‘As American as apple pie” has come to mean, over the last century or so, the exemplar of all those wholesome, happy things that typify our native land: sandlot softball, late-summer carnivals, roast turkey with all the trimmings at Thanksgiving, Doris Day movies and kids cooling off in a sun-dappled river on a hot summer day.
I’ll add another, albeit not as warm and fuzzy. Guns are as American as apple pie.
In fact, probably more American than apple pie. Guns – long guns, if primitive – sailed here with Christopher Columbus, whose crew supposedly fired a few shots from the ship to scare the indigenous people on the shore.
But the only apple species native to North America were tiny inedible crabapples. Real apples – eating, pie-making apples, which probably originated in Asia – didn’t get here until European settlers brought them in the early 17th century. The Mayflower landed in 1620, and the first apple orchard on our continent was planted in Boston in 1625 by one William Blaxton, a minister.
By then, we who were to become Americans were well on our way to conquering a good section of the continent – from sea to shining sea, as the song goes – and subjugating anyone and anything in it. Guns were with us all the way, as they have been since.
Now we’re having a national conversation about guns, hardly surprising given the gun-caused human toll – 36 people slaughtered, scores more wounded – in just three violent eruptions of gun-enabled mass murder in American cities in fewer than two weeks. The oldest victim was 90, the youngest just 6. A 2-month-old baby was saved only because he was sheltered by his parents’ dead bodies.
The killers – all Americans – were three young men, likely with mental issues but also with access to guns. Which most Americans – as long as they were white and male Americans, if not always adult – have had from the beginning.
And those guns have been useful to us over the years, as a cursory glance at American history shows.
We explored a huge wilderness with guns in hand, ready to use against hostile entities, human or otherwise. We farmed and foraged for food, guns by our sides – the forests and plains could be dangerous places, and we hunted for game with them to get us through cold North American winters.
Those first Americans’ prowess with those old, primitive guns, among other things, bought the country its freedom from Britain. And our armed farmers and shopkeepers took on the English again in 1812 when we went to war to throw off Britain’s remaining strictures.
In the worst crisis in American history, the Civil War, the industrial North with its mines, foundries and factories was ultimately able to deploy not only the troops but the military equipment – guns, and more! – to defeat the more agrarian South and thus hold the Union together.
And so it went through the centuries, through both small wars – the Barbary Wars in the early 19th century – and large global conflagrations like World Wars I and II, where the future of much of the world was at stake and we were able to deploy awesome armaments. In the end, we had the biggest, the best guns! Along with a lot of other stuff, of course.
But in the course of all this gun-making, gun-acquiring, gun-using and gun-celebrating, we pretty much neglected one aspect of the whole matter: Gun controlling.
Throughout America’s history, guns have been pretty much there for the taking with surprisingly few of the restrictions that people in other nations take for granted. Our kids grow up playing with toy guns. In my long-ago childhood, we all fought our mock battles with relatively uncomplicated six-shooters, little girls sporting bright silver Dale Evans cap pistols.
Today’s “toy” is more likely to be an amazingly lethal-looking toy AK-47 assault rifle, presumably real ammo not included, but the result is the same: Children growing up to believe that guns are just a basic part of American life, along with toy cars and baby dolls. They promise a whiff of excitement and danger – sanitized, of course.
Despite a few feints over the years at enabling at least a fragile framework of regulations (adopted over great opposition) to fight the worst excesses of our national gun fetish, guns are epidemic in the United States. And they continue to be celebrated in popular entertainment, where – unlike in real life – many are “shot” only to spring back to life, just to “die” again tomorrow.
This is unlikely to change soon, no matter how much someone like Mitch McConnell pays lip service (only) to the notion of curbing gun violence. By now, our country is literally awash in guns. Repeated and respected surveys in recent years show that America has 4% of the world’s population – but 46% of the world’s guns that are in private hands.
It’s interesting. We know how to deal with other menaces to American life.
Smoking – once celebrated as a sign of sophistication, of style – was made socially unacceptable as the toll of lung cancer and other maladies became obvious to all. Now it’s seen as smelly, dirty and dangerous, and its adherents pitied, even shunned.
Drinking to excess – once indulged, even celebrated in literature and popular entertainment – has become socially unacceptable.
Plenty – within the confines of the much-cited Second Amendment – could be done to curb the worst gun excesses. Even the late ultraconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that.
But until we make guns and the violence they visit upon us as socially unacceptable as smoking and drunkenness have become, no matter how much we tinker with our laws, we will keep slaughtering one another with ever more lethal guns.
As evidence of the lethality of today’s weapons, it took one of the three recent shooters just 32 seconds – seconds! – to kill nine people.
And I see no reason to believe we won’t continue to be, as far as I could learn, the only nation on the planet where prudent schools and businesses can buy the grotesquely named Active Shooter insurance policies.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)