Gun protests in US raise hope for positive change

Demonstrations across the United States last weekend by hundreds of thousands of predominantly young US residents raised the prospect that a new generation will finally overturn the country's dominant gun culture.

The "March for Our Lives" protests included survivors of the latest mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed last month. The demonstrators were demanding tougher rules on ownership of guns in the US.

As someone brought up in a non-gun culture Britain, it has frequently struck me on my frequent stays in the US, including some of its wilder reaches, that the basis of the country's gun culture has more to do with emotion than with self-defense or historical rights.

Surprisingly, even some sane US citizens appear to be in love with their guns. Others show an almost unhealthy attachment to weapons of the type that most of us think do not belong outside the battlefield. Inadequates view their guns as the great equalizer, while the paranoid see them as their first defense against often imagined threats. That perhaps explains the psychological profile of many who carry out the deadly shootings that inflict such pain on communities with increasing frequency.

Most of the rest of the world accepts the need for gun control for the simple reason that it makes sense. After a lone gunman killed 16 children and a teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996 in a rare mass shooting there, the government met little opposition when it swiftly adopted a ban on private ownership of most handguns.

In China, as in many other countries, gun ownership is broadly limited to the military and the police, with the exception of hunting rifles for permit-holding hunters.

Most modern societies have rejected the facile slogan of the US gun lobby that "guns don't kill people, people kill people", and concluded that it is indeed guns that kill people and so the fewer guns, the better.

There are historical reasons for the US' gun culture, though. There was a justifiable reason for a society that had thrown off the yoke of the English king to maintain a "well regulated militia" to prevent him or anyone else attempting to reassert control. The gun lobby argues that private gun ownership is a defense against any future tyranny, although its critics argue that the main motivation of its powerful backers is actually to sell more guns, and make more profits.

Presumably the motivation of the country's founding fathers was not to empower criminals and psychopaths to wreak havoc in the lives of the people. So it seems common sense for the US to at least tighten controls in order to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands.

The recent protests were an indication that a growing number of US citizens are no longer prepared to be victims of a historical tradition, which has been perverted by the gun lobby, and are ready to make their own history by forcing a change in the rules.

Polls indicate a majority of US citizens now support at least a degree of tougher controls. Many US states have long imposed their own restrictive measures, without chaos ensuing. The young protesters, meanwhile, have signaled that turning their schools and colleges into armed camps is not their idea of freedom.

After some of the largest demonstrations by young people in the US since the Vietnam War, there are hopes that the tide is turning against the gun lobby.

Many saluted the young survivors of mass shootings who were prepared to show their faces to demand changes in the law. In some places, pro-gun activists turned up with their guns at rival rallies to demand, among other things, the arming of teachers.

So who were the real heroes in that contest?

The author is a senior media consultant for China Daily UK.

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