America is a bizarre country. To be an American – or to live in America – is to accept a few things that defy common sense. For starters, pizza is considered a “vegetable” under federal law. Two tablespoons of tomato paste on the dough is enough to make the pie healthy enough to be served at every public school cafeteria. Speaking of health, emergency rooms across the country routinely turn down trauma patients who fail to produce proof of health insurance. Facing skyrocketing healthcare costs, the uninsured are left for dead and the insured are worried sick about rising deductibles and annual premiums. Not bizarre enough? Here's another good one: gun shootings have become so commonplace that the evening news no longer reports them unless they are a “shooting rampage.” And each time after a massacre, gun enthusiasts line up outside Wal-Mart to stock up on assault weapons for fear of tougher gun laws. That’s right, in America you can buy a military-style semi-automatic rifle off the shelf at your neighbourhood Wal-Mart, the same way we pick out a frying pan from Sogo.
Ironically, the NRA’s biggest enemies are neither gun law advocates nor the so-called liberal media. Their worst nightmare is the occasional depraved heart who storms into schools, shopping malls and government buildings and sprays bullets on the innocent. Names like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Oak Creek are now synonymous with mass murders and forever etched into the nation’s psyche. Two Fridays ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza joined the growing list of crazed gunmen and killed 26 teachers and children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Lanza was armed with three semi-automatic assault weapons, including two handguns and a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, the type of combat weapons used by Mexican drug cartels and African warlords. Another shotgun was found in Lanza’s car and three more firearms were uncovered in his house. All seven weapons were legally obtained under Connecticut state law by Lanza’s mother, whom he murdered prior to the school shootings.
The Newtown shooting shook America to the core. For those living in the Tristate area, including my brother Dan and his family, the tragedy brought the issue of gun violence much closer to home. Days after the shooting, Dan received an invitation from his daughter’s school principal to attend a town hall meeting to discuss school safety. Later that week, Dan’s eight-year-old daughter Kimmie went through a “lock-down” drill at school. Kimmie and her fellow third-graders learned all the places in the classroom where they could hide: under the desks, inside the cabinet and behind the piano. They also learned how to stay quiet, refrain from crying and keep clear of the classroom door during an “emergency situation.” So while students in Hong Kong go through fire drills and Japanese children learn what to do in an earthquake, kids in America are taught tricks to evade armed gunmen like some bad Halloween movie. It is absurd, but hey, it is America!
Gun control, abortion and same-sex marriage are the “Big Three” social debates of our time. Gun law reform is especially controversial because of the economic interests involved and the cultural nerve it touches. Advocates on both sides of the debate cite their own studies and statistics and are backed by their own scholars, celebrities and public interest groups. The for-and-against arguments go something like this. Supporters of tougher gun laws say “enough is enough.” They blame gun violence on easy access to firearms and question the recreational value of semi-automatic weapons like the Bushmaster XM-15. On the other hand, gun-rights advocates say “guns don’t kill, people do.” They use the classic slippery slope argument: what’s next after banning assault weapons? Pistols? Kitchen knives? Sharp pencils? Should China ban knives because some whack job in Henan Province stabbed 23 children at a primary school? But the NRA goes one step further. They believe that more guns is the solution to gun violence. At a press conference last week, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre said defiantly, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” He urged every school in America to hire armed security guards like they do at airports and court houses. The fact that LaPierre's proposal will boost gun sales is, I suppose, just a happy coincidence.
While gun law reform is stirring up passion in America, it is something of a no-brainer for the rest of the world. Here in Asia, we watch what happened in Connecticut in horror and listen to the ensuing social debate with disbelief. For most of us who didn’t grow up with firearms in our house, it is self-evident that restricting gun access is a direct, logical and effective way to curb gun violence. Discussing gun control with my colleagues and friends in Hong Kong makes for a deeply disappointing debate, for everyone seems to be on the same page. What confuses us, however, is why a great country like the Unites States – the superpower that put a man on the moon, beat the Soviets in the Cold War and invented the iPhone – can be so backward when it comes to such an obvious issue. We don’t understand how a population of 300 million can let a small minority of trigger-happy fanatics drive the national agenda. And when we hear the NRA’s proposal to fight gun violence by flooding the streets with even more guns, we don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for these people. One of my readers puts it best: “I don’t understand this country, and I never will.”