The SIG P320 is a source of endless controversy in gun circles. From shooting ranges to online forums, wherever gun guys gather, there are strong opinions on this pistol. If you aren’t a gun guy, you might mistake the dispute as a matter of brand loyalty: think Ford versus Chevy, Pepsi versus Coke. And the SIG debate is that, in part, but it’s also far more than that. 

The issues go a lot deeper, and the backstory reveals something about gun culture in America, and how it’s crossing the political divide from red to blue.

But to get something out of the way upfront, to save my fellow gun nuts a bunch of scrolling through this essay so they can figure out where I stand on The Issue: I’m a die-hard SIG guy with a small yet primo collection of raced-out DA/SA pistols to prove it. But I don’t touch the P320, nor do I recommend it to anyone.

There are exactly two things a loaded firearm absolutely must do with 100% reliability. First, it must go bang every time the shooter intends for it to do so. Second, it must never go bang when the shooter does not intend for it to do so. There is zero room for error in either of these two requirements, which, incidentally, is the reason why electronically authorized “smart guns” — which identify the user before permitting the gun to fire — have never taken off in the market and probably never will.

The Beretta M9 that the US Army issued to troops up until 2017 as a standard sidearm struggles to meet requirement No. 1, for example. For starters, the M9 had basic mechanical problems, at least initially. A 1988 Government Accountability Office report detailed significant quality and safety shortcomings: namely, slide failures and frame cracks. But the M9 and guns like it also have what we might think of as a user-interface problem that can prevent them from going off even when the gun is working exactly as designed. I’m speaking of the challenge posed by the presence of a manual safety mechanism.

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Even a perfectly functioning pistol can fail to fire when a shooter intends for it to do so, if that shooter has forgotten to flick off the safety before pulling the trigger. This safety issue is well-known for all guns that have manual safeties. When I took my concealed-carry class, the two veteran Austin Police Department detectives who taught it spent time scaring us with stories of dead cops whose corpses were found with their trigger fingers swollen from desperately squeezing a trigger that was never going to fire, because they “missed the throw” of the safety lever in the stress of a shootout.

The instructors told us these horror stories to stress the importance of training yourself to the point that your body reflexively flicks the safety off when bringing the gun up; you shouldn’t even have to think about it. But what about those of us who just don’t have time to ingrain the safety flick so deeply into our muscle memory that our thumb will automatically do it, without fail, under life-or-death levels of stress? What about new recruits?

Training is one way to address this issue. Another is to simply remove the safety, which is essentially what striker-fired pistols like the Glock and the Smith & Wesson M&P ultimately did. (The Glock does have a tiny little safety built into the trigger, so that when you pull the trigger you’re pulling the safety, but it’s basically like not having a safety. Note also that you can get versions of these pistols with a manual safety, but this isn’t a popular option and is typically only selected in situations where a department still requires the safety.)

Striker-fired pistols became popular over the past few decades with police and special forces because they nail our requirement No 1: every time the trigger is pulled, these light, partially plastic handguns go bang. They may not have the ergonomics and heft of a nice Colt 1911. But these “plastic-fantastic” shooting appliances have proved to be extraordinarily reliable. And most important, they’re dead-easy to use under pressure, because you don’t have the added step of manually disengaging the safety before engaging the target.

Which brings us back to Pretti’s handgun. In January 2017, the US Army announced that the SIG P320 had won the bid to become the branch’s next standard-issue service pistol. This announcement brought the Army into the striker-fired era, and was a huge victory for SIG Sauer over rival firms like Beretta and Glock.

The P320 is more than just a striker-fired pistol. It’s a modular weapon system — a “platform” that lets buyers mix and match the parts so that the same gun can be configured in more than one size and capacity.

This concept of a gun as a “weapon system” or “platform” was pioneered by the AR-15, which an executive at high-end AR maker Daniel Defense once told me is like “Legos for grownups”. In recent years, Glock has also evolved in a similar direction, with an ecosystem of aftermarket parts so extensive that it’s possible to build a complete “Glock” out of entirely non-Glock parts from other manufacturers.

The P320 fully embraced this hacker ethos and incorporated it into its design. From the point of view of federal firearms law, the “gun” is legally whatever part of the firearm has the serial number on it. In the case of the P320, the serial number is engraved on a small metal frame that houses the trigger and the core mechanical parts — all of which can be swapped out, or the frame itself can be moved around into different-sized grips and matched with slides and barrels of different lengths.

So when you buy a P320, you’re essentially buying a fully assembled gun kit that’s designed to be disassembled and reassembled in a variety of configurations for applications like concealed carry, home defense, or military use.

As with its striker-fired cousins from other makers, there was little question that the P320 would go bang every time the shooter pulled the trigger. But about two years after the gun’s 2014 debut in the civilian market, rumors began cropping up of troubling incidents: to wit, a number of users claimed that their P320 had fired a round without the trigger being touched. By the time the gun won the Army contract, the uncommanded-discharge allegations were widely known, but not necessarily widely believed, in the gun community.

YouTube videos began circulating, as the “bro scientists” went to work proving or disproving the reports of uncommanded discharges rolling in from firearm classes, police departments, and gun stores.

The specific allegation is that if the gun is dropped — or even bumped or jostled just right — the internal mechanism that holds the spring-loaded firing pin striker will disengage and the gun will go off, even though the trigger hasn’t been touched. Accusations of such flaws have plagued other striker-fired pistols on and off through the years, including the Glock. But with the P320, there is such a great quantity of smoke that it seems pretty reasonable to many to assume there’s a fire, too.

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If the uncommanded-discharge reports were true and indicative of some sort of design flaw, then this would be bad. Very bad. It would be bad for SIG, obviously, but also bad for the legions of shooters who had rushed out to buy a modern, modular handgun billed as a garage tinkerer’s dream.

To decide if the P320 has a real problem, you can spend hours watching YouTube videos and forming your own opinion. I’ll just say that for me, as for many other gun enthusiasts and SIG partisans, the mere fact of the controversy is enough to keep us away from the P320. There are many other great handguns out there, and even SIG has a solid alternative in the P365 family of striker-fired pistols. (I own and shoot one of these.)

Why does this controversy matter within the broader debate over the Pretti shooting? First, as I said above, the P320 is absolutely going to bang if a finger or anything else gets inside the trigger guard and applies the required few pounds of pressure to the trigger. As you can probably guess, these kinds of negligent discharges resulting from improper gun handling happen all the time with striker-fired guns. They happen when someone is reholstering the weapon and a piece of clothing gets caught in the trigger guard. And they can certainly happen when someone is amped up in a high-pressure situation and has grabbed the weapon — either his own or someone else’s — and unthinkingly placed his finger on the switch.

If Pretti’s gun went off at any point — and there’s an ongoing dispute over whether it did — then it was most likely because the officer holding it accidentally pulled the trigger.

The second, more disturbing, and admittedly far more remote possibility is that this was an uncommanded discharge. That is, the ICE officer who removed the SIG from Pretti bumped the gun in such a way that it went off at exactly the wrong moment, causing confusion among his comrades, and costing the protester his life.

Whatever the truth, the discharge — whether it did or didn’t happen, or what role the peculiarities of the P320 ultimately played — should be part of a careful probe of what took place. That is, if we ever get such a probe. What’s most surreal for me, as a longtime shooter and on-and-off gun-industry reporter, is the fact that this very Republican-coded “gun-guy” controversy has now bled over into the blue side of my feed.

We now have the spectacle of a Left-wing concealed carrier sucked into the long-running SIG P320 controversy, and whose right to carry that gun at that protest is being defended by both the arch-gun-restrictionist lawmaker Gabby Giffords and the National Rifle Association. What a time to be alive.

America, by contrast, is much wilder — with its mountains, deserts, hurricanes, bears and rattlesnakes. Unlike in the orderly UK, it’s easy to feel here as if the state has all but disappeared. Surely America’s vast landscape must play some role in shaping political life?

Certainly, following Donald Trump’s victory, it is impossible not to notice the profound contrast between the two countries. Over the last few years British politics has had a decidedly sad, small-country energy. Boris Johnson and “cash for curtains”, Liz Truss and the lettuce, Rishi Sunak in the rain, Keir Starmer snaffling free Taylor Swift concert tickets. In the US, on the other hand, we have an epic political drama that people will be writing about centuries from now. In the last three months, multiple assassins attempted to kill one candidate while plutocrats defenestrated a senile emperor so they could continue to exercise power through a talentless cypher. In a late plot twist, the plutocrats were thwarted, and now their nemesis is preparing to return to the seat of power. Clearly, this level of drama can only happen in a big country where people carve the faces of their greatest leaders into a mountain.

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The physical environment shapes politics in other ways too. Consider the perpetual debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment, for instance. This is extremely perplexing to outsiders, partly because they do not understand the sacred role of the Constitution. But there is also a pragmatic reason for gun ownership, which I learned from my father-in-law, who grew up in the Texas panhandle. Out there, he told me, the counties are huge, and police are few and far between. Dial 911 and you might be waiting a long time for help to arrive. In a wilderness full of coyotes, snakes, and bears, you need to be able to protect yourself.

You see this sentiment reflected in American attitudes to hunting. When I was growing up in the UK, the image of a hunter was a toff in a red coat, perched on a horse, setting his dogs on a fox. In the US, there is still an element of man against nature, of waiting for hours to shoot dinner, or perhaps to take out a feral hog with razor-sharp tusks charging at you at 25 miles per hour. This is also why the Democrats sent their bumbling vice presidential candidate Tim Walz into a field with a gun: to demonstrate that he was worthy of the male vote, he had to inflict violence upon nature. When he was filmed struggling to load his weapon, he was mercilessly ridiculed, and instantly lost credibility.

Another way the landscape has shaped American politics is by its sheer scale. A large nation forges a different type of politician: to play the game of power in such an immense country, you must become big yourself. In Britain we have a vestigial memory of this; anyone who reads history cannot help but be struck by the fact that our imperial elites, fighting uprisings across the globe while translating Thucydides for amusement, seem like an alien species. Small island Britain no longer has need of such grandiose figures, and for decades has only produced mediocrities and nonentities. Americans, by contrast, have the confidence of a people who have conquered an epic landscape. Trump made his money by developing the land and erecting garish hotels on what was once wilderness. But he is only one rich man among many. America’s rulers know that there is much left to exploit, but you cannot do that if you go small, so the land forges grandiose liars, monumental crooks, and titanic phonies.

America’s landscape is abundant in resources, and this, too, plays out in political debates. In the UK, the case for renewable energy is bolstered by an understanding that resources are finite: one day the oil will run out, and that will be that. In America, though, there are deserts, forests, mountains, glaciers, swamps. How can a land so huge and diverse not feed itself, make its own cars, and produce its own energy? If you exhaust one area, you could just look elsewhere, or dig deeper, “drill baby drill”. This vastness also fuels a greater confidence in renewables. When I see a lone wind turbine in a field in the UK, I imagine it might just about provide enough power for a toaster. When I see the endless rows of turbines rotating slowly in the deserts of West Texas, I am struck by the transformative potential of the wind.

This sense of abundance also defines attitudes towards immigration. Economists may argue that mass immigration is necessary for growth, especially in the face of declining populations, but in Europe the emotional case is centred on inherited guilt: migrants should be welcomed as recompense for historical crimes of racism and imperialism. In America, the emotional case is more positive: it emphasises generosity, that there’s enough for everyone. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” goes the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed in bronze inside the Statue of Liberty. Pro-immigration arguments always point to the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, and that they should extend the good fortune their ancestors enjoyed to newcomers. Indeed, Matt Yglesias’s book One Billion Americans is predicated on America’s great abundance: not only could the land house one billion people, he argued, but this would lead to still greater riches. You could never make this argument on a small, crowded island such as the UK — nor in any European country, for that matter.

But just as America is blessed with great natural wealth, so it must regularly suffer the Wrath of God in the form of recurring natural disasters, such as hurricanes, forest fires and periodic earthquakes. These, too, have a direct impact on politics, although the extent of the political fallout of a disaster depends on which party is in power at the time. For instance, following Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush’s administration was pilloried for weeks and then months; the inadequate disaster response was clear evidence of Republican perfidiousness and racism. Following Hurricane Helene, however, there was infinitely less coverage, as the Democrat’s media stenographers feared harming Kamala Harris’s chances of success in the election. Perhaps, now that she has been soundly defeated, they will develop a curiosity about what is happening in the affected regions.

These disasters also provide regional politicians with opportunities to demonstrate that they are effective in a crisis — if they fail, then their foes make hay. The ice storm that struck Texas in 2021, causing major power outages across the state, was still being used in political attack ads against Governor Greg Abbott two years later. When Kamala Harris argued that Ron DeSantis was refusing her calls and using the crisis to play political games, Joe Biden, perhaps bitter from his ousting, took the opportunity to undermine her by calling DeSantis “gracious”.

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Yet when all is said and done, I think that the American landscape’s ultimate contribution to US politics is something that is at the core of the American character: optimism. The belief that better days are ahead has been central to American politics for as long as I have been alive, from Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” to Barack Obama’s “Hope” to Kamala’s “Joy” and even Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. No matter how polarised American politics becomes, both Republicans and Democrats agree that a new dawn is always right around the corner. And as traumatised as the Democrats may currently be by their crushing defeat, I am confident that they too will soon lift their gaze from the smouldering ruins of the Kamala campaign and once again find hope.

Those who view America from the outside may find this optimism baffling. The same goes for those who live in coastal metropolises and spend far too much time online, succumbing to feverish fantasies that a new civil war is looming. Yet step outside the dysfunctional cities, leave behind the demented discourse and actually enter the landscape and you will find that a sense of renewal is never far away. It’s everywhere: on the edge of a great lake, in the desert, on top of a mountain, or simply driving past immense fields, teeming with crops. This land — diverse, abundant, wild — is still young. And this is why, for all the talk of the end of America, and despite the corrupt media and devious politicians, optimism keeps breaking through.

And yet for decades, conservative Americans have held up her series, the Little House books, which includes Little House on the Prairie, as a Bible of libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit. The nine children’s books about a hard-working pioneer family warned about the encroaching power of the state, and heralded the rise of the modern Republican party. They are fiction, of course, but based on Wilder’s real childhood.

Published in the throes of the Great Depression, the Little House books were powerful allegories opposing President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes, which provided unprecedented financial support to struggling Americans. They also illustrated a major shift in Republican ideology that took place in the Thirties, as the party sought to widen its appeal. It shed its reputation as the party of elite business owners, and instead began to emphasise the power of the individual.

In one of the scenes in The Long Winter, a storekeeper is overcharging starving residents of De Smet, South Dakota, who want to buy the last grain in town. A riot seems imminent until the hero of the books, Charles “Pa” Ingalls, speaks up. “This is a free country, and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with his own property,” he tells the storekeeper. “Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.”

This impromptu speech is anachronistic: arguing about unregulated markets was a debate rooted in the Thirties, when this book was written, rather than the 1880s, when it was set. It hints at the secret lying at the heart of the Little House books: it was Wilder’s daughter and secret co-author, Rose Wilder Lane, who imbued the books with their political message.

Lane was one of the intellectual architects of the libertarian political movement in America: she was an influential free-market activist, writer, and acquaintance of the philosopher Ayn Rand. Her projection of her radical political views onto her mother’s pioneering childhood means that the series should be read as a double history: folk stories about the 1870s and 1880s woven through the vantage point of the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Pulsing through the books, meanwhile, are principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence. Thanks often to Lane’s revisions, characters occasionally quote that document, noting that they want to be “free and independent”. In Little Town on the Prairie, Pa takes Laura and her sister to the Fourth of July celebration in town. In Lane’s revision, Laura is transfixed by the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the singing of My Country Tis of Thee:

“The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the Song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king. She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences.”

This is why the books are so beloved by conservatives today: these libertarian views formed the basis of the modern Republican Party.

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Yet the books purposefully understate the difficulty of the American pioneer experience. It was in fact a brutally hard life of crop failures, isolation, and disease. Although the Little House books preserved in accurate and lyrical detail many of the skills that small farmers practiced in the 19th century, Lane recast many scenes as optimistic takes on tragedy that did not reflect how the family actually responded. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa announced during a horrible plague of the Rocky Mountain locust that ate crops for two years: “We won’t let a pesky crop of grasshoppers stop us.” The locusts did, in fact, lead to their financial ruin. Two years later, according to Little Town on the Prairie, the family resorted to eating the blackbirds that had destroyed their first corn crop in Dakota Territory. The family sings Sing a Song of Sixpence at the table. And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?

But Wilder cautioned her daughter that the family was not an optimistic group. The quality they relied on was stoicism, putting up with the bad that came. That’s very different from hope. “I wish I could explain to you about the stoicism of the people,” she wrote to Lane in 1938, when they were halfway through writing the series. “You know a person cannot live at a high pitch of emotion. The feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation.” Wilder insisted that the Ingalls family had never reacted to anything emotionally.

The divergence between Wilder’s real-life story and the Little House narrative was also apparent from what they left out: crime and tragedy. Gone from the books were stories Laura had written in early drafts: the death of a baby brother, a mournful episode running a tavern that ended with the family fleeing late at night to avoid paying its debts. The hardships that did stay in the books shored up tenaciousness as a value, such as sister Mary Ingalls going blind as a teenager. Laura then had to step in to help her and support the family by teaching at several schools.

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The books also downplayed the various ways the government helped the family, spinning a myth of self-reliance. Like many pioneer settlers, they were given a free homestead through the federal Homestead Act, which granted tracts the government had taken from American Indians. Then there was sister Mary’s state-paid college for the blind in Iowa. The stories only talk of Laura having to teach to pay for Mary’s college expenses — perhaps her clothes.

The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche. The books have sold more than 60 million copies and were taught in classrooms for many decades; the series remains part of homeschooling curricula. “Laura Ingalls Wilder is the quintessential American pioneer,” says Wilder expert William Anderson in the PBS American Masters documentary Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page.

And Lane’s legacy can still be felt in the Republican party. Lane only wrote political articles after publishing the Little House books and her libertarian treatise The Discovery of Freedom. But she campaigned for limited government in the last years of her life. In the Sixties, she took under her ideological wing a young man in Connecticut; he was Roger Lea MacBride, who became a champion of libertarian thought and ran for president for the new Libertarian Party in 1976. Later, MacBride took the libertarian ideas with him as he migrated back to the Republican party’s Liberty Caucus.

Lane also donated funds to help businessman Robert LeFevre launch an institution for adults in Colorado called the Freedom School, which named a building after Lane. Two of the early students who studied free markets and limited government there were Charles and David Koch, who went on to become members of the Libertarian Party in the Seventies and Eighties. Later, they returned to the conservative branches of the Republican Party and became hugely influential by donating money to Republicans promising to support free-market concerns, including such notions as refuting the science of climate change.

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The myth of the pioneers, embodied by Laura Ingalls Wilder, inspired many conservative American values today. They were seen as the kind of independent, self-reliant Americans that the Second Amendment was designed to protect. But even they would have struggled with some aspects of modern Republican policy — gun control in particular.

Certainly, the Ingalls family owned and used guns. In one scene in Little House in the Big Woods, Pa Ingalls trudges with his rifle through the snow of northern Wisconsin, checking animal traps. Rounding a large pine tree, he meets a black bear, standing on its hind legs clutching a dead pig. Pa aims his gun, kills the bear, and immediately runs home for the horses and sled to take the meat home. There, it resides in frozen form in a shed. Pa hacks off pieces with an axe at mealtimes.

Even the mythical Pa Ingalls would not have thought today’s Americans needed guns in most situations, especially the range of weapons available today. He preached to his daughters the necessity of restraint. “You wouldn’t shoot a little baby deer, would you, Pa?” says Laura. “‘No, never!’ he answered. ‘Nor its Ma, nor its Pa. No more hunting, now, till all the little wild animals have grown up. We’ll just have to do without fresh meat till fall.’”

When baby animals were roaming the forest, it was time to put the rifle away.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated 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’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

Chauvin will go to prison for Floyd’s murder, having been found guilty of murder in a court of law, but the sweeping civil unrest that followed the 2020 killing — and which still continues in some spaces unabated — is its greater legacy. Riots and looting left multiple urban neighbourhoods in ruins; more productive forms of protest led to tangible policy change. Punitive bail policies that target the already disadvantaged have been revoked; new laws have been passed restricting the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants; more states are requiring the use of police body cameras and mandating the swift release of footage when an encounter with the cops results in violence or death.

But at the same time, an unsettling rise in violent crime over the past year threatens to undermine the cause. Last weekend, multiple shootings occurred in various American cities — and media outlets leaped to declare a crisis. “Bloody weekend in America renews call to stop the shootings,” wrote The Times, which pointed out that the “mass shootings” had “brought total number killed by guns in the US this year to 7,601, with an additional 9,504 dying from suicides.”

“America has already endured 230 mass shootings and 13 mass murders in 2021,” said Axios on Monday. Today, the Gun Violence Archive — a non-profit organisation that tracks all shootings in the US — puts the total number of mass shootings so far this year at 232: the California Bay area saw its worst incident since the early 90s in San Jose on Wednesday. Indeed, since the Times story was published on Tuesday, the Archive has tallied up 257 more deaths caused by guns, bringing this year’s total to 7,858 — or, if you include suicides, 17,626.

Crime and policing have become so fraught, so politicised, that despite the need for urgent action, productive discussion on these topics is a rarity in America. And no issue better illustrates the unbridgeable divide than the debate over gun violence. At one extreme is the gun enthusiast, a card-carrying member of the NRA who owns dozens of weapons — as is his inalienable right, according to the second amendment — and mocks the sissy libs who want to take them away. At the other is the blue-state pacifist, who has never held a gun in his life but nevertheless would like to abolish them entirely, including taking them out of the hands of police. In between them is a landscape littered with bullet casings and dead bodies that both sides shamelessly use as props in an endless, seemingly unresolvable debate about who’s to blame: the guns, or the people using them.

“What’s clear, as the president has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” said the White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre in response to events in San Jose, “both from mass shootings and in the lives that are being taken in daily gun violence that doesn’t make national headlines.” But if you look behind the headlines, the distinction she draws is blurred. CNN, whose headline read, “There were at least 12 mass shootings across the US this weekend,” included a pivotal disclaimer a few lines in: “CNN defines a mass shooting as an incident with four or more people killed or wounded by gunfire — excluding the shooter.” This definition also stems from the Gun Violence Archive, which interprets a mass shooting as any incident in which at least four victims (not including the shooter or shooters) are shot and either injured or killed.

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But in shaping its coverage around this definition, the media elides distinctions that are vital to understanding the different ways that gun violence manifests — and arguably misleads readers who don’t realise how much nuance is being lost. The GVA makes no distinction between an incident of terrorism like the Pulse nightclub tragedy; a disgruntled employee “going postal” at his workplace (as happened in San Jose); or a drug-related skirmish in which two rival gang members start shooting at each other and the wounded are innocent bystanders who simply caught in the crossfire. They’re all lumped together under the “mass shooting” umbrella.

But for most people, whose awareness of gun violence centres on high-profile, high-fatality incidents in places like schools or churches, the words “mass shooting” evoke something quite specific: the image of a lone gunman — always male, usually white — firing into a crowd of innocent, unarmed people without warning. A mass shooting is Stephen Paddock raining down bullets from a Las Vegas hotel suite, as a crowd of concertgoers screams and scatters below. It’s Adam Lanza murdering innocent children and teachers at Sandy Hook elementary school with a bag full of semiautomatic weapons. It’s Eliot Rodgers’ incel massacre.

This type of shooting, also known as a rampage or spree killing, is rare as compared with other forms of violence; in 2020, a year in which roughly 20,000 Americans were killed by guns, there were no rampage killings in the US at all. Yet we tend to highlight these incidents above others in discussions about gun violence — or, as CNN did here, use language that evokes them — not just because they’re particularly horrifying, but because they’re easy to politicise. Defining “mass shootings” in an overbroad way allows us to insist that the problem is guns, not crime, and that the solution lies in gun reform, not law enforcement.

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This is a narrative generally favoured by politicians on the Left, for whom gun control is a relatively easy issue on which to take a hardline stance without losing voters (whereas a tough-on-crime position can alienate those further Left.) It’s also the one preferred by the Biden administration, which actively steered the conversation in this direction in a recent press conference. When asked about the weekend’s violence, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said:

“Certainly there’s a gun problem. Between mass shootings that get a lot of attention, that we lower the flags, there are hundreds, thousands who lose their lives and that’s one of the reasons the president will continue to advocate for the Senate passing universal background checks.”

Passing major gun control measures was one of Biden’s bigger campaign promises, and universal background checks are just one part of that; the President’s gun reform wish list also includes more legal liability for gun manufacturers, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and closing loopholes that allow people with records of domestic abuse and stalking to get their hands on weapons. He’s also proposed a gun buyback program and taken aim at kits that allow the creation of “ghost guns,” unlicensed firearms with no serial number, which are popular with criminals. Unfortunately, the background check measures have passed in the House but stalled in the Senate, where Democrats lack the numbers to push them through and can’t seem to convince any Republicans to cooperate across the aisle.

Psaki’s pivot away from rising violence and toward gun reform legislation is a politically savvy move — but it also pivots away from the truth. Even if you believe (as I do) that universal background checks are a great idea, focusing on this and other reforms that primarily affect the sale of licensed firearms is a way of avoiding the complicated nature of tragedies like the spate of shootings last weekend.

Many of these tragedies took place in communities plagued by continual violence, where murders happen so frequently that pop-up shrines to commemorate shooting victims are a common roadside presence, and where perpetrators frequently escape arrest because residents fear retaliation if they talk to the cops. Some were gang or drug-related, and several involved conflicts between multiple armed assailants who ended up hitting innocent bystanders when they were trying to shoot at each other. In Youngstown, Ohio, an altercation at a nightclub spilled into the street and exploded in gunfire that left two people dead. In North Charleston, South Carolina, fourteen people were shot, and one teenage girl killed, after a fight broke out at an “unauthorized concert”; the police are still looking for multiple shooters. In Minneapolis, another nightclub shooting allegedly began with a confrontation between gang members who both pulled guns and began firing.

And because this type of gun violence often involves illegally obtained firearms, gun reform legislation or more stringent background checks would have done nothing to take the weapons out of these killers’ hands.

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The “mass shooting” narrative, in which the biggest threat is the ubiquity of the guns themselves, also obscures the tangled web of class, cultural and community factors that create these horrific tragedies — as well as the human cost to ordinary people who live every day with the endemic threat of violence. And the Left’s obsessive focus on more unusual forms of gun violence, whether it’s police shootings or rampage killers, misses the ugly truth that people in communities plagued by crime are far more likely to be killed by a neighbour than they are by a cop.

The prominence of a given death seems to depend more on the identity of the villain than the victim. When police shot and injured Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year, there were protests, riots, and strikes by multiple professional sports teams, as the whole country rallied around the idea that black lives matter. And yet, the two dozen black children killed in incidents of community violence since the start of 2021 don’t seem to matter to anyone; there are no protests, no namesake legislation, no hashtagged outpouring of rage and grief. Perhaps one of the strangest omissions in this narrative, considering the source, is that both the victims and the shooters in last weekend’s brutality were virtually all people of colour.

Of course, while the Left pivots towards guns-not-violence, the Right will pounce on its own pet issues. The phrase “black-on-black crime” will make an appearance, invoking ugly racial stereotypes while ignoring the anguish of the communities and families who live with such constant grief, fear, and loss. Policies favoured by the Left, from defunding police departments to bail reform, will be blamed for leaving more criminals on the street while giving law enforcement fewer means to deal with them. They will note that it’s not just shootings that are up, but crime across the board: car-jackings, muggings, brutal assaults in broad daylight. They’ll blame progressive lawmakers for empowering criminals to offend with no fear of arrest, from Chesa Boudin in property crime-plagued San Francisco to Jacob Frey in violence-ridden Minneapolis. They’ll be a little too gleeful when one of the police-free autonomous zones in places like Portland or Seattle devolves into chaos that results in someone’s death.

Nobody will offer policy solutions; everyone will point fingers across the aisle. The Blue Lives Matter crowd says, what can police do? Their hands are tied. Their opponents counter that their hands aren’t  tied, they’re just sitting on them — on purpose.

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The truth is buried somewhere here, but conversations like these will never reveal it. It’s all heat and no light, all the time. Yes, some politicians are trying to strike a balance on criminal justice reform: NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang recently suggested revisiting the city’s elimination of cash bail for non-felony offenders to address the issue of hate crimes, in which perpetrators have gone on to attack someone else as soon as they’re back on the street. He is an outlier, though — and even in deep blue New York City, the mayoral race has become dominated by the issue of gun violence. It’s not a coincidence that Yang’s fiercest opponent is Eric Adams, a more conservative former police officer who has promised to take a tough-on-crime approach to reducing shootings.

Meanwhile, America has settled into two separate, well-worn grooves, forever digging deeper instead of rising up and out in search of common ground. The Right will go on taking ghoulish delight in spiking crime rates, perhaps quietly hoping that it’ll get worse yet, so that come 2024 they can claim that Joe Biden’s America is indistinguishable from the dystopian nightmare of the sci-fi film The Purge — the kind of country where you’d have to be crazy not to have a few guns for self-protection.

And the Left will remain safely ensconced in their white upper-crust neighbourhoods, vowing to “save” their poorer, blacker neighbours from the racist rule of law, whether the neighbours want this or not (and they don’t: across the board, including in black communities, police abolition remains a largely unpopular proposal.) They’ll sneer back and forth about the Ferguson Effect, in which community distrust of police leads the cops to pull back from policing in vulnerable neighbourhoods, which in turn leads to a spike in crime rates (a real and dangerous phenomenon, or a myth that coddles cowardly racist cops, depending on your political sensibilities.) They’ll start another unwinnable war over the second amendment.

And in the meantime, whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.

But unless the violence fits the narrative, most of us will never hear about it. Even as national media descended upon Minneapolis to await the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, little mention was made of the countless lives lost or upended by violence in the city since last May. Since the death of George Floyd, at least 100 people have been murdered in Minneapolis. Nearly 200 have been shot. Among the dead are several children. The four-block grid now known as George Floyd Square remains closed off, guarded by security checkpoints to keep law enforcement out; possibly for this reason, it is something of a magnet for acts of violence, including drive-by shootings.

On March 6 of this year, when one man was shot and killed just steps from the same place where Chauvin killed Floyd, police reported meeting resistance when they tried to enter the scene. But when shots rang out yesterday, sending those who came to honour George Floyd’s memory diving for cover, it was a different story: according to witnesses, the police never showed up at all.

“This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately.”

The outcry against this connection was swift, with many pointing out that young people in other countries – Japan, for instance – enjoy playing first person shoot-em-up video games without taking to the streets with semi-automatic weapons to kill in real life.

No, these people argue, the charge against video games is a deliberate distraction from the real enemy: the availability of military grade weapons at the local gun store. Trump is so in hock to the NRA that he wouldn’t dare confront the original sin at the heart of the American mind: that guns mean freedom – freedom from outside interference, freedom from colonial oppressors (the British), freedom from big government etc.

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By Mary Dejevsky

It was 20 years ago this year that a pair of students from Columbine High School murdered twelve of their fellow students and a teacher using automatic weapons and sawn-off shotguns. A connection was later made between these murders and the amount of time both students had spent playing Doom and Quake, and other first person shooting games.

Those who resist any causal connection here describe the reaction as “moral panic”, and in 2011 the video games industry in fact won a significant victory at the US Supreme Court, against those who would restrict the sale of violent video games. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association concluded that: “studies … do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively … and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology”.

So where does this idea originate that video games cause young people to be violent? One surprising tributary that has been influential in establishing this connection can be traced back to a controversial report written long before video games had ever been invented: S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall’s much discussed Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, published in 1947.

Slam Marshall was the army’s chief historian of the European theatre of operations during the Second World War: his astonishing thesis was that, in an average infantry company, no more than one in four soldiers actually fired their weapons while in contact with the enemy. Later historians have challenged his methodology. But notwithstanding this challenge, this was the root of the moral panic, and it originated within the military: most soldiers are reluctant to kill.

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On 10 June 1944, one battalion of the US 502nd Parachute Infantry started receiving enemy fire. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole, described the behaviour of his men. “I found no way to make them continue fire,” he explained:

“Not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used his weapon. When I ordered men who were right around me to fire, they did so. But the moment I passed on, they quit. I walked up and down the line shouting “God damn it! Start shooting!” But it did little good. They fired only when I watched them.”

It was testimony like this that prompted a complete re-think within the US military about how to train soldiers to overcome their natural resistance to killing. Turning to the work of the popular behaviourist psychologists of the day – especially B F Skinner – the military set about transforming their training programmes, using behaviourist principles to desensitise their troops to the effects of killing other human beings. The key idea was simply that the empathetic connection between human beings needed to be broken by the constant practise and repetition of killing in a situation that, as closely as possible, simulated the feel of the combat environment.

The combination of repetition and desensitisation, underscored by a strong sense of group absolution, enabled the natural human instinct against killing to be overcome. Using these basic techniques, the firing rate of ordinary soldiers was transformed. By the time of the Korean War in 1950, the rate had more than doubled.

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How does this connect to video games? Perhaps the most influential exponent of the Slam Marshall line is former Army Ranger and West Point psychology professor Dave Grossman, whose book On Killing (1996) has become required reading at military academies around the world. According to Grossman, first person shooter video games replicate exactly the same techniques that the military have used to get soldiers to kill: repetition and desensitisation. Thus, for Grossman, video games can act as “murder simulators”.

“They act just like police and military simulators, providing conditioned responses, killing skills and desensitization, except they are inflicted on children without the discipline of military and police training.… If we intentionally tried to raise a generation cocked and primed to kill, we could not have done a better job.”

These conclusions issued in a whole host of influential studies, including Grossman’s co-authored Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill (1999) and Assassination Generation (2016).

The case against these books is pretty straightforward. Many millions of young people play Grand Theft Auto without turning into psychotic killers. And gamers have a strong case when they argue that the NRA point to the video games industry as a scapegoat to deflect attention from the real cause of the epidemic of mass murder that blights the US: the simple availability of military-grade weapons.

But both intention and opportunity need to be considered here – and video games relate to intention whereas the availability of weapons relate to opportunity. It is perfectly conceivable that both may shoulder their fair share of blame.

As I watch my sofa-rooted teenager, console in hand, blasting his way through the summer holidays, I know perfectly well that he will never act out in reality what he plays out on the screen. But I retain a residual commitment to the idea that we become what we practise to be. And the real world experience of the military, whose job it is turn naturally empathetic children into professional killers, gives me some pause to wonder what it would take to turn him into a fighter.

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By Giles Fraser

The problem with the various pet theories that people have about the causes of gun crime is that they have become both so reductive and so highly politicised that one explanation is too often set against another. The interplay of societal breakdown, a culture that celebrates violence, weak gun laws, white male resentment, the role of alcohol and mental health: one could go on – and most social scientists tend to say that there still isn’t enough data to really work out what is really going on.

In 1996, and under pressure from the NRA, Congress withdrew public funding for the study of gun violence; there is a national database of car crash deaths, for example, but still no such equivalent for gun violence. Given the epidemic proportions of mass shootings in the US, the idea that even its study is a political football is totally absurd.