UNITED STATES
ALAN DAWSON
At the new Centerra Shopping Centre facing high-speed Interstate 25 highway in Loveland, Colorado, you can pick up pretty well everything you need on a Saturday afternoon: clothes at Macy's, a birthday present at Build-A-Bear, a latte at Starbucks and a new Smith & Wesson .357 Taurus at Dick's Sporting Goods... "You'll need a couple of boxes of ammunition with that, sir."
This is a giant, supermarket-style store with pretty well everything you need for sports. The gun section takes up a 60-metre wall display near the back of the store, with a couple of dozen clerks showing the merchandise - hundreds of rifles, shotguns and handguns sold over the counter in an operation that is seemingly as casual as all the other purchases. You get a local and federal police check as part of the service, and in 30 minutes you're on your way.
This store could serve as a fine introduction to what many around the world find to be one of the most perplexing features of American lifestyle.
So could last week's ruling by the Supreme Court, whose nine judges in a close vote said once and for all that all law-abiding Americans have the right to bear arms freely in exactly the same way as they have the right to speak, gather and worship freely.
Contrary to what you may be reading about the issue, the majority decision of the Supreme Court held that the US bill of rights, embedded in the constitution since 1791, gives every law-abiding US citizen the right to own personal firearms - pistols, rifles, shotguns and the like. Within hours the deeply committed tried to spin us all off this central and vital fact.
The news agency Reuters sneered editorially that: "Although an individual now has a constitutional right to own guns, that new right is not unlimited, wrote [Justice Antonin] Scalia, a hunter."
Reuters erred. The only point of the "new" ruling was that it is not new, but rather almost 217 years old. The court did not say that "from now on" all Americans have the right to keep guns at home; it said they always have had that right - because any newer laws against the right to own guns were unconstitutional.
Being a hunter or an Olympics-level shooter has nothing to do with the right to own personal-style firearms in the US. Laws can forbid owning military-type weapons under certain circumstances, say, just as laws can and do forbid shouting "fire" in a theatre under certain circumstances.
Even pro-gun Assistant Law Professor Michael O'Shea of Oklahoma City University wrote on his blog, Concurring Opinions, that: "The imposition by the US government of a UK-style system of sweeping gun bans and prohibitions on armed self-defence is now off the table. Such laws are a violation of the US constitution."
Well, yes, but again the point of the court decision was that they always were violations of the supreme law, even though many local governments in the US have tried to break the law by enforcing them.
One can disagree about the gun issue, but surely all arguments must be based on a solid knowledge of the facts.
Far from embracing the seemingly obvious global trend to ban most personal gun ownership, US public opinion in recent years has actually increased in favour of gun ownership - 73% in the last Gallup Poll in March - and not just locked in a gun cabinet for use in hunting and sports, either. Just 31% favour tougher anti-gun laws, reported the Zogby Poll, with most mainstream media editors apparently ranting in the minority.
After a troubled student at supposedly gun-free Virginia Tech university killed 32 people and shot many others in April of last year, a national debate broke out about guns on campus. A clear majority seemed to favour them.
Sheriff Jim Alderden of next-door Fort Collins, site of the 25,000-student Colorado State University, openly criticised no-gun zones at universities, calling them areas where "crazed individuals can prey on other students".
"A firearm in the hands of law abiding citizens who frequent the campus is not a risk, but could be a deterrent to violent criminal activity," he said.
This deterrent factor has gained much credit in the past few years. There have been several slaughters of innocents in so-called gun-free zones - and several well-publicised incidents where armed citizens took down "crazed individuals" before they could kill.
Last December, Jeanne "Dirty Harriet" Assam saw Matthew Henry enter her church in Colorado Springs, where he began to fire on worshippers with a rifle. She pulled out her legal handgun and shot him, saving perhaps 50 lives. The pastor said the man with a rifle, two handguns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition probably would have killed 100 in the large church. (The wounded gunman committed suicide.)
In February of last year, an off-duty policeman broke the law and packed his handgun while shopping at the allegedly weapons-free Trolley Square mall in Ogden, Utah, which has the right to ban guns because it is private property. He was at the opposite end of the Seacon Centre-sized complex, but still was the first to trade shots with a gunman who was randomly killing shoppers, and stopped the murderer in his tracks.
The writer Robert Heinlein wrote famously that: "An armed society is a polite society." For the moment at least, Americans have bought into that.
Consider that in Chicago, the hometown of Barack Obama, 27 students have been killed by gunfire since September. Consider that nine Chicago people were killed in a single deadly weekend recently when there were 36 separate shootings. Consider that there is a total ban on gun ownership in Chicago.
Mr Obama was righteously anti-gun until he became a national politician. Now he has waffled and not made a single speech against guns or in favour of more anti-gun laws. Nor will he unless he wants to lose significantly more votes than he can gain.
Visitors often are surprised at the placid pace of life in the US, seemingly no different from other countries even though there are 300 million guns spread liberally among its 300 million residents.
Many of those who support the Supreme Court's decision, which officially upholds the right of ordinary citizens to own, store and carry guns, believe the best system of gun control is take lessons on how to hold the gun with both hands and hit the target.
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