Its propaganda has created a widespread misapprehension that Australians can’t own any guns. To rationalise the inconvenient truth that the right to bear arms is now rare in advanced democracies, the US gun lobby portrays their citizens as dupes and victims of oppressive regimes who are sliding inexorably into slavery. It lives on only in England’s rebel child, which lifted it out of the common law and enshrined it in its Constitution. The appeal to them also is ironic because most Commonwealth countries-whose allegiance to English common law should be much closer-long ago enacted statutes extinguishing any such right. As well as being irrelevant to the Amendment’s purpose and operation, those purported origins are actually inconvenient to pro-gun arguments. Second Amendment orthodoxy holds that the right to bear arms is natural and inviolable, pre-dating the Constitution with ancient origins in English common law. America is stuck with the Second Amendment-with being an armed society-and must learn to live with it. The most important thing about the Second Amendment is that it exists, it says what it says, and it seems politically inconceivable that it will ever materially change. Trying to understand the American take on gun ownership is a journey that reveals numerous dark sides, inconvenient truths and ironies in both corners of the ring, and just as many misapprehensions in the understandings of outside commentators.Ĭonsideration must begin with the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States-and it origins and purpose. The second is how little Australians or most others in the West seem to understand the difficulty of the issue in the USA or, more importantly, the implications that our own approaches to the bearing of arms have for the quality of our respective democracies. The test for America is to find a way to be an armed society in the twenty-first century while remaining a passable civil society: one in which civic life is not governed by fear. I believe that the armed society is now an immutable part of America’s political and social DNA-it can’t change. The first is the enormous problems a country takes on when it makes a conscious, codified decision to be an armed society, rather than simply to allow some citizens to possess guns. Two aspects of this rich conundrum remind me of the differences between our societies, histories and cultures, despite our unquestionably close friendship. Gestating since 1791, the monster now seems an indomitable challenge to the very society that created it. In constitutionalising a guarantee of liberty, the Founding Fathers conceived a Frankenstein’s monster. What to most foreigners seems a straightforward law-and-order policy judgment is, for America, a wicked dilemma in which some of the greatest ideas of the Enlightenment, of the likes of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Franklin, collide with the realities of modern technology and the domestic security norms that democracies now demand. For an Australian living in America this was a fascinating demonstration of the unique quality of American democracy. America has just spent months deliberating over whether or not to increase controls on its citizens’ ownership of and commerce in firearms.
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