When you think about it for a moment, it’s not hard to understand how guns came to hold such a preeminent place in American culture. To the Europeans who came to North America and unquestioningly perceived themselves to be “taming” and “domesticating” an “uncivilized” continent full of physical threats — be it from nature or the Native peoples from whom they were appropriating land — firearms were a tool of unparalleled value.
While groups of humans had fought with other groups and conquered their lands for millennia, this typically was a communal exercise in which armies took the lead. The North American experience was somewhat new and different. While organized, state-sponsored takings of Native lands played a big and indispensable role, the advent of modern firearms also allowed large numbers of individuals and small groups of “settlers” to strike out on their own.
Over time, not only did guns play a huge role in providing residents of “wild” territories a sense of security and safety (and a useful tool for avoiding starvation), but they also helped spur the advent of a political ethic of stubborn individualism — a society in which many people came to perceive that they could do without government (or much of it, anyway) and maybe even resist it, if push came to shove.
Today’s America of 330-plus million people living mostly in highly populated urban centers, of course, bears little, if any, resemblance to that world. While many still make use of firearms like their forebears to hunt, and a few may still realistically rely on them for self-protection, it’s been ages since privately held guns were essential for survival or a tool that might be used effectively to resist government.
Like a lot of things that once were widely seen as signs of miraculous societal progress (in many cases with good reason) only to be viewed very differently later — high calorie foods, smokestacks, the internal combustion engine, drained wetlands (aka “swamps”), large dams, nuclear power plants, cigarettes — guns in the 21st Century United States have lost much of their former luster.
Indeed, in a country that’s home to an ever-growing arsenal of 400-to-500 million guns with an ever-shrinking number of things to shoot, guns have effectively gone from solution to problem.
Nowhere is this more painfully evident than when it comes to guns and children. Like a metastasizing cancer, America’s youth gun violence crisis continues to grow and spread.
As Stateline reporter Amanda Hernandez reported last week, the latest mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that firearm-related deaths among children and teenagers in the United States have soared by 50% since 2019.
In 2023, firearms remained the leading cause of death among American youth for the third straight year. No other advanced nation comes close to having such grim figures. Black kids, Hernandez reports, were eight times more likely to die from firearm homicide than their white peers.
What’s more, these numbers would undoubtedly be much worse if our nation’s health care providers hadn’t made so many remarkable advances in recent years in treating gunshot wounds — largely as a result of having had so much practice.
Amazingly, however, North Carolina Republican legislative leaders remain determined to pour more gasoline on the fire.
As NC Newsline’s Christine Zhu reported, under bills now on the fast track in Raleigh, North Carolina could soon allow anyone 18 or older to carry a concealed handgun without a permit of any kind, or so much as a minute of training.
Yes — you read that right. At the same moment the nation is experiencing a youth gun violence crisis of horrific proportions, state lawmakers want to make it easier for high schoolers to carry concealed handguns than it is for them to get a driver’s license.
What could go wrong?
Supporters like the National Rifle Association, however, see no problem. As one of the group’s allies in the state Senate noted, state law already allows anyone 18 or older to carry a firearm openly in public, and since, as he assured members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it takes “years” to learn to master the proper management of a firearm, the eight hours of training currently required for a “concealed carry” permit isn’t that useful.
Pardon those of us who aren’t especially comforted by that analysis. People like the Durham-based pediatric nurse, who told the same Senate committee about the fear she experiences each day for her husband — an emergency room physician who must regularly perform CPR on patients not knowing whether they have a concealed weapon hidden on their bodies that could fire inadvertently while he’s trying to save their life.
Will universal concealed carry become state law this spring? Large GOP majorities and boatloads of gun lobby cash will make the legislation hard to stop.
At some point however, as with so many other once celebrated societal phenomena that have been rendered obsolete by the march of history, an armed-to-the-teeth society will also eventually lose its allure — even if that day will arrive too late for tens of thousands of children who will be denied the chance to see it.
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