America must seek ways to control guns

Thursday December 20 2012


Easy access to guns in the United States leads to horrific murder rates relative to other highly-educated and wealthy societies. America needs to find a better way.

Other countries have done so. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, Australia had several mass shootings. After a particularly horrible massacre in 1996, a new Prime Minister, John Howard, instituted a severe crackdown on gun ownership, and forced would-be owners to submit to a rigorous application process.

Conditions for gun ownership in Australia are now very strict, and the approval process can take a year or more.





American violence is rooted in history. The US and Latin American countries are all “conquest” societies, in which Europeans ruled over multi-racial societies. In many of these countries, the European conquerors and their descendants nearly wiped out the indigenous populations, partly through disease, but also through war, starvation, death marches, and forced labour.

In the US and many Latin American countries, slaveholding fuelled mass violence as well. The slaves — and generations of their descendants — were routinely murdered.

Militias anachronistic

The US also developed a populist belief that gun ownership constitutes a vital protection against government tyranny. The right of citizens to organise militias to fight government tyranny was a founding idea of the new country, enshrined in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which declares that the people have the right to bear arms.

Since citizens’ militias are anachronistic, gun-owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that offers protection against tyranny.



The shooting in Newtown is part of an increasingly common pattern — a specific kind of murder-suicide. Loners, often with paranoid tendencies, commit these heinous acts as part of their own suicide.



Prof Sachs teaches Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management, and is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. (c): Project Syndicate, 2012.