American myth of freedom through guns

The brutal murder of 20 children and seven adults in Newtown, Connecticut, shakes us to the core as individuals and requires a response as citizens. The United States seems to reel from one mass gun killing to another - roughly one a month this year alone. America needs to find a better way.

Other countries have done so. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, Australia had several mass shootings. After a massacre in 1996, then prime minister John Howard instituted a severe crackdown on gun ownership, and forced would-be gun owners to submit to a rigorous application process.

Conditions for gun ownership in Australia are now very strict. The government also implemented a rigorous "buyback" policy, to enable it to purchase guns already owned by the public.

The policy worked. Murders are down and there has not been a single mass shooting since 1996 in which three or more people died. Before the crackdown, there had been 13 such massacres in 18 years.

Yet the US still refuses to act. The US homicide rate is roughly four times that of comparable societies in Western Europe, and Latin America's homicide rates are even higher than in the US. What accounts for this?

American violence is rooted in history. The US and Latin American countries are all "conquest" societies, in which Europeans ruled over multiracial societies. In many of these countries, the European conquerors and their descendants nearly wiped out the indigenous populations, partly through disease, but also through war, starvation, death marches and forced labour.