COMMENTARY
Americana and the March
against Gun Culture
Vinay Lal
The recent incident in a school
in Parkland, Florida, where
a 19-year-old school dropout
randomly gunned down several
innocents, raises pressing
questions about a “gun culture”
that has become an intrinsic part
of Americana. While this is, by
no means, the first incident of
its kind, its significance lies in
the large-scale mobilisation of
students who have emphatically
come out demanding gun control
and questioning deep-rooted
institutional support within the
American establishment for a
mindless culture of violence.
Vinay Lal (vlal@history.ucla.edu) teaches
history at the University of California,
Los Angeles.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 5, 2018
O
n 14 February 2018, 19-year-old
Nikolas Cruz walked into his
former high school in Parkland,
Florida, just before students were about
to disperse for the day. Cruz, a school
dropout, proceeded to Building 12, a
three-storey structure that, on a typical
day, would have held 900 students and
some 20 to 30 teachers. Armed with a
semi-automatic rifle, Cruz started choos-
ing targets and firing at random; he said
not a word, nor is there anything to
suggest any provocation. Six minutes
later, he dropped his rifle and made
good his escape by blending into the
crowd of panic-stricken students fleeing
for their lives. Having done his work
for the day, Cruz descended upon two
iconic American fast-food restaurants to
satiate his thirst and hunger. He appar-
ently stopped at a Subway for soda,
then wound up at McDonald’s, before
being spotted by a police officer who
took him into custody.
Americana
The shooting at the Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School at Parkland is a
story dripping in Americana. Other soci-
eties have had an occasional mass killer,
but the high school dropout lends a par-
ticularly American touch to the story.
The college dropout may, on that com-
paratively rare occasion, turn out to be
vol lIiI no 18
the proverbial genius; but the boy who
fails to complete high school almost in-
variably signifies trouble. Social workers
like to point out that boys in the United
States (US) are less likely to finish school
than girls, and are far more likely to en-
gage in what is termed “risky behaviour.”
Such behaviour—turn to crime, petty
vandalism, overindulgence in drugs,
exceedingly fraught relationships with
family members, etc—is not only risky to
one’s own life and well-being, but may
also be risky, sometimes fatally so, to
others. Cruz, like others of his ilk, seems
to have had few friends and a morbid
fascination for guns. In the characteris-
tic language of the day used to describe
people in his mold, he was apparently a
“depressed loner” and was increasingly
drawn to extremist views (BBC 2018).
Though African Americans are, pro-
portionately, implicated in more crimes
than white people, mass killers in Amer-
ican society are generally white. The com-
mentators who uniformly dwell on the
“loner” generally fail to probe whether
white people are far more prone to lone-
liness than black people, or why the
white male American is more likely to
land up without a “community” that
might succor and sustain him. It is no
overstatement to suggest that nearly
every aspect of a uniquely American nar-
rative around “the gun”—that includes a
fanatical obsessiveness with a presumed
constitutional right to ownership of fire-
arms, the lure of the hunt, the gun shows
at large convention centres, the recrea-
tional shooting ranges, where Americans
pass their time much as one might at a
picnic or a basketball game, the gun
retailers spread throughout the country,
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COMMENTARY
and the place of the gun in the “winning
of the West”—started with white people
and remains overwhelmingly part of
their universe, even if the gun has now
passed down into other hands to sow
terror in other communities.
Cruz’s weapon of choice in commit-
ting mass murder was the AR-15 rifle. It
is sometimes called the Colt AR-15, Colt
being the name of the famous gun man-
ufacturer that took out a patent on it in
the early 1960s before it lapsed in 1977.
He had acquired the firearm from Ar-
maLite Rifle, the company which first
developed the model. The “AR” is de-
rived from the name of this company.
The New York Times has described the
rifle as “simultaneously, one of [the] most
beloved and most vilified rifles in the
country.”1 Its versatility is demonstrated
by the fact that, with slight alterations,
the United States (US) military turned it
into a fully automatic assault weapon,
and civilians can likewise personalise
the rifle. The National Rifle Association
(NRA) notes, with evident pride, that
the “AR” is often mistaken for “assault
rifle,” but actually stands for “America’s
Rifle” (NRA 2016). An estimated 10 to 12
million of such rifles are in private cir-
culation in the US.
Where else, then, but in the US could
Cruz have walked into a school building
without being accosted by a guard, calmly
taken out what is practically a military-
grade assault rifle from a duffel bag, cut
down many lives before casually casting
aside his rifle, and then put a finish to a
most satisfying afternoon with a visit to
fast-food outlets? In some countries, the
state comes after innocent people: in the
Philippines, thousands of alleged drug
dealers, and often just those who have
dabbled in drugs, have been gunned
down; in Yemen and Syria, military air-
crafts have strafed their own popula-
tions; in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide
bombings, a fall-out of the American
“war on terror,” have turned every street
corner and every building into a possible
booby trap. The US does not need any of
these. It has its own form of terrorism,
one which sends schoolchildren hunker-
ing behind desks and closed doors for
safety and compels institutions to
go into “lockdown.” A new debased
18
vocabulary to match this terror has
come into being. In most large offices,
university campuses, and government
installations, the “active shooter drill” is
now mandated for employees. The US
has taken out a patent on everyday gun
violence. Will it own up to this patent?
School Shootings
Mass shootings have taken place at
schools, university campuses, entertain-
ment venues, nightclubs, churches, shop-
ping complexes, and even army camps.
No venue is entirely safe; the gunman
can strike anywhere and at any time of
his choosing. This is the essence of any
act of terror. Nevertheless, a shooting at
a school has a poignancy that is all its
own: whatever the conceptions of child-
hood in a given culture, and howsoever
traumatic childhood may have been ren-
dered for some by warfare, street vio-
lence, or sexual abuse, some notion of
the innocence of children persists across
cultures. A school, moreover, is a place
of learning, and thus of growth and
development; it carries with it the insig-
nia of a sanctuary and a refuge from the
storms of life. The vulnerability of chil-
dren is greater as they place their secu-
rity and well-being in the hands of those
who are empowered to act on their be-
half. It is for these reasons that school
shootings are particularly horrifying.
A recent Washington Post study has
established that since the school shoot-
ing on 20 April 1999 in Columbine, Ohio,
where teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher
before committing suicide, over 1,87,000
children have been caught in the hail of
fire, or exposed to gun violence, across
schools in the US. The study has exclud-
ed those incidents where shootings did
not lead to any casualty, except of the
perpetrators. Suicides have been simi-
larly excluded, as are shootings at col-
leges and universities (Cox and Rich 2018).
According to this study, the shootings
led to at least 130 deaths, and twice that
number were injured; however, the study
does not include, in its tally of those
who were “exposed” to violence, a much
greater number of schoolchildren who
were informed by teachers that the school
was going into “lockdown” since a threat
MAY 5, 2018
had been received. Reports of such lock-
downs—when an anonymous threat
turns out to be a hoax—make it to the
local community newspaper, but no rea-
sonable assessment can be made of how
these affect students’ lives.
To take one example, Menlo-Atherton
High School, which is located in one of
the country’s wealthiest districts, home to
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tycoons,
went into lockdown in the late morning of
4 April 2018 after Atherton police received
warnings of a possible (unspecified) threat
against the school. A photograph of a
15-year-old boy at the school brandish-
ing a firearm was found on social media.
Students were sequestered in locked
rooms and the lockdown was lifted two
hours later (Almanac 2018). The incident
did get reported in the local newspaper,
though the day when such an incident
goes entirely unreported may not be very
far into the future. Indeed, had the school
been located in a poor district, there is
every likelihood that the lockdown
would not have been “news” at all.
‘March for Our Lives’
Seventeen students’ lives were taken
away at the Parkland school shooting.
These could have, after the customary
eulogies and testimonies to their lives,
ended up as only as statistics. However,
the aftermath of the massacre has made
the story of the Parkland school shoot-
ing somewhat unusual in contemporary
American experience. Rather than turning
the gun upon himself in one final act of
desperation as most shooters have done,
Cruz allowed himself to be taken captive.
Perhaps, his “story” will be heard, though
it is doubtful if anything particularly
striking will emerge beyond the by-now-
familiar narrative of a white boy in his late
teens or early 20s who routinely engaged
in slurs against Muslims, black people,
and Jews, sported swastikas and was
drawn to neo-Nazi videos on the internet,
and appears to have thought of white
women who had entered into inter-racial
relationships as traitors to their race.
The shooters, whether at school or else-
where, have been predominantly white.
Their admirers, drawn from the ranks of
those who harbour a fascination for
guns and advocate racial purity, are also
vol lIiI no 18 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

overwhelmingly white. In another piece of
Americana, as Cruz remains confined in
prison while awaiting trial, he is being in-
undated with fan mail from across the
country (with a few stray pieces from Eu-
rope), mostly from girls, women, and older
men. His interlocutors include older wom-
en who have sent Cruz photos of them-
selves in lingerie, as well as young women
who have written him love letters or are
solicitous of his welfare (Flores 2018).
More significantly, however, it is the
resolve of the students of the Parkland
school to bring the subject of gun control
to the attention of the nation that has
differentiated this shooting from many
others. Just days into the shooting, some
of the school’s students had already be-
come emissaries for a cause, appearing
as spokespersons for gun control at other
schools, on news channels, in town hall
meetings, and at community forums.
Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas who was raised in
Parkland, emerged three days after the
shooting as the face of the student-led
gun control movement. At a gun control
rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she
ended her speech with the rallying call,
“We call BS.” Gonzales, like the other
students, had had enough of politicians
informing families of victims and trau-
matised students that their “thoughts
and prayers” were with them. She had
heard far too many politicians piously
vowing, time after time, to make the
country’s schools safe from gun violence,
and then unabashedly proceeding to
collect donations from the NRA for their
re-election campaigns. She now knew
what it meant to have to cower in fear.
On the day of the shooting, she was in
the school auditorium when the alarm
sounded; though she sought to make
good her exit, she and other students
were held in the auditorium for two
hours before the police arrived and un-
locked the doors.
On 20 February 2018, Gonzalez and
other students met with state legislators in
Florida at Tallahassee and watched them
vote down a debate on the gun control
bill. The day after, she let the NRA and
the politicians who stand by it have an
earful: “You’re either funding the killers,
or you’re standing for the children.”
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 5, 2018
On 14 March 2018, one month to the
day the massacre of the innocents took
place, students from across the country
staged a school walkout termed “Enough!”
They would be assisted in this endeavour
by some of the organisations and acti-
vists in the “Women’s March” that had
descended upon Washington the day
after Donald Trump’s inauguration as
President on 20 January 2017. Timed at
10 am, students in perhaps as many as
3,000 schools quit their classrooms,
staying within the school grounds for 17
minutes in memory of their 17 peers who
were killed in Parkland and to signal their
impatience with prevarication by legis-
lators in initiating gun control measures.
All this served as a prelude to the far
more ambitious and purposeful “March
for Our Lives” on 24 March, when one
million students gathered in Washing-
ton, and several hundreds of cities across
the country, to demand legislative action
in Congress, and state legislative assem-
blies, that would put into place more
stringent measures to regulate the sale
of guns. Some, taking a more complex
political view of the matter, called atten-
tion to the gun violence that has blighted
urban communities across the country
and taken an especially heavy toll of
African Americans, Chicanos, and even
bystanders. There, again, was Gonzalez,
this time standing forth, most of it in
heavy silence, for 6 minutes 20 seconds—
as long as it took for Cruz to snuff out
many lives and maim as many—before
concluding her speech with a call for
action before “someone else is shot.”
The day belonged not to Gonzalez
alone. Seventeen-year-old Edna Chavez
recalled how, one evening three years
ago, she heard what sounded like fire-
works outside her South Los Angeles
home, not realising that her older broth-
er had been gunned down in gang vio-
lence. “I lost more than my brother that
day,” she told the Washington crowd, “I
lost my hero.” At 11 years of age, fifth-
grader Naomi Wadler took the podium
and spoke forcefully for nearly four min-
utes on the disproportionate impact of
gun violence upon black women. Let us
pause over her remarks:
I am here to acknowledge and represent
the African American girls whose stories
vol lIiI no 18
COMMENTARY
don’t make the front page of every national
newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the
evening news. I represent the African Ameri-
can women who are victims of gun violence,
who are simply statistics instead of vibrant,
beautiful girls full of potential.
Wadler displayed, for someone her
age, remarkable poise; and she evidently
had more political awareness and acuity
than one encounters among most politi-
cians. Much more so than school shoot-
ings, it is the violence on American
streets that has destroyed families, dec-
imated entire neighbourhoods, and
condemned generations of black men to
prison terms and lives of destitution.
Once the gunfire has died down, it is
largely women—mothers, daughters,
sisters, wives, girlfriends—who are left
to mourn, pick up the pieces of their lives,
and, as they say, carry on. The US has lit-
tle interest in addressing gun violence. It
makes some streets unsafe, but the rigid
segregation that is pervasive around the
country ensures that, for the most part,
this violence does not spill over into
white neighbourhoods. In any case, much
of white America has long been reconciled
to the idea that a slight degree of discom-
fort can be tolerated, so long as gun vio-
lence does not begin to tear apart their
own communities. School shootings
have, we may say, broken that barrier.
The March and the Aftermath
The student-initiated “March for Our
Lives” is now commonly thought of as an
unprecedented event in American histo-
ry. The idea of the march is, of course,
scarcely a novelty in the annals of politi-
cal action, including in American history.
Nor is “the march” a singular thing. The
“Long March” itself consisted of several
marches. Most famously, it entailed the
movement by Mao Zedong and fellow
comrades from Jiangxi province to
Shanxi, a distance of some 4,000 miles
across mountain ranges and two dozen
rivers, over a period of 370 days from
October 1934 to October 1935. The stran-
glehold that Chiang Kai-shek had at-
tempted to place around them was bro-
ken; the march would help to seal Mao’s
ascent to power. Likewise, M K Gandhi’s
march to the sea may have, more than
anything else, transformed him into a
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COMMENTARY
world-historical figure, just as Nandlal
Bose’s rendition of the Gandhi of the
strident walk would yield one of the
most iconic images of the Mahatma. In
its wake, came the Round Table Confer-
ences; whatever their place in the narra-
tive of independence, the British for the
first time sat down to negotiate with Indi-
ans. Numerous marches have sought to
reconfigure the American landscape as
well, none more so than the 1963 “March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,”
which itself demonstrably took a page
out of Gandhi’s march to Dandi. A quar-
ter of a million people gathered to hear
some of the stalwarts of the Civil Rights
movement. None present there had any
anticipation of the soaring speech that
Martin Luther King was about to deliver.
Less than a year later, the Civil Rights
Act, inarguably the most transformative
piece of legislation in modern American
history, was passed.
The most recent “March for Our Lives”
cannot be likened to any of these march-
es, and yet it has earned the moniker of a
“march.” Will it, in time, be similarly
transformative and, thus, deemed his-
toric? Few remember today the Million
Mom March, held on Mother’s Day in
2000, when an estimated 7,50,000 wom-
en and men converged in Washington in
support of gun control legislation follow-
ing a shooting at a Jewish community
centre in Granada Hills, California. An-
other 2,50,000 people took part in sister
marches held simultaneously around
the country. The legislation that may
legitimately be described as having, in
part, emerged from this activism—the
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention
(BHVP) Act of November 1993—mandat-
ed federal background checks on fire-
arm purchasers and imposed a five-day
waiting period for purchases, though
the latter provision was rendered obso-
lete by the introduction, in 1998, of the
National Instant Criminal Background
Check System (NICS). The NRA, expect-
edly, offered stiff resistance to the Brady
bill; its defeat, at that moment, was
roundly celebrated as a demonstration
of the fact that dents can be made in the
NRA armor.
The BHVP Act, however, did nothing
whatsoever to put into question “the gun
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culture” that occupies an immense space
in the American imaginary. The long-
standing, militant executive vice president
of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, is scarcely
the only exponent of American excep-
tionalism and believes, with many of his
countrymen and women, “in America as
the greatest nation on earth”; but he is
also certain that the US’s greatness owes
everything to the Second Amendment,
and that gun owners were critically im-
portant in handing Hilary Clinton an un-
expected defeat (LaPierre 2016). Clinton
is far from being an enemy of the Second
Amendment; much like the students
who marched on Washington, she be-
lieves only in sensible gun control.
Though, it is necessary to state, gun con-
trol laws in most nations are far more
stringent than anything that could be
contemplated under the rubric of “sensi-
ble gun control” in the US.
The NRA has absolute mastery over
this domain. It defines, names, and
maims its enemies, except that its ene-
mies are merely somewhat more reason-
able human beings and nothing like the
radicals who, as the NRA claims, are de-
termined to take the US down and strip
its citizens of their cherished freedoms.
Apart from all this, it should not be for-
gotten that the provisions of the BHVP
Act continued to be whittled down, and
the NRA relentlessly waged successful
battles to augment the rights of gun
owners in other respects. As the events
of the last 25 years have amply shown,
the BHVP Act has been rendered tooth-
less. One survey, based on an exhaustive
study of data from 1985 to 1997 at the
National Center for Health Statistics,
concludes that the BHVP Act may have
done something to reduce suicide rates
among those who are 55 years or older,
but that it has had no impact on homi-
cide rates or even suicide rates for those
under 55 (Ludwig and Cook 2000).
“Welcome to the Revolution,” shouted
the students at “March for Our Lives”
(Livingston et al 2018). Nearly everyone
appears to be filled with admiration for
the students, marvelling at not only
their energy and organisational abili-
ties, but at the fact that hundreds of
thousands of them appear to contradict
the widespread idea that students of this
MAY 5, 2018
generation are filled with political apa-
thy. The election of Trump and the
installation of a political regime that is
determined only to protect the privileg-
es of the most affluent elements of
American society have doubtless moved
many people to action who were content
until recently to sit on the sidelines. But,
some commentators have also remarked
upon their innocence. Revolutions, the
adults seem to know, are not made by
merely shouting the word. There is a
suggestion that students may not have
much of an organisation behind them,
and that gun control legislation, in par-
ticular, cannot be achieved without mas-
sive financial backing. These criticisms
may be misplaced. As a recent New York
Times article suggests, the students are
backed by billionaires such as the for-
mer New York Mayor, Michael R Bloomb-
erg, and that they can count on the sup-
port of large activist organisations
(Blinder et al 2018).
Naive Faith
The problems run much deeper. The stu-
dents have repeatedly warned politi-
cians who do not support gun control
legislation that they will vote them out
of office when they come of age. Their
faith in the ballot box is charming if
naïve. The supposition that electoral
politics can deliver fundamental changes
has long been in need of serious exami-
nation, and students’ textbooks on
American government have clearly done
little, if anything, to educate them on
the corporate stranglehold on the Demo-
crats and Republicans alike. Moreover,
the students have agitated for what can
only be described as sensible gun con-
trol measures, which shows how guns
have now become an inescapably part of
the mythos of the US. This is one reason
among many why almost no one dares
shoot down the Second Amendment.
The retired Supreme Court Justice John
Paul Stevens has now done so (Stevens
2018) in a rare missive tacitly directed at
what can be described as the gun cul-
ture of the US. However, thousands of
such voices will have to be heard across
the country if there is to be the remotest
chance of repealing the Second Amend-
ment. And it is absolutely certain, as
vol lIiI no 18 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

certain as the fact that night follows day,
that the NRA will, in defiance, comman-
deer its inexhaustible resources—finan-
cial, cultural, even spiritual—to defeat
the “enemies” of the US. There will be no
revolution in the US without guns, at
least not in any foreseeable future.
Note
1 A slightly modified model of this rifle was used
by Omar Mateen less than two years ago to
mow down dozens of people at a gay nightclub
in Orlando, in what was then the largest mass
shooting in the United States.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW MAY 5, 2018
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