Translated from a 2013 article by Freerk Huisken, Gegenrede 26
A school massacre in Newtown and already a debate is raging in the USA about the right of Americans to be privately armed
What do gun laws have to do with mass shootings?
1.
After every mass shooting, whether in the USA, Germany or elsewhere, the initial outrage is quickly followed by the usual debate about the causes. The options are always the same: The perpetrator must have been mentally ill, allowed himself to be manipulated by violent video games and brutal first-person shooters, had much too easy access to firearms, or grew up in a home where he was beaten instead of loved. And with the same reliability, representatives of the gun lobby – in the USA, it is the powerful NRA, here it is the shooting clubs, the rifle sports associations, or hunting clubs with their associated gun suppliers – and the lobby of the producers who make a business out of those violent video games, enter the public sphere and know full well that the consumers of their snazzy business ideas are completely normal citizens who pursue their fun or sport or who feel defenseless and, what’s more, no longer like real Americans without weapons. It can happen that gun nuts point the finger at the combat game players and their distributors, while the latter point their finger at the guns within easy reach in the dining room. Everyone wants to identify the other as the culprit and to get out of the line of fire. The issue of mental illness, on the other hand, appeals to everyone. It is only problematized in scientific discussions in which psychologists and sociologists throw the ball into each other‘s court: Nature or nurture – 50% to 50%, 30% to 70% or 70% to 30%? Prof. Dr. Christian Pfeiffer is responsible for the alleged lasting effect of harsh parenting methods – at least in Germany, where no mass shooting can be televised without commentary from the criminologist and former interior minister from Lower Saxony.
2.
These propositions can‘t explain mass shootings. Not even when scientifically trained participants in public causal research declare them to be “factors” that all play their “role” in the “complex and multi-causal event” in which everything is often somehow connected to everything else. This is not because they all miss the thing that needs to be explained. They just raise the question of how it is possible for young people to be capable of such acts of violence and where their “willingness to use violence” comes from. They reduce these massacres to violence. That is said to be the whole purpose of the perpetrators. The reasons why these college boys or ex-students resort to such weapons are then of no interest. But there must be such reasons, because nobody picks up a semi-automatic assault rifle or a revolver for no reason – however right or wrong these reasons may be. In other cases, it’s a sure thing that the relevant reasons will be found for the everyday acts of violence committed by people or institutions: A father beats up his son because he stole; skinheads want to drive foreigners out of the country with baseball bats; a husband beats up an adulterer because he is in a dispute over his wife; a defender breaks a striker’s leg because he wants to prevent him from scoring; teachers use violence to separate students who are arguing in the schoolyard, etc. In all these cases, regardless of whether the use of violence is publicly welcomed, declared to be unfortunately necessary, or condemned, it is always the case that its use is only a means of breaking people's will or snuffing out their willfulness, i.e. their lives: they have been identified as disobedient, as criminals, as opponents, as enemies, as slanderers or offenders, and the perpetrators have come to the judgment that they cannot be made compliant by influencing their will. But mass shooters are supposed to be motivated by nothing but an interest in violence for its own sake – without reason and without content? There is no such thing.
3.
However, this construction is sufficient to declare the perpetrators mentally ill: The indignant diagnosis is that a normal citizen is incapable of killing innocent people, including children, for no reason. It is, however, inaccurate when formulated in this way, as it does not apply to citizens in uniform who are sent into enemy territory and – “unfortunately” – sometimes cause collateral damage to civilians. But the good political reasons for these acts of excessive violence are explained to us every day: if a state has its soldiers shoot people in Afghanistan or now in Mali, then it is only to guarantee our freedom in the Hindu Kush or our security around the “mare nostrum.” If, on the other hand, a young person in civilian clothes kills people on the “home front” and goes on a killing spree, he is declared sick in the head, and it is claimed that he lacks the desired sense of right and wrong and valid morals due to a defect, which is why he cannot possibly have known what he was doing and should therefore have been locked up. Incidentally, this is a conclusion that underlies the NRA’s proposal to register all mentally ill people in order to prevent them, and only them, from buying guns.
The fact that mass shooters are not masters of their own will is a finding that also underlies the other three theoretical explanations. Their minds are then considered to have been manipulated: either by the fascination of killing games, by the easy availability of weapons, or by the formative influence of abusive parents. It’s absurd: someone who comes from such a home does not fight out of a compulsion to imitate them and does not automatically reach for a weapon, but only when he has made the judgment that this means is suitable for his purpose. And conversely, there are always adolescents who reject these “child raising methods” of parents, precisely because they have experienced first-hand that nothing is ever accepted as a result, but rather that obedience is only achieved by eliminating punishment. It’s the same with shooting games: it is only the distinction between fun and seriousness, between fiction and reality that makes these games so entertaining. When the game is over and your opponent or you yourself are swimming in pixels of blood, you have to decide whether you want to play another round or whether it’s time to do homework, go to hockey practice, or chill with friends.
Anyone looking for a predisposition to violence is therefore making two separate theoretical mistakes: the asserted nonsense of violence without reason or content as an end leads to the search for forms of disruption of alleged normality which is the product of a natural deformation of the mind or of determining life circumstances that manipulate the will and consciousness, but are never the result of a well-founded decision to take revenge for the damages suffered – e.g. to one’s self-image.
4.
On the one hand, the finding that easy access to weapons is somehow also (partly) responsible for such massacres deals with the same mental crisis. That “opportunity makes the thief” – to invoke the relevant saying – may be considered an excuse for miscellaneous shoplifting incidents. Objectively, it is the case that the thief is characterized by the intention to commit theft – long planned or made on the spur of the moment. Unguarded goods in a department store do not become an “opportunity” without a decision to commit the crime. In the case of a mass shooting, it is also not the case that the ability to access weapons is the reason for the decision to go on a shooting spree in the first place. Such a “decision” would not even include a target to point the weapon at. The decision to commit the crime is usually made long before it is carried out, has a specific, well-founded content, and culminates in the carefully planned massacre. The perpetrator wants this to show the school or college, for example, that his classification as a failure or as an uncool outsider, and thus as a born powerless victim of bullying, is diametrically opposed to his self-image. He demonstrates that he can exercise power, even over life and death, and, deeply wounded in his honor, takes revenge on those who have completely misjudged him. He acquired his weapon legally or illegally, with or without a great deal of effort, long before. No gun law has prevented him from doing this. And no tightening of the gun laws will do that either.
5.
If a national gun register was introduced after the mass shooting in Winnenden and – “on a test basis,” as the responsible authorities say – stricter checks were carried out to ensure that the weapons were properly registered and stored in a child-proof way, then such a package of measures primarily serves other political purposes. In Germany as well as in the USA. “Shooting sprees can never be completely ruled out,” says the Bavarian Minister of the Interior (SZ, 1.23.13). He and his colleagues in the German states and the federal government are generally very skeptical about civilians owning weapons, regardless of such school massacres. As holders and supreme representatives of a state monopoly on violence, they want to have first and final control over any equipment that could be used by unauthorized private individuals to compete with this state monopoly on violence: whether it be by people who commit murders of jealousy with a gun, by those who lynch alleged child molesters and so take the law into their own hands, or by those who use armed force to gain access to bank vaults because they find this form of raising money less laborious and risky than underpaid wage labor; or by those who kill immigrants or set up weapons caches in order to attempt a well-equipped uprising against the ruling state power – as is the order of the day in not so distant parts of the world.
The state monopoly on the use of violence therefore regulates who is allowed to carry and use weapons. These are primarily civil servants in uniform, security services of good repute and, for example, drivers of cash-in-transit vehicles. However, the fact that the latter repeatedly arouse suspicion, as is well known, is the subject of numerous scripts. Possession of weapons beyond this that doesn’t ccme under state security considerations is prohibited or declared an exception to the rule and controlled accordingly. The clear distinction between state-authorized officials and normal citizens who are obliged to abide by the law is the basis of state order in this country. It makes sure that it continues. Not least because it is only considered violence when citizens act without permission, while the same breaking of the will by the state is sold as “security measures,” “law and order” or “peacekeeping.”
At the same time, security policy shows that the state is the sole master of life and death. It allows itself to do what it strictly forbids its citizens to do by law and morality, namely to kill people, primarily in the form of its uniformed service members: In war, of course, but also in peacetime, which obviously includes mass patrols by armed police, the arming of border guards, and the special establishment of munition-free zones – be it around government districts, barracks, or nuclear power plants and much more.
In fact, “discord” in the peaceful market economy established and guarded by the state is repeatedly caused by its contradictions. These are sometimes materially based: Any violation of property by private individuals who cannot use property as a source of money and are therefore excluded from the wealth produced in this country is a breach of the basic principle of the prevailing economic order and must be nipped in the bud by force; sometimes it is the psychological consequences of the competitive society that leads to various kinds of violence in the private lives of the citizens and is also responsible for “youth violence.” Sometimes it is the organized resistance against “disloyal elements,” with which disappointed rightwing nationalists make their presence felt in murderous ways; and sometimes it is resistance against the entire system, which was taken up by the Red Army Faction. All this has made one thing clear to the state: despite the voluntary obedience of the majority of the state‘s people, which is achieved by democratic means such as legal coercion and the permission to constructively criticize, it must look after its citizens. Governments create enough reasons for protest, resistance and unauthorized opposition in every legislative period. And they know it. That is why any tightening of gun laws is nothing more than a further safeguarding of its monopoly on the use of force and thus of the political and economic purposes for which it was established.
6.
The situation in the USA is somewhat different: Obama can‘t, and doesn‘t want to, stop mass shootings by trying to enforce stricter gun laws. Instead, he wants to set new limits on a constitutionally protected systemic principle established in the USA: The strict distinction established in Germany between public officials who use law and violence to ensure that the system is enforced and private individuals who are absolutely compelled to obey this system by the rule of law has not been established in this way. In addition to the state-appointed and appropriately equipped forces of law and order and a functioning judiciary, every American citizen is not only allowed to equip himself with the weapons of his choice, he may also use them as a civilian in defense of “law and order.” The Second Amendment of the US Constitution of 1791 allows US citizens to do so: “A well organized Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” It is not the principle of this permission that bothers Obama, but its occasionally rather liberal interpretation by citizens, by quickly appointed deputies and vigilantes, which is not exactly conducive to the security of “free states” – as he believes as head of the USA.
The only explanation fpr the fact that the Obama administration’s more than moderate plan – to ban purchases of assault rifles and ammunition depots, control their sales, prohibit certain citizens if necessary, register them nationally in any case, etc. – has caused a storm of indignation in the USA is the national mindset of American citizens. They associate gun ownership with a kind of private combat mission in which unreserved assertion in the competition and loyal commitment to the US state becomes blurred. Standing up with a gun against “un-American activities,” or whatever they consider that to be – ranging from abortion to immigration policy, from equal rights for their “black fellow citizens” to permission to build mosques – is considered by many American citizens to be not only a right, but virtually a duty of every good American. What is evidence of a righteous American attitude – a nationalism bordering on fanaticism – for those who love the private use of weapons is somewhat different for the US government. For example, Obama points out that “in the month since the rampage in Newtown, more than 900 people were killed by guns in the United States” – although, it must be added, quite a few of the gunmen were certainly acting with the best of intentions, namely in defense of their idea of “law and order.”
The government wants to bring all of this under better state control and, as a result, is attracting the suspicion, nurtured by the NRA, that it is itself the mastermind of “un-American activities.” These organized gun fanatics therefore draw the opposite conclusion from the Newtown massacre: teachers should arm themselves and armed citizen militias, recruited from parents, should patrol the schools. These armed good Americans are to make sure that the armed bad guys have no chance of getting into the school. All this and government threats of more restrictive sales practices have led to gun stores now selling out, the first vigilante groups being installed outside schools, and the arming of teachers being encouraged regionally. The only question is how these pedagogical militias are now supposed to distinguish the bad guys from the good guys when all those who have become mass shooters so far have not acted as Rambos, but as normal schoolchildren, and, moreover, the carrying of weapons by schoolchildren in the USA is considered not only cool, but also a necessity for the clashes between gangs that take place in schools. But surely a few innocent victims can still be justified by the “good cause.”