The Elusive Line (archive)

It’s a humid morning in Kampala, the bustling, overcrowded capital city of the East African nation of Uganda. In the distance you can hear prayer calls from a local mosque, and the blaring horn of a taxi driver recklessly maneuvering through traffic accompanied by the cacophony of revving motorcycles as people start their morning commutes. Many walk to work, including security guards in ill-fitting and heavily starched uniforms. They carry a plastic bag with their lunch, and perhaps a change of civilian clothes. They also carry their firearm, often slung carelessly over one shoulder. These are not top-of-the-line weapons, but more like crudely constructed bolt-action, single shot rifles that maybe someone made in his basement with a blowtorch and a hacksaw.  You might also see a police officer or soldier carrying his battered Kalashnikov, not unlike someone carrying a briefcase to his office job. To an outsider, this scene seems unusual and even alarming. But in Kampala, seeing young men openly carrying their firearms to work is as routine as seeing the postal worker carrying out his rounds in the United States.

To an outsider, Uganda seems a place where security is a significant issue. Though it is relatively stable now, the “Pearl of Africa” (as Churchill called it) has seen civil wars, and several coups since the country gained independence from Britain in 1962. Police officers stand guard at major thoroughfares with armored personnel carriers, and brandish automatic weapons. Crime is certainly an issue in Uganda, but most crime consists of robberies and theft. Want and poverty are the principle motivators of this crime.  However, in a general sense, from my experience of living there for five years, I would say it is a peaceful country where violent crime is rarely heard of.  All the Ugandans I met in my time there were exemplary in their warmth and friendliness.

In murders per 100,000, the United States ranks higher than Uganda by 14%.

So, one might argue, perhaps, that the reason for the lower murder rate is that Uganda has armed its citizens so that they may defend themselves? I don’t think so. And statistics don’t bear that out. In comparison to the United States, Uganda has sixty-three times fewer guns per 100,000 residents than the United States. That’s right, a country which has endured civil wars, invasions, and insurgencies has sixty-three times fewer guns than the United States. And yet, it still has a lower murder rate per 100,000.

Not only does Uganda have fewer guns, I dare say that few Ugandans would ever conclude that they needed to have more. I think most would balk at this idea. In Ugandan history, it was the well-armed “liberators” who soon became the oppressors, the terrorists, and the tyrants. Most Ugandans still remember the brutal rule of Idi Amin and are wise enough to know from this history that guns were not the defenders of liberty they initially seemed.

For most of my life, I lived overseas. My father is a diplomat, my mother has been a director for several NGOs. In Uganda, she was Peace Corps director.  In no place where I lived did I ever see anything like the gun problem that plagues my home, the United States. The only other countries where mass shootings and high gun violence are as prevalent are places like Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan (i.e. countries that U.S. State Department advises Americans to avoid). This situation is not normal. Gun violence, mass shootings, and a lack of common-sense gun laws in the United States are not an acceptable situation. The citizens of no country, and certainly no Western industrial country, should ever have to endure what people in the United States endure on such a regular basis. The fact that our lawmakers and many of our fellow Americans are so unwilling to face this fact is stunning. It is no exaggeration to say that the United States is a country where the death of a French bulldog in the overhead bin of an airliner generated a faster response from the U.S. Congress than the latest in a chain of mass shootings which left 17 innocent high school students dead (legislation was filled a day later in the Senate following the death of the dog).

This is appalling and bizarre to most of the rest of the world. It’s become a routine part of life in the U.S. to read “17 more kids mowed down in school today” and respond by saying “Ho-hum, turn the page.” 

We’ve become a nation obsessed by the fear of possible terrorist attack by outsiders, but unable to react to the daily terrorism of gun violence perpetrated by our own people. In late 2015, the Paris attacks were trumpeted as a warning by right-wing politicians of the imminent danger we faced by allowing refugee Syrian women and children onto our shores. The San Bernardino shooting that killed 14 further transfixed the American public. And yet, on an average day in the United States, 96 people die due to gun violence. Every single day, 96 people are killed, not by foreigners, Islamic terrorists, or “bad hombres”, but by their fellow Americans. If all deaths caused by gun violence since 1968 in the United States are combined, they form a sum greater than the total American casualties of all the wars we have ever fought since the Revolution. And yet, nothing is done.

Every time a dozen more children are slaughtered senselessly, many of us ask ourselves, when exactly will the elusive line be crossed which demands prompt action? What has to happen before Congress finds the courage to act? How many more innocent Americans need to die in preventable tragedies before we finally realize that to have such ready access to weapons of death and destruction such as automatic rifles is utter madness? When will we stop trying to rationalize a situation that is clearly insane?

Maybe the ice is breaking finally. In the past few weeks, courageous students from Majory High School and high schools nationwide are marching on their state capitols, walking out of classes, and making their voices heard. Of course, already some in our nation are trying to silence them. Schools are penalizing students that walk out of classes, and the gun lobby has shamelessly dismissed survivors of the mass shooting as “crisis actors” or tools of the anti-gun movement. These are children who survived a brutal massacre and yet they are fair game to the NRA and their political allies.

Emma Gonzales, a survivor of the Majory High School shooting and one of the most vocal student activists, was denounced as a “lesbian skin head” by Leslie Gibson, a Maine Republican who demonstrated a shocking lack of civility, basic human empathy, and decency in a series of vitriolic tweets against Gonzales. Nonetheless, I hope that the students will persist until the nation becomes so ashamed of itself that it cannot help but act. We need reform in our gun laws, and we need it now. No American school child should ever have to live in fear of having his or her life cut short by a mentally disturbed classmate. No American parent should ever have to bury a beloved child because of the greed, anger and paranoia of the NRA and its political allies.