President Joe Biden has highlighted and interlinked the violence against women and the easy accessibility of assault weapons with their high capacity magazines
Gunrunning is a malady which mars the stability and stolidity of the larger rubric of the United States. The American constitution allows citizens to have legal guns which doesn’t border on an automatic firearm. Since the inception of the British colonial rule and the attendant counter-moves through the American revolution and the patriot’s activities, the citizens of United States have found firearms to be a part and parcel of their civic entourage and day-to-day life.
With the advent of anarchy and pandemonium in the context of the British rule, bearing guns in an organised fashion became a nom de plume for the Americans which persisted even when the Americans gained independence.
Gunrunning challenges the fundamental premise of the USA, both as a civilised nation and as a purveyor of the liberal democracy. On the other side of the fence is the agrarian aggressor, who owns guns, and the derelicts who own advanced weaponry which led to the gunrunning incidents sometimes at an American school or in a mall or in the lobby of a cinema hall. It’s much beyond what David Kuresh did to the American disciples a few decades back!
Still, from the time of the American myth, the citizens led by their leaders have sashayed their personal weapons as instruments of pride and protection. Vigilantes as part of the national truth-seeking instruments have always been part of the American myth, wherein, capped cowboys have been avid subjects of cinema and musical performances and presentations in order to man the western crime filled frontiers of the shack towns in the then western underbelly of a dusty, wind-swept, United States of America. This is how the American nation has acquired its greatness and profundity through example setting, deep-seated and frothing functionalism.
The cowboy mindset of the superhero variant is a central motif of American culture and its existential stature much adhered to by President Donald Trump. A hero has to go gung ho with his steed, crack gun and the horse’s hooves, if order has to be restored on the side of the just and the meek’s protection. In the cultural-societal mores, it’s the figure of Charleston Heston, who runs in the tradition of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association (NRA) that messages for the masculine and protective veneer of a responsibly restrained American society and the larger life.
Let’s delve inside the IInd amendment which legalises gun ownership and not the related violence in the American firmament. It’s legal to own a non-assault oriented weapon for personal and familial protection which should not raise much of a question and a poser. Still, what needs to be looked inside is that a few lacunae remain and persist in the gun laws. One of the major issues being a psychological, medical analysis of a prospective gun-owner, who might be mentally unstable or a juvenile derelict, and thus poses a threat to the lives of other American denizens. Telling issues have been brought forth by the American anti-gun lobby, but what stares them right in the face is the fact that the anti-gun lobby is not as well organised as the environment lobby or the tobacco lobby, which, makes the functioning of it very difficult in the legal and the financial sense. Still, pitched battles have been fought between the gun-runners and the anti-gun lobbies in the national and state judicature with promising results for the anti-gun lobbies as they are largely led and funded by the lawyers’ guild in the business of things.
One of the cases, which appeared in the US Supreme Court, deals with a January 2019 engagement which details the debate that can the Manhattan gun-owners actually and safely transport the handguns without engendering the chances of violence in New York? The Guardian reports that, “The conservative-majority US Supreme Court has taken up its biggest gun rights case in nearly a decade, agreeing to hear a challenge backed by the influential National Rifle Association lobby-group to New York City’s strict limits on handgun-owners transporting their firearms outside the home. The nine justices reviewed a 2018 lower court ruling upholding the city’s restrictions after three gun-owners and the NRA’s New York state affiliate sued, claiming the regulations imposed in the largest American city, violated the constitution’s second amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”
President Joe Biden, too, has announced that gunrunning, gun walking and violence is similar to being an epidemic in the organic whole of the United States. It has been reported in a prominent Indian national daily that, “US President Joe Biden on Thursday announced limited gun control reforms through six actions in the aftermath of three deadly mass shootings, including the killing of Asian Americans in Atlanta and shoppers at a grocery store in Colorado in recent months, calling the divisive issue an “epidemic and an international embarrassment”. President Biden has announced new gun control measures in order to belittle the threat of home-made weapons. Joe Biden has contended that America witnesses people dying everyday due to gun-related violence is a blemish on the free, democratic and egalitarian ethos of the United States of America while convening a placatory mass for all the citizens unnecessarily stained in Sandy hook and Stoneman Douglas High school and expressed his angst as, “We are thoroughly determined to end this menace of gunrunning in the nation,” as part of his half a dozen executive actions since his donning the mantle of the American Presidency.
President Biden has highlighted and interlinked the violence against women, and the easy accessibility of assault weapons with their high capacity magazines.
In a recent move, President Biden appointed David Chipman, a guns control consultant at Gifford’s, as the head of the Bureau on Alcohol, Tobacco, firearms and Explosives (ATF). Though Chipman is a proud gun owner, he has been an actively avid gun control lobbyist since the last twenty-five years. Two themes have emerged of key interest in the international firmament that gun trafficking from the US to the UK has been augmented and the ISIS is also behind the gun trafficking trade in Malaysia. Thus, the global overarch of the menace of gunrunning and gun walking cannot be relegated to the backburner when one refers to gun-related violence in the American homeland. District of Columbia VS Heller in 2008 brought to fore the debate that whether the IInd amendment protects the rights of the American citizens to own weapons in self defense but added the rider, that, gun trade will continue to be regulated and the right to own guns is not unlimited. Thus, eventually, strengthening the hands of those, who, cry foul at the gunrunning crisis in the United States of America.
(The writer teaches at International Relations and International Organisations, IIPA, New Delhi)