GUNS, TRAUMAS AND EXCEPTIONALISM: AMERICA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Co-founder of IsraelSeen, Steve Ornstein and Blogger/Author, Howard David Epstein, Discuss Gun Culture, And Why That May Be The Way To Approach Gun Crime in the USA
SO: So, after blogging your trenchant views about Israel, you have now gone public with advice to the American nation about their problem with guns. Why do you, a Brit and an Israeli, consider yourself qualified to do this?
HE: Not being an American, not having been anything more than a tourist and occasionally a lawyer doing business there, places me firmly in the position of an outsider. Insiders often cannot see the wood for the trees and I believe that is the problem the Americans have with gun crime. And I shall tell you something else I am not: I am not an academic historian. As a lawyer, I try to drill down and find the causation for events. I ask what is the critical path that causes or allows things to happen.
Now, everyone knows there is an exceptional level of gun crime in America, but sadly, from the President down, all anyone talks about, after every rampage killing all we ever hear about is gun control.
SO: Well as gun control is not the obvious answer. Do you disagree with Obama, Clinton – and on this they all agree – Trump, that guns have to be kept out of the hands of, shall I say, those who should never be allowed them.
HE: Absolutely. I agree with that but there are two early caveats:
- First: there are already more guns than there are people (that is children, adult men and women and seniors) in the US; and
- Two: the control regime – the Brady checks, introduced in 1993 – plainly do not work. It is trite to say that they did not work for all those outrages, which is most of them, where the killers did not buy the guns they used themselves, thus evading the Brady-FBI database – don’t forget that at Columbine the killers were underage when they procured them through just 18-year-old Robyn Anderson, and the Sandy Hook killer took his mother’s gun, slew her and went on to the school where he killed the kids and the teachers. They also do not necessarily work where a check is made. In the case of the worst of them – Virginia Tech, the killer of 32 victims passed the Brady checks, but the FBI were unaware of his history of errant behavior. So you see, the FBI database can be either circumvented or ineffectual.
SO: You seem a little fixated on rampages at schools and colleges. Why?
HE: You are right and it is simple to show why I start there: at American schools and colleges, pupils and students are three times more likely to be shot to death than at those of the whole of the rest of the world combined and that is without taking into account the relative populations that those two places: America and everywhere else. In other words, the per capita gun-homicide rate is something I did not even want to calculate.
Now, it’s not only schools and colleges. You are twice as likely to be shot to death in an American workplace as in those of the whole of the rest of the world combined.
SO: But Hillary Clinton famously said that 90 people a day are shot and killed in the USA. That works out to nearly 33,000 a year. Rampage killings contribute to that, but they are far from the whole story.
HE: You are right, but you have to start somewhere and if you focus on the youngest members of society, in the way that I suggest in my book, you may not only prevent rampage killings at educational establishments, but you may also stop kids becoming murderers down the road, when they are in work or just out in society as a whole.
SO: We’ll come to your recommendations in a moment. First I want to ask you about the title of your book. Guns, I understand. Also that they cause traumas. But the cover of your book shows the twin towers burning on 9/11. What is the relevance of that national trauma?
HE: Thank you Steve. You have now cut to the chase. My book consists of 21 chapters. The last one is about America exceptionalism. That is a redemptive story so we can park that as we have tragedies to consider. Two of the chapters are about firearms-perpetrated homicide: Columbine itself, which carries some very important often-overlooked messages, and the continuing trauma of gun crime, which we have started to examine. The other 18 chapters are some shorter, some longer, descriptions of national traumas that America has suffered – and they have occurred (along with others which I arbitrarily omitted, as I thought twenty (in all) were sufficient to make the point) – they all occurred in the space of 80 years. Now I think that is a record, but an unenviable one.
SO: What traumas, and why do you think America is different from other countries?
HE: The traumas I thought to be the most harmful include (I’ll just mention a few here): the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Sputniks and the Space Race, Korea and the McCarthy Witch-hunts, Vietnam, one presidential assassination, one presidential candidate’s assassination, the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, which is all bound up with Desegregation, two presidential impeachment processes and so on.
As to the second part of your question, I grew up through all of those after WWII, following them in the media from a safe distance – in the UK – and I became a regular visitor to Europe and Israel. I do not see events of that magnitude as having occurred in those numbers, or anything like them, in any of those places, in those years. I give a few examples for several countries in the Preface to my book and I stand by them: in the UK I remember being traumatized when a school full of kids was buried in mining slurry, I remember the collapse of Rolls Royce (in retrospect hardly traumatic but it seemed so at the time) and I remember sterling being pitched out of the European Monetary system. All small-fry by comparison with what you lived through.
Had (heaven forbid) the IRA taken out several members of the Royal family – they got the uncle of the husband of the Queen and a top Conservative MP, a close confidant of Margaret Thatcher and they blew up a hotel in which Thatcher was staying during a Conservative party conference – and had they taken out the prime minister and the whole of her cabinet that would certainly have been a trauma, but they did not aim to achieve or succeed in doing that. We didn’t have a Katrina. Our entry into WWII was not like Pearl Harbor – we had a phony war for the first 18 months. We suffered the blitz and the V1 and V2 destruction of lives and property in London, but this was war and just as the American people got used to war after Pearl Harbor, so the British grittily got through it.
SO: And the other countries?
HE: Look, I am sure that the realization of what happened in the Holocaust, once its extent became known was traumatic for many but – and here I exclude Syria, Libya, Sudan and other failed states for two reasons: they are not peer nation of the USA such as the European, Scandinavian, and Australasian states are, I am considering only those nations who are culturally similar to the American nation – and I say that apart from WWII, in and from which all suffered one way or another, no nation underwent 20 national traumas in those 80 years. And since 9/11 we can say that none of them has suffered in recent times like the USA. And no-on else loses 90 people a day to the bullet.
SO: And the connection?
HE: The connection is another superlative, the one that we examined at the beginning: no other suffers such a rate of homicide caused by firearms and no other nation has suffered so many traumas. So I made a neural connection, first as a question: could all those national traumas have induced a national PTSD that results in all these terrible killings? I though it worth trying to expand on that, and that is what I researched. I decided two things: the chances of the connection were too great to ignore; and, if it were so, then the ineffectual gun control laws on their own were never going to achieve anything: gun crime needed to be looked at as a cultural issue and dealt with accordingly.
SO: You have forgotten one thing: there are more guns in US society than people, and that penetration rate is greater than in any peer nation. Is it not obvious that there would be a comparatively elevated level of gun crime resulting in death with all those guns around?
HE: Yes and no. Of course, where there are very few guns there will be fewer shootings. But here is what I did: I applied the gun penetration rate of America to the firearms-perpetrated homicide rates of several peer countries and what do you think was the result?
SO: You tell me.
HE: Their kill rates, as notionally elevated were still nowhere near those of the USA. Now if what the psychologists and criminologists say: that about 1% of every societal group is psychopathic, and if you notionally eliminate the accessibility to guns that is unique to America, you are left wondering why more Americans are shot to death, per capita, than in any peer nation.
SO: And if you are wrong. If people qualified in those fields (which you accept you are not) come along and disprove your thesis?
HE: They have to explain the coincidence between the traumas and the kill-rate and they have to come up with an approach that beats mine, for something new has to be tried.
SO: And what do you suggest?
HE: I suggest two routes to amelioration of what is presently a hopeless situation: gun control laws that, as they are, do not work and are never likely to do so. I say, supplement them with two programs: one for joining up all the dots, for identifying youths (it is almost always young men) whose trajectory suggests they are tending towards extreme violence, preserve their civil rights until it looks they have crossed a certain threshold and then benign intervention to protect them against themselves and to respect the civil rights of his potential victims. Set up county or state-wide committees of suitable experts from a wide range of specialists, make it obligatory for schools and the police to report to the committees’ errant behavior, and require the committees to report those whose conduct is giving rise to concern to the FBI Brady database. I set out a whole route map for this in my book. So in other words, as I say, join the dots and intervene at the right time and in the right way.
SO: And the other?
HE: The other is a generational multi-media campaign to wean angry young men away from thinking that the gun will solve their problems and to persuade society that the gun is the most unpleasant and dangerous thing that they could have in their lives and around their families. It has been done with seat belts, smoking, conduct on the roads – and it can be done with guns.
SO: Plenty to think about there…
HE: well, that is just a précis. There is much more in the book.
For more info on the book follow this link to Amazon
