In Dysfunctional Countries Thousands Suffer from ‘the Rule of AK-47,’ And Then There’s the Strange Case of the United States of Massacre

“In the Central African Republic, and other anarchic states,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent column for The New York Times (3/25/18), “people suffer and perish under the rule of the AK-47.”

Kristof was making the point that in countries such as the Central African Republic, where civilians have for years suffered to an excruciating extent from murderous armed bands, “armed conflict” has become a greater problem than even poverty and disease.

I hope that message is heard, though I do not think anyone in this country’s current gangster-government is capable of learning anything, or caring. But if I may be allowed to make a still wider application of Kristof’s observation — and borrow his incredibly apt phrase — I think Americans have also had some experience of living “under the rule of the AK-47.”

The same cannot be said of other Western, or Western-oriented, democracies. In countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia shootings deaths by citizens are almost unheard of. They do not occur in Japan or Sweden or in significant number in any of the countries of Western Europe.

People do not shoot their family members in these countries. They seldom shoot themselves. Rival gangs of adolescents suffering from poverty or neglect do not shoot one another.

And the gun massacres in public settings such as schools that occur routinely in the United States simply do not take place anywhere else in First World Countries.

So which class of country does the United States of American belong to?

To the unfortunate, politically unstable nations Kristof calls “anarchic states,” in which domestic peace and tranquility along with the most basic of rights — the right not to have your life taken violently by another human being — is routinely shattered by armed bands of outlaws, whatever their ideology or lack of it?

Or to the more domestically tranquil societies in which citizens seldom die at each other’s hands, and if they do it’s not because of the ease of a pulled trigger?

The country from which Kristof (aided by Lynsey Addario) filed his devastating report, tellingly headlined “Conflict is More Profitable Than Peace” — a story that begins with a heart-breaking truth: “Perhaps the most devastating blow any human can suffer is to lose a child” — is hardly alone in its suffering from continued armed conflict.

We can all think of others: Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela, Yemen, to name a few that often appear in the rollcall of suffering newspapers label “international briefs.”

But what other country do we know of in which fatal attacks on children (frequently enhanced by the K-47) routinely take place?

Think hard, ye sons and daughters of the Second Amendment.

Are the mothers and fathers of European and other countries governed by the rule of law and not by groups of armed men likely to lose a child to a random shooting, a child’s accidental discovery of the family firearm, a walk to an inner-city school, a domestic quarrel, a candy purchase inside a gated community, a spiraling adolescent despair, or a rash of gang violence breaking out in a desperate neighborhood? Or to a premeditated attack on a public gathering in a school, theater, night club, workplace, or shopping center?

Or are these murderous outcomes, big and small — especially the large-scale massacres which visit us alone of western countries — “the pure products of America”? (To borrow a phrase from William Carlos Williams.)

In which country do parents experience “the most devastating blow any human can suffer” at the hands of deranged monsters empowered by an easily acquired military style assault rifle capable of firing hundreds of bullets within the time it takes to microwave a child’s dinner?

Are not the citizens of this presumably ‘modern,’ ‘democratic,’ ‘stable’ country also “under the rule of the AK-47”?

In countries where civil institutions are not strong and stable enough to protect their citizens from the predations, however driven, of domestic armed conflict — through factional rivalry, religious fanaticism, power struggles among ‘warlords’ or criminal gangs — the tyranny of an armed few over the decent civilian majority is enabled by the ease with which automatic weapons have spread over the world.

(Who makes these guns? one wonders. Who exports them?)

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a resurgence of white racism produced an epidemic of lynchings of African Americans not only in the South but in Midwestern states such as Indiana, Mark Twain coined the phrase “The United States of Lyncherdom.”

Welcome today to “The United States of Massacre.”

Why here, but in not in other established democracies? How do we differ from the other wealthy countries of the world in which established, reasonably stable governments and public institutions guarantee an enviable standard of public safety?

They elect their leaders; we elect ours.

They have systems of justice, police, courts, penal institutions, and a tradition of observing the rule of law. So (for the most part) do we.

But what do we have that our allies do not have?

We have the Second Amendment.

Last week retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens proposed repealing the Second Amendment to make it easier for lawmakers to design gun safety laws that would withstand legal challenges. It’s been reported that many gun-safety organizations are cool to this proposal because it is unlikely to be politically viable.

That objection is surely accurate. In fact amending the Constitution in any way — much less by repealing the Second Amendment — has become practically impossible in the current era of Single-Issue-Veto politics.

But let’s not allow the practical politics to blind us to the true merit of the idea.

The United States would be significantly better, safer country today without the Second Amendment — and perhaps in earlier centuries as well — and the so-called, wholly fictitious “right to bear arms.”

The concept of individual “rights” given written form in the first ten amendments to our Constitution derives from the philosophical tradition of “natural rights.” While the concept that all human beings have some ‘natural rights’ simply by being human has roots in ancient Greek and Roman thought, it came to America through the philosophies of the English theorists, principally John Locke.

The most famous words in the Declaration of Independence are Thomas Jefferson’s transformation of Locke’s theory that all human beings have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty and property.”

Jefferson brilliantly turned that idea into his justification of the American independence: “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, . . . among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

By “inalienable” both thinkers meant that these rights could not be given away to — or taken away by — a government.

Defenders of the Second Amendment argue the so-called ‘right to bear arms’ is another of those inalienable rights. But none of the ‘natural rights’ theorists ever said so. Neither do the laws of any other civilized country.

When James Madison prepared a list of amendments to the proposed ‘constitution’ for a newly formed notion, he included a list of “civil” rights. Civil rights are the rights a government grants its citizens in exchange for agreeing to live under the government’s rule.

Why did Madison include the Second Amendment with its notorious “right to bear arms” — stated thus: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — among his amendments?

The reason was practical politics.

As any decent civics course should tell us, Madison and other so-called “framers” of the Constitution prepared the famous First Ten Amendments, all of them limiting the powers of the central government — a list of “shall nots” resembling in their use of a negative construction the Biblical Ten Commandments — in order to allay the fears expressed by Thomas Jefferson and others that the new federal government would become as oppressive as the British government Americans had just overthrown.

Madison’s ten amendments guaranteed that Americans would always have essential rights such as the right to speak, publish, “assemble,” and petition government for the redress of grievances. They protected the traditional English right to a trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures of properties, and the so-called “fifth amendment” right to refuse to testify against yourself.

These statements of individual rights that could not be abridged by government were a political necessity to attract voters in the 13 then-independent states to approve the Constitution and become part of a new “union” with a workable central government.

And on practical grounds their inclusion in the document succeeded.

But among this list of guaranteed rights, the framers include the infamous Second Amendment. I picture Madison slipping it in right after packing the most essential rights — freedom of speech, press, assembly —into the First Amendment to make sure he doesn’t forget about it, because it appears in no English or European list of inalienable natural rights.

Why was it included at all? The answer is it was a sop offered to the perceived needs of an anxious new, frontier nation, intended to quiet the nerves of a certain segment of the population — white men who own property.

Whether it’s the head of a farm family’s musket kept handy behind the door, or a plantation owner’s force of armed overseers, the Second Amendment assured male property owners of the right to keep their firearms’ handy (and their ‘powder dry,’ as the peculiarly American adage holds) to protect themselves from Indian raids and slave revolts.

In 1788, when the Framers were looking for votes, the British were no longer coming. No foreign foe was at the colonies’ throats, or likely to cause trouble. Providing for the common defense was a future contingency.

But firearms had proved their usefulness to the Colonials when a combination of local militias hid in the woods and made the British regulars pay a bloody price after the brief encounters of Lexington and Concord. Hence the Second Amendment’s reference to the “well regulated militia.”

And ultimately American independence was won by force of arms — along with perseverance, the advantage of fighting on home terrain, and the ultimately successful courting of a French alliance.

In the nuclear age, the advantage to national defense to be gained from Eighteenth Century style militias or individually owned long-guns is pure fiction.

Neither a well-regulated militia nor an armed citizenry is essential to our nation’s security. We could excise the so-called “right to bear arms” from the Constitution with James Madison’s toe-nail scissors without the slightest ill effect on America’s national defense.

The blow to the male ego, however, would be considerable.

And in these days of growing gender equality, it is surely true that many women would also rush to martyr themselves to the false security of the firearm by forcing others to remove their dangerous and wholly illusory security blanket from their cold dead fingers.

And, of course, to add to this bill of real and imaginary suffering, many of those who work in the firearms industry would lose their employment… along with that vast cadre of cold-blooded corruptors of mealy-mouthed American office-holders who vote the way they are told regardless of the price in blood others will pay.

The benefits of removing guns from their deadly-prominent place in American society to a level resembling that of the other Western democracies, would of course be immense. Not just the elimination of the “rule by the AK-47” national horror that results in mass killings in schools, concerts, nightclubs, etc., but also reducing the nation’s daily butcher bill of domestic murders, suicides, and gangland shootings. Not to mention assassination attempts on politicians, accidents in the home, preschoolers in automobiles shooting mommy in the back, and — lest we forget — the national shame of relentless executions of unarmed black men by frightened policemen.

Nevertheless, as previously stated, amending the Constitution to remove the “right to bear arms” is unlikely to occur any time in a realistically imagined American future.

Too many oxen would have to be gored.

But , oh, if only human beings permitted reason to govern self-interest.