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Document 1

Dan Wasserman, The Boston Globe, 2012

Document 2

On guns and race, America is a nation shackled to its past

The Charleston shootings show that for all its might, the US still cannot cure its two critical birth defects
THE OBSERVER, Jonathan Freedland, 20 June 2015
Jon Stewart and Barack Obama are men of a similar age with, on some days, a similar role. Sometimes it falls
to both of them to help their fellow Americans digest what’s happening around them, to make sense of it.
Yesterday it was the murder by a white supremacist of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.
The TV host did something unusual, dispensing with his usual gag-packed opening to deliver a joke-free
monologue. Obama, by contrast, did something that has become all too usual, delivering what is now a
rhetorical genre of its own: the presidential post-massacre speech. “I’ve had to make statements like this too
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many times,” he said. By one count, it was the 14th time he had had to speak in such a way after such a mass
shooting.
Stewart’s emphasis was on America’s enduring struggle over race. Obama chose to focus on the country’s
equally stubborn problem with guns. But what was striking was that on both questions the presenter and the
president struck the same tone. They matched each other in weary resignation. (…)
You can see why both men – nearing the end of their terms of office – have given up hope that change is on
its way. When it comes to both race and guns, there have been episodes so shocking that people assumed
action was bound to follow. And yet the brutality, especially police brutality, shown towards black Americans –
those doing nothing more threatening than walking or breathing or swimming or praying – goes on.
When in 2012 a 20-year-old man walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut,
killing 20 children and six adults, many assumed this would finally expose the limits of American indulgence of
gun rights. Obama declared enough was enough and proposed a raft of gun control measures. They seemed to
be making progress until the National Rifle Association got busy, pressuring wavering senators facing tough
reelection battles, and the effort was crushed.
Race and guns are the birth defects of the American republic, their distorting presence visible in the US
constitution itself. The very first article of that founding document spelled out its view that those “bound to
service for a term of years” – slaves – would count as “three fifths of all other Persons”. Meanwhile, the second
amendment enshrines “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”.
The three-fifths rule was eventually discarded, but the legacy of slavery hangs heavy. In South Carolina the
flag of the slave-owning Confederacy still flies. The church where those worshippers were gunned down was on
Calhoun Street, named in honour of a luminary1 of 19th-century white supremacism. As for guns, a rule written
in the age of the musket, designed to protect an infant republic from the return of King George’s redcoats2, still
holds – allowing a 21-year-old bent on provoking a race war easy, legal access to a weapon that lets him
commit what, in a different context, would be called an act of terror.
The result is paralysis and a desperate fatalism. The paradoxes are obvious. America, the land of restless
innovation, is shackled to its past. The United States sees its own wounds and cannot heal them, its hands tied
by a constitution that in almost every other respect is a manifesto for liberation. (…)
Americans like to tell themselves anything is possible, that their destiny is in their own hands. Politicians
describe the country as “this great experiment in self-government”, insisting they can make America anew if
they want to. Yet the persistence of arms and racism and armed racism suggests that the people are, in
important ways, powerless: a nation still ruled by its ancestors; a nation that has forgotten the wisdom of one
of its greatest revolutionaries, Thomas Paine, who understood that “government is for the living, and not for
the dead; it is the living only that has any right in it”.
All this matters beyond America too. US influence in the world does not rest solely on its wealth and military
might. It also requires America to be admired. As Bill Clinton said five years after the Iraq invasion: “People the
world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”
Every one of these mass killings, or police shootings of innocent black men and women, undermines that
example. It makes America look like a basket case3, a country that seems to think it’s normal for a toddler to
find a gun in his mother’s purse and accidentally shoot himself dead, a country that saw 12,600 of its people
shot dead last year and believes itself incapable of doing anything about it.
To change will mean looking to the rest of the world, and recognising that, as Obama said, most “advanced
countries” do not have this problem. It will require a reckoning with the circumstances of America’s birth – and
the courage to say that the US is not the country it was more than two centuries ago, and can no longer be
bound by those rules: that it has changed – and that it can be so much better.

Document 3

1
A luminary = someone very important, renowned
2
Redcoats = British soldiers
3
A basket case = (here) a crazy person
2
A counsel of despair
The Charleston massacre will not produce new controls on firearms
THE ECONOMIST, June 27th 2015
AFTER the massacre in Charleston, Joseph Riley, the city’s mayor, said that “nine people died, because of this
crazed man, with obviously easy access to a handgun.” The right to bear arms “is ingrained in the constitution
and life in America”, he conceded. But, he continued, “There has got to be a better way.”
Mr Riley’s plea did not get far. The shootings in Charleston have sparked a clamour about racism and the
Confederate battle flag. On guns, they produced a whimper. Barack Obama denounced loose rules, but added
that he doesn’t “foresee any real action being taken”. Harry Reid, the minority leader in the Senate, called for a
vote on expanded background checks, but admitted that “we may not be able to win that vote”. Republicans
spoke in favour of guns: Ted Cruz, a Texan senator and presidential candidate, warned that Democrats would
try to use the massacre “to take away the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens”.
Americans are far more likely to die by gunfire than people in any other rich country. In 2013, 21,175 people
killed themselves with guns and 11,208 people were killed by others. Gun homicide and suicide rates are hugely
higher than in most of Europe. Mass shootings appear to be more common, too. Jaclyn Schildkraut and Jaymi
Elsass, two criminologists, have counted 133 such events in the United States between 2000 and 2014
(excluding gang violence or terrorism). In England, they counted one.
Yet there is little appetite for change. After the massacre in 2012 of 20 children and six staff at a school in
Connecticut, by a young man using one of his mother’s rifles, several attempts were made in Congress to
tighten access to firearms, but all failed. Many states are actually loosening their rules. In June Mr Reid’s state,
Nevada, introduced new legal protections for people who kill in self-defence from their cars; in May Texas
allowed its citizens to carry pistols openly. In April Kansas passed a law allowing residents to carry concealed
handguns without having to get a licence.
If the number of background checks performed or the number of guns manufactured is any indicator, gun
sales are at close-to-all-time highs. According to data from the FBI, nearly 21m background checks of various
sorts were performed in 2014, up from just 8.6m a decade earlier. Those numbers soared almost as soon as Mr
Obama was elected (see chart 2). According to the Small Arms Survey, Americans own more guns per head than
citizens of any other country in the world.
Yet while the number of guns appears to be going up, data from the General Social Survey (GSS), gathered by
the University of Chicago, suggest that gun owners represent a slightly smaller share of the population than
they did. In 2014, 31% of households had guns, down from over 40% a decade ago (see chart 2). Individual gun
ownership increased slightly between 2010 and 2014, but it was still sharply lower than in the 1990s. A
shrinking number of gun owners seem to be accumulating ever larger stashes.
The difference today is that gun ownership is less of a hobby and more about self-defence—and identity. In
1977, 32% of Americans told the GSS that they or their spouse hunted; by 2014 that figure had fallen to 15.4%.
But according to polling by Gallup, since 2000 the proportion of Americans who say that owning a gun makes
them feel safer has increased sharply, from 35% to 63% (see chart 1). Mike Lau, an instructor at the South
Carolina Gun School, predicts that the Charleston shooting will lead to more people learning to use guns to
protect themselves. Gun ownership by women has risen, even as it has fallen for men; pistols now outsell rifles
and shotguns.
Gun ownership is a strong indicator of political and demographic background. Poorer people, residents of big
cities, blacks and Hispanics are far less likely to own a gun. Richer white people in suburbs and rural areas are
far more likely to. Republican voters are much more inclined than Democrats to say that having a gun makes
them feel safer—a gap that has widened dramatically since 2006 (see chart 1).
A large majority of Americans still say they support background checks for all gun purchases (in most states,
private sales and sales at gun shows do not require such checks at present). But they do not trust the motives of
the politicians—mostly Democrats—who want to tighten the rules. Most Republican politicians are bullied into
absolutism by N.R.A gun lobbyists. And so the shootings will inevitably go on.

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Document 4

Presidential Candidates and Mass Shootings

THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE EDITORIAL BOARD, August 3, 2015
Despite the repeated horror of mass shootings in churches, movie theaters and schoolrooms, the Republican
candidates running for president are remarkably quiet about how they would deal with this most pressing
public health challenge.
“We define gun control real simple — that’s hitting what you aim at,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas
told a political gathering in New Hampshire earlier this year, typifying the level of pandering by the Republican
field to the gun lobby.
In contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, is taking up the gun
control issue once more, 15 years after the defeat of Al Gore left her party leaders swearing off the subject as a
losing cause. “We have to take on the gun lobby,” Mrs. Clinton told a New Hampshire crowd last month. “This is
a controversial issue. I am well aware of that. But I think it is the height of irresponsibility not to talk about it.”
Tell that to the Republican candidates staunchly opposed to gun safety laws, like limits on ammunition used
in the rapid-fire, battlefield-type weapons favored by mass shooters and a ban on unregistered weapon sales by
dealers at gun shows. Mass shootings involving three or more murder victims have been on the rise in recent
years, according to federal data, while gun production has more than doubled since 2008.
Republican candidates prefer to focus on the mental health of mass shooters as the decisive issue, not easy
gun access, as if both issues should not be forcefully pursued by sensible public leaders.
After the recent shooting deaths at a Louisiana movie theater by a man who obtained his gun out of state,
Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican presidential candidate, proudly pointed to his state’s recently joining the
federal watch list that attempts to track mentally troubled people who should be denied guns. But his state had
ignored the list for years and remains one of the lowest in spending on mental health care. After the shootings,
Mr. Jindal proposed that gun owners be allowed to bring their weapons to movie theaters. […]
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who signed the reckless Stand Your Ground law that has been used to
reduce gun owners’ culpability in shootings, said in his 2003 declaration to N.R.A. conventioneers: “The sound
of our guns is the sound of freedom!”