How Rep. positions, US culture make gun control impossible: Analysis
4 Min Read
Due to the US settler-colonial mentality and the Republican Party's fixation with the Second Amendment, Joe Biden appears unlikely to pass gun control changes through Congress, according to observers.
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US President Joe Biden
Despite the recent string of mass shootings in the United States, President Joe Biden is unlikely to get gun control changes passed in Congress, according to commentators. This is owing to the country's settler-colonial mentality and the Republican Party's fixation with the Second Amendment.
In a prime-time address last week, Biden urged Congress to move quickly on legislation to prohibit automatic guns, raise the purchase age to 21, limit immunity for gun makers, and strengthen background checks.
Biden called on members of Congress to pass tougher laws just a day after a mass shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over a week after a school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and almost three weeks after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York City.
More than 45,000 flowers honoring gun violence victims were placed on display at the US National Mall in Washington, DC, on Tuesday as legislators conducted a memorial. According to government data, the United States saw 45,000 gun-related murders in a 12-month period in 2020, the highest number reported since 1994 and a 35% rise over the previous year.
The US has had more than 200 mass shootings with 27 at schools, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Read more: US gun violence hit highest level since 1994
Experts believe that despite this, the US will make little progress in changing any gun laws.
University of Houston Professor of African-American History Gerald Horne told Sputnik that the "proliferation of arms underpins settler colonialism, the current system in the United States, inaugurated by the invasion of European settlers centuries ago who used weapons to seize the land from the Indigenous people and keep enslaved Africans in line."
This dark history has remained a powerful influence in 21st century US politics and culture, according to Horne.
Horne added that "it is deeply embedded in the culture and made more potent because there is a widespread denial of this horrendous reality."
Senators in the United States have lately stated that they are making progress on bipartisan legislation to combat gun violence, but such claims have been received with skepticism. Previous attempts to tighten gun rules in the Senate have been defeated due to the so-called filibuster, which takes 60 votes in the 100-seat body.
The so-called nuclear option, which would eliminate the filibuster, would allow Democrats to utilize their slim majority to pass legislation, but a few Democratic legislators have refused to support such a strategy.
Many opponents of gun control have cited the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, enacted in 1791, which states that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should not be infringed because a well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state.
Read more: Congressman Ted Cruz blames mass shootings on "backdoors"
Dan Lazare, the author of "The Frozen Republic," a US constitutional historian and political pundit, projected that any attempt at significant change would fail due to the force of the Second Amendment and the paralysis that currently pervades all national political institutions.
Lazare told Sputnik that it was "not possible. All talk about a bipartisan compromise on the gun question is nothing more than empty blather," adding that "significant gun-control measures by this point are dead on arrival- D.O.A."
Lazare added that the second amendment in the US makes any response to mass shootings near impossible, adding that Republicans will never abandon what has morphed into a central part of their party's view.
"Sure, ten-year-olds may die from time to time as a consequence. But freedom, as they say, is never free," he added.
"The whole thing is idiotic, but thanks to America's unchangeable 18th-century constitution, it's essentially etched in stone. This country really has painted itself into a corner."
