Every time there is a fatal crime resulting from guns in the United States, the world collectively rediscovers its amazement that fire-arms are regulated so little in that country.
While predicated on the rather unproven causality between legal fire-arm ownership and criminality, such concerns often get lost in hysteria and hubris that do not explain well the American exceptionalism regarding guns.
Almost uniquely in the developed world (Switzerland being the other exception), neither a general prohibition of personal fire-arm ownership nor a licensing regime for the same is part of the American legal framework.
For reasons that are constitutional, historical, primal, and social, the regulation of private gun ownership is fundamentally different in the United States than any of her peers in the developed democracies of the world, let alone the developing societies.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, as reinforced by two Supreme Court decisions in the first decade of this century, prohibits any government, at any level, from “infringing” upon the rights of citizens to own fire-arms for hunting or self-defense.
Within that constitutional parameter, at the national level, gun regulations principally deal with sale and shipment of weapons, and the registration of high-capacity items like machine guns and grenades.
Beyond that, different states have varying sets of regulations dealing with private ownership of firearms: The more urban states like New York, California, and Illinois prohibit the sale of certain, purely military-style weapons and require some form of training or licensing for the possession of other types.
The more rural states in the South and Midwest have very few regulations, and some, like my own, allow citizens who are not felons to openly carry fire-arms in public as long as they don’t seek to intimidate others.
Historically as well, in a country born of a revolt against the world’s mightiest empire, the individual right to bear arms strikes a chord that is hard to dismiss. Without a culture of self-reliance for defense, it is inconceivable to imagine that the rag-tag militias of George Washington would have been able to take on the British Army.
Self-defense was also important in the aftermath of the Reconstruction period in the 1870s, when the Ku Klux Klan terror organisation systemically targeted blacks, Jews, Catholics, and Republicans in the American South, while the largely white, Protestant, Democratic law enforcement structure there stood on the sidelines.
It is no surprise that some of the fiercest opponents of gun control were the first wave of emancipated blacks in the Deep South states, where, more often than not in the early years of the 20th century, the only defense against murdering KKK bigots was the rifle of the home-owner.
Fast forwarding to recent times, the primal desire of individuals to be safe in their own person and property has hardly diminished since the Civil War era. The sheer size of the inhabitable land which, outside of the major metropolitan conurbations, finds families living dozens of miles away from any police unit, makes it almost a necessity to find means of protecting oneself from intruders bent on harm.
At the same time, many of the biggest American cities have a permanent and huge under-class, where generations of illegitimacy and welfare dependency create a criminal under-current that can terrorise law-abiding citizens who are loath to depend on an imperious municipal police for emergency protection.
Beyond the practical uses, guns also serve as a revered totem for a certain broad demographic in the United States: Men with little formal education and traditional social mores, whose importance as sole bread-winners for their families has been severely compromised by breath-taking changes in the socio-economic landscape.
With women matching and often surpassing men in educational attainment, and low-tech manufacturing plants replaced by information technology firms, such men are left with few obvious symbols of their once vaunted primacy -- a collection of guns is one such symbol.
The relationship that America has with guns is unique enough -- in both substance and context -- that it would be a folly to judge it through the lens of simple theories which are deduced from the facts in other parts of the world.
Indeed, there is some truth to the point often made by gun rights advocates that world history has often shown that tyrants begin their reign by disarming ordinary citizens.
Given the strong constitutional safe-guards and the necessity of gun ownership felt by so many law-abiding Americans, it is highly unlikely that private ownership of fire-arms in the United States will go the route of England, Canada, or Australia anytime soon.