Cultures of violence: It’s time to reevaluate our love of guns

The Hot Tea: A Pitt student’s ramblings and amblings abroad

When you pack up everything you’ve known for the past two decades and trade it for four months “across the pond,” you quickly discover that life’s not all tea and crumpets. Everything you encounter in a foreign country presents a new set of challenges, from classic public transportation woes and language barriers to the more modern-day struggles of meeting natives on Tinder and becoming acquainted with local politics.

“The Hot Tea” is a weekly column dedicated to these discoveries — unearthing the intricacies of London’s social, political and millennial issues in context of Pittsburgh’s own complex culture.

Follow me on my journey as a Pittsburgh native striving to become an authentic Londoner.

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LONDON ­– Mourn the losses, share a few posts, argue a bit over gun reform, forget about the murders after a few weeks — repeat.

Though we may move on to other topics of concern, the issue of gun violence never fades. That’s why I’m not dumbfounded by the Oregon campus massacre last week, where Nine people died at Umpqua Community College.

It’s hard to keep track of massacres when we discuss mass shootings in America. But when they talk about massacres in the United Kingdom, there is only one.  The Dunblane school massacre in 1996, when gunman Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and one teacher, was the United Kingdom’s first school shooting — and the last, because legislators banned handguns were banned following the Scottish tragedy.

After the massacre, Conservative Prime Minister John Major set up a public inquiry to look into the best ways to protect the public from further gun-related tragedies. His successor, Tony Blair, then went on to introduce The Firearms (Amendment) (No.2) Act of 1997 that made all handguns illegal.

Meanwhile, the United States’ burgeoning trigger-happy culture continues to devastate the masses — whether it’s in the form of mass school shootings or police brutality. If we look to the United Kingdom as an example of a developed country without firearms, we can critique starkly opposing cultures of violence and see what we need to change in America.

Living in London has put America’s culture of violence into perspective for me. Despite identifying as left leaning, I used to support the Second Amendment and those who wanted to avoid regulation. Mostly, it was because I was so numbed to the number of homicides committed with firearms that I didn’t see the necessity. I wanted to go to law school, so I considered the preservation of rights to be of utmost importance.

Outside of the U.S., I’ve had a better line of vision into our gun problem. I was genuinely sick when I found out there’s a higher proportion of murders in Pittsburgh than in London — one of the busiest cities in the world. Pittsburgh’s population is under 306,000, and 66 murders took place last year, according to World Population Review. London is home to 8.6 million people, and there were less than 100 homicides last year, according to the BBC. Keep in mind that Pittsburgh is a “safe” city — it ranked 18th on a 2009 list of safest cities compiled by Forbes Magazine.

What does that say about the U.S.?

A few days ago, my supervisor at work even asked me about what was happening back home after reading an article about the Oregon shooting.

“Explain your country to me,” she said.

I can’t explain my country’s steadfast preservation of the Second Amendment, so I settled for the truth. “We’re a wreck.”

My co-workers have the right to criticize my home country when it comes to gun violence — theirs isn’t privy to the same issues. The United Kingdom’s ban on handguns greatly contributes to how much safer I feel here. For the first time since I first started going out with friends at 14, I don’t carry my mace. Even if it were legal to carry it — mace is considered a firearm here — I still wouldn’t feel like I needed it. I can also hop on the Tube and doze off. There isn’t a pressing need to always be alert and equipped.

Notwithstanding my own subjective feelings about London’s safety, the numbers speak for themselves. From 2012 to 2013, firearm related offenses made up just 0.2 percent of all police-recorded crimes, according to the Office for National Statistics.

But naturally, Second Amendment preservers in the United States always want to tango with the topic of knife crime in Britain and the rest of the United Kingdom.

I hate to disappoint them, but knife crime is still relatively insignificant in the scheme of Britain’s dark side. Of all police offenses between 2012 and 2013, wrongs committed with knives and sharp instruments made up 6 percent of crimes, according to the Office for National Statistics. And out of these stabbings, most were confined to gang activity.

It wasn’t only what I learned about gun violence in the U.K. that amazed me — what I saw played a big part in my awe.

It’s the police force — or police service, as Commissioner Sir Peter Imbert renamed it to convey a kinder connotation — that took me aback. The “bobbies” don’t regularly carry guns while on duty, quite the shock for an American who’s all too accustomed to a culture of police violence and brutality. When they do carry guns, they rarely fire any shots. Between 2011 and 2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire just five times, according to the Home Office Public Order Unit.

In America, there’s no dearth of gun shots on our shores.

A mass shooting has occurred every calendar week since 2012, according to The Washington Post. With a shooting of some form every 15 minutes, it’s actually more likely that you’ll be killed at the mercy of a firearm than in a car, according to the Center for Disease Control.

You’re also much more likely to get shot by the police in America than you are in the U.K.  According to the Guardian’s new database, The Counted, police have shot and killed 55 people in England and Wales in the last 24 years. In America, police shot and killed 59 people in the first 24 days of 2015.

Yet, we’re still more concerned about whether or not we can sleep with a handgun under our pillow than whether or not our loved ones will come home that day.

But fighting fire with fire doesn’t always make sense. After the mass shooting in Scotland, the United Kingdom banned firearms, and no school shootings have happened since. Since the Sandy Hook murders in 2012, we’ve had 994 more mass shootings in America, according to ShootingTracker, a website that records events in which four or more people are shot as mass shootings.

It’s unlikely guns will ever be completely eradicated from our culture. However, the United States should at least consider funding an inquiry, similar to the United Kingdom’s, that would determine the best course of action in reducing firearm homicides.

We need to combat this love of guns — because we’re the only developed country with this level of gun violence.

To those who claim guns don’t kill people, but people kill people — I agree. But, having a candy store-like spread of weapons to choose from sure doesn’t help.

Courtney Linder is a senior columnist at The Pitt News, primarily focusing on social issues and technology. Write to her at CNL13@pitt.edu.