun violence despite being in significantly closer proximity to acts of terrorism but equally further from nearly double the number of gun murders. I feel safer. I feel more at ease about my kids in school and my husband at work and out in the cities near me.

That word _feel_ is very important. Those 24-hour news guys, they want you to feel it. The NRA wants you to feel it. Because it is there. That threat. It isn’t there any more or less really than it was ten years ago though (and I’d argue it was too high then as well). It’s just that Americans have let politicians and news media and lobby groups tell us that there’s only two sides. That there’s only one right America and the other America is wrong. They don’t want you to look anywhere for compromise or negotiation. Because if they can keep everyone with their fists up, they can quite literally get away with just about anything else they want to. They can freeze the minimum wage as was done in North Carolina. They can increase guns sales for the gun companies that fund the NRA by spreading that rumor Obama is coming for their guns and telling you that terrorists are in your backyard and coming for you. Again. They can ignore Supreme Court justice nominees and veterans benefits funding and sexual violence against women. The so-called leaders, of late elected by less than 7% of voters in many places, can pray for victims without reaching out to talk, without threat, to the those “hooligans” in that other America to see if they can quiet down and try to respect the living, breathing lives of the people they claim to represent.