The misfortunes of gun violence are plenty, and a growing epidemic. Treated as un-treatable, spoken and forgotten… somehow it has been addressed and decreased, but America won’t listen. Here is my first blog post written several months ago (meaning the numbers have only increased), where literature takes a hit at an everlasting ignorance.
“…we in this country have no experience of the crime of ‘shooting down’ so common in the U.S.”
Gun violence: a phrase affecting an entire nation but with definition being altered to circumstance and politics. Just as gun violence affected an entire man’s life in Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, the urgency to define an act based on outside influence happens firsthand today, even though this English tale of the Oxford English Dictionary gives us full perspective as it’s set in 1872.
As defined by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) gun violence “describes the results of all incidents of death or injury or threat with firearms without pejorative judgment within the definition. Violence is defined without intent or consequence as a consideration. To that end a shooting of a victim by a subject/suspect is considered gun violence as is a defensive use or an officer involved shooting. The act itself, no matter the reason is violent in nature.” In similar nature, the first pages of Winchester’s timely book are given to defining “murder” and the historical altering the connotation of this word has undergone.
Murder defined in late 19th century Britain was applied to any homicide, there were no degrees of murder, and it is “essential that the perpetrator be of sound mind.” Winchester defines murder to set the screen for unfortunate events to quickly unfold as a murder takes place, one of extreme rarity. George Merrett, going to an early morning shift to support his downtrodden family, never reached his destination as he was shot by an esteemed gentleman, Dr. William Minor. It was a strange read to see that the actual murder was described in a quickness, but the surrounding contexts were detailed to many pages. For example, this particular case of rarity was a high point. The shot itself was said to be “unimagined, unprecedented, and shocking.” But as described by a policeman, one would assume the sound of a gunshot wouldn’t exactly be unimagined and unprecedented. In the case of Lambeth Marsh, England however, one of the tougher and poorer parts of the country, it was “not a place for men with guns.” This was because “guns were costly, cumbersome, difficult to use, [and] hard to conceal.” Seems a simple, definitive reason. But we must ask, what place is sound for men with guns, where the same events were occuring? Winchester offers this answer through comparison. As Winchester sticks to his definition, he uses the form of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The OED, as mentioned in the story, has a foundation through comparison. Winchester makes an audacious comment as his first comparison and uses the capital of gun violence: the United States of America. Smugly, he introduces the comparison through the medium of media: “we in this country have no experience of the crime of ‘shooting down’ so common in the U.S.” As the story continues and it’s revealed that Dr. William Minor committed the crime and that he’s American, he is only referred to (until charged) as “the American.” Being American, and learning that he was a surgeon-captain in the U.S. Army, they charged him as an intellectual who lost his way, and his mind. Mentioned above, murder has no charges of degree in England in 1872 but made exceptions if a person did not fit the definition of a “sound mind.” Minor was considered unsound and charged as a “criminal lunatic” on grounds of insanity, and the connotation of that word in the terms of law has haunted American history to this very day.
Particularly, gun violence in terms of mass shootings has sprouted exponentially, with the insanity clause following it closely. To keep this in close perspective, I was born in 1994. Bill Clinton passed the assault rifle ban in this year, and it would expire in 2005. There were three less shootings during the assault rifle ban than the decade prior, but the jump from 2005 to 2018 once the ban was lifted is currently an increase of 26. There have been 42 mass shootings in America, including the unfortunate events in Santa Fe. Granted, again being stuck by definition, mass shootings are defined by numbers, and many different organizations define mass shootings in smaller numbers, so 42 could be considered a sad minimum.
Although placed in 1872, Winchester wrote this warning in 1998 after at least 20 mass shootings happened in America. And why would a writer from London, England have a dog in this fight? Since 1994, Britain has experienced only two mass shootings, in which one very important one in 1996 changed their entire system of gun regulation. Just as Winchester did, Gill Marshall-Andrews of the Gun Control Network in England said “it looked like we were going down the American route of gun violence at the time, and it just wasn’t what people wanted.” America is pinned as a tolerable nation, and we have been for some time. Things unchanging to prevent gun violence, and since the assault rifle ban was lifted in 2005, we can actually say our government has permitted these acts to continue to happen. Britain saw a problem immediately, defined the main issue as a man who murdered with a gun, and banned that gun.
The one thing America needs is definition. We must define gun laws in whichever way they change. We must define the problem as Britain has been warning us to do through thankfully bold comparisons. And we must define our integrity. When Britain recognized the problem was a man with the gun, they removed the gun. They banned all hand-guns when the sport of pistol shooting was rising to popularity, so of course they had opposition. In the same way America has opposition to this perspective, because people want their guns for protection and simple sport. The people of Britain gave up their hobby, with exception to one hand gun being left legal, in order to keep their country safe. Simon Winchester felt is necessary to write this story set over a century before it was written to express this sentiment has been incredibly prolonged and America will always refuse to listen. So we must force our country to listen and ask: how do we refuse to define gun laws in which our problem is clearly definable through many men with assault rifles, when we’ve had a neighboring country calling out our names in media and literature for decades, even centuries, defining the solution?
A Room of My Own 