Contra Ganz on Guns
Escaping the habits of American exceptionalism
John Ganz writing at Unpopular Front is one of a handful of actually-invaluable writers on this platform. I take plenty of direction from him, especially with regard to the history of antisemitism and European reaction, and I tend to defer to him on most things America, too.
So it was pretty uncomfortable to see him open his otherwise great piece on the killing of Charlie Kirk with effectively the opposite view to mine. I put a lot of emphasis on US gun culture. To my mind, gun access, and the maelstrom of gun ideology that surrounds it in the United States, is the indispensable starting point to understanding a killing like Kirk’s.
But Ganz seems to want to disregard the gun culture stuff entirely:
To those who say, “Guns are the issue,” I say, get real:—Charlie Kirk was killed with a bolt-action hunting rifle, not with an assault rifle. Even the most modest attempts at reasonable gun control have failed. There is no conceivable world in which there would be a powerful movement in this country to ban the types of guns that millions and millions of Americans consider to be a natural part of their lives, as normal as an automobile or a refrigerator. And even if they did, the judiciary is attached to an extremely expansive notion of 2nd Amendment rights and would strike it down. Even in countries with stringent gun control, these are the very types of weapons that are permitted. Out of respect for my fellow citizens and their liberty, I would not take them away even if I could.
There’s an array of arguments in there, both practical and normative, but I take Ganz’s ultimate point to be that hunting rifles will be available even if the gun reformer’s utopia comes through. Robinson would therefore still have shot Kirk. This sort of thinking rests on the view that gun control only works when it eradicates guns from the private sphere. But that’s just not right.
Few countries go so far as to remove firearms entirely from private hands. Many countries ban some weapons. But gun control is not limited to bans—much of its effectiveness comes from the conditions of access it puts on the guns that do remain legal.
I think it’d help to familiarise ourselves with those conditions. To buy a similar rifle where I am in Victoria, Australia, you would first need to acquire a gun license—specifically a category A or B longarm license. To get that you have to do a firearm safety course, which has both a theory and a practical component. You’d also have to demonstrate a “genuine reason” for owning a gun. And you’d have to demonstrate that you are a “fit and proper person”, which excludes people convicted of some crimes, people with histories of some mental illnesses, and people who have been issued domestic violence orders. Then you have to let a 28 day waiting period pass. You’d also need your Permit to Acquire, which connects your permit to the serial number of the gun you buy. Then, once you own the gun, police will (or, say they will), occasionally visit your home to check on the safe storage of the weapon.
Let’s compare that process to where Charlie Kirk was shot. To buy a rifle in Utah, any person over 18 can walk into a gun store and purchase a bolt-action hunting rifle the same day after passing a criminal background check.
These are radically different environments of gun accessibility, and those differing contexts help to explain why, according to data accumulated by USYD, something like 6.2% of Australian households hold a firearm, compared to 42% in the United States.1 Buying a rifle in Australia is totally feasible—it’s just layered with friction. So much friction, in fact, that outside of regional communities gun ownership is simply not a salient feature of Australian life. While reading Ganz’s piece it struck me that I don’t even know where to buy a rifle in this country—and I live in regional Australia.
Meanwhile I remember well the location of a number of gun shops I encountered in the US. In the nearly 6 years I lived there, basic access to guns was a salient feature of day to day life. Gun access was actively advertised—in some states, on billboards.
The diminished salience and proximity of weapons materially limits a would-be killer’s access to those weapons, but it also, and maybe even more importantly, restricts the psychological work a person must do before he picks up a gun, loads it, points it at another, and pulls the trigger. The type of decision tree that Tyler Robinson was led down does not occur easily unless the mind is actively reminded of the accessibility of the weapon. The mere presence of guns, on the other hand, is a reminder that guns can, even should, be used. It is their raison d’etre.
When guns do end up in the hand of murderers and assassins in Australia—Dezi Freeman reminded us of that they sometimes can and do—those stories shock us exactly because, relative to the United States, they are so rare.
That is why I’m perplexed by the idea that America’s gun culture is irrelevant to the killing of Charlie Kirk. His death, after all, was one more murder in a national firearm murder rate 18 times higher than that of other developed countries.2
The idea might be perplexing but it’s not unfamiliar. Ganz’s approach is representative of an attitude I encountered time and time again when talking to liberal and left-wing Americans. It seems to inhabit some mix of acceptance, fatalism, and American exceptionalism. The idea is always that the policies that worked elsewhere could never work there.
Why? This always gets hard to pin down. In Ganz’s piece there is a sort of retreat to the uniquely violent nature of American society. An explanation of this nature is not provided. It is a given.
That sort of exceptionalist approach is not just thought-terminating. There’s a deeply-conservative element to it, too—a futility thesis, to steal from the theorist Alfred Hirschman. As Wikipedia has it, the thesis holds that ‘attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will fail to "make a dent" in the problem, and the motives of those who keep attempting futile reforms are suspect.’3
How else to understand Ganz’s dismissal of gun reformers? Time to get real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_guns_by_country
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/26/world/us-gun-culture-world-comparison-intl-cmd/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction
Excellent piece. The lack of comparative thinking, knowledge or analysis has long held the US back.
Good piece.