No place for poetry

I have just been reading an excerpt from the second amendment to the American constitution:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

I found it on a website called fee.org, relating to a publication called The Freeman. The author says,

"Is this sentence so hard to understand? Apparently so. Even some of its defenders don’t like how it is worded because it allegedly breeds misunderstanding. But the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights is indeed a well-crafted sentence. By that I mean that its syntax permits only one reasonable interpretation of the authors’ meaning, namely, that the people’s individual right to be armed ought to be respected and that the resulting armed populace will be secure against tyranny, invasion, and crime. Someone completely ignorant of the eighteenth-century American political debates but familiar with the English language should be able to make out the meaning easily. "

The author makes a decent fist of a close reading of the sentence. But he misses one thing: the drafters of the constitution and its amendments ARE LONG DEAD. It's the same sort of argument that says that every word in the bible is absolutely 'true', without any attempt to understand its context.

At the time of the second amendment, there was a real danger of a colonial power using force to take back power. And there was no standing army, nor was there yet a strong tradition of such a thing. So you're an eighteenth century American, facing a real threat from the British, perhaps the French or the Spanish. You have no means of defending yourself except to reach for the gun under your bed. The second amendment makes sense in its historical context: today it doesn't.

I have fired a fair few weapons, from 9mm to 84mm, from pistols to belt-fed machine guns and anti-tank weapons. They feel good. They feel powerful and they made me feel powerful. But I did so in a military context, as part of a standing army (albeit just at the weekends!). And as a civilian, I would be terrified to think of other civilians walking around with concealed weaponry.

Here are four stories:

I have a friend who served in Bosnia, in a military/civilian liaison role. She took great pains not to appear threatening: she wore a beret, used open hand gestures and only carried a holstered pistol. She said that the Americans serving with her - by and large national guardsmen (and therefore perhaps the descendants of the militia mentioned in the second amendment) - strode around in their flack jackets, helmeted and brandishing their automatic weaponry. She said that their posture provoked rather than reduced aggression.

Years ago, I heard from the man who commanded our contingent in Beirut in the eighties. The British troops kept their heads down and didn't return fire. They were only once fired on - and that was by accident. By contrast, the US marines fired ten rounds back for every round that was fired at them. And they suffered the consequences.

A third example: British troops, when serving in Northern Ireland, were governed by a code that stipulated that if they were found to have fired on a civilian without clear warning and good cause, they would be tried for murder. As a student, I helped train troops preparing to go out to Northern Ireland by acting as a Northern Irish civilian and trying to provoke them into firing on me. If they did so, they received the bollocking of their lives. "You do this in Northern Ireland and you will go down for life!" the directing staff shouted. We have all heard about cases of shoot to kill and official collusion to murder in the Province - but there was this code, written on a yellow card carried by every soldier. And I have known members of the Metropolitan Police's SO19 armed response unit who live with a similar threat of prosecution.

Contrast this with the FBI officer in the basement of the FBI building in Washington DC. As a visiting tourist to the astonishingly open headquarters, I watched him blast targets to pieces with his small arms. I asked him if the FBI had any code similar to the 'yellow card'. "No. We don't have time to shout. We shoot." I can understand why. Living in a society that embraces weaponry in so many aspects of its culture and, in its official attitude to defence and law enforcement, believes in a posturing, "shoot-first-ask-questions-later "approach, I'd be a bit trigger-happy.

But it's too late to change anything, I suspect. America loves its guns to death, and this venereal disease - not so much the massacres as the routine gun crime - is the consequence it has to live with. Sadly, we're incubating the same disease here in Britain. I am now really scared.

It's not really a logic thing: it's a heart-felt thing. I think that widespread gun ownership is stupid and I think that a nation that considers it to be a part of their constitutional right to carry weapons is, corporately, stupid. And for the most powerful nation on earth not to grasp this simple concept is very scary. A sick joke.

Let's be clear: I am referring to America as a corporate whole. Of course this conflates a kaleidoscopic miscellany of peoples. There are sensible, mature, emotionally intelligent people everywhere and it is grossly insulting to talk about "you US". Even to refer to the US as a homogenous whole is to lose the sense of variety in the country's people. And to be clearly clear: by 'corporate America' I mean the US as a body politic - not America as represented by big companies. When I talk about America, I address those citizens of the United States of America who - collectively - like guns and shooting.

Is this just a question of language? No it really IS important. Because lost in the "you" of US is the individual: every beautiful, varied soul - some of whom become ill-informed, sick or ultimately just depraved. It is vital to remember the second persons singular that make up humanity - just as I remember my girlfriend who died, my friend at work, my friend's son and so on.

But as for mourning: why should I, who know no more about these people than the other millions who die needlessly and because of human intervention - war, terrorism, state-sponsored famine and poverty, lethal working conditions and, yes, gun crime, to name a few, mourn them any more? If we mourned the millions as they deserved, our hearts would give in, our minds break down and our lives become a living wake.

I am unduly affected by the suffering of others close to me because I feel I ought to be able to do something about it. My mourning a few who have been highlighted by the media would mock the other millions. This does not mean any of these deaths is any less tragic, but my mourning is meaningless and I am powerless. Corporate America is not going to hear my chatter and my tears will lift none of these people from death.

My response to this situation is to try to be as clear thinking as possible: hollow grief for people I didn't know does nothing. But considering this shooting is something that I've said should be put into the perspective of all the other deaths, I am finding it difficult to think of much else.

By a macabre coincidence, I was at the Royal Ballet's production of Mayerling last night. To cut to the point: Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary is obsessed with guns and death, scares the wits out his wife with a gun, then shoots someone at a hunting party, then shoots his lover then shoots himself. The sexual, insane and lethal violence of the dance was chilling.

I was also reminded of when I took my daughter to Orador-sur-Glane, near to where my parents live, in the Limousin. In 1944, members of the Waffen-SS - many of whom were hardened by their experiences on the Eastern Front - were attacked by partisans. They responded in their typical way, by surrounding a town, slowly gathering all the people in the centre and then slaughtering them. The town was partly demolished by the SS as they left, and a new Orador was built nearby. But the ruins remain and Orador is now a national memorial. You can walk around the barns and place your fingers in the bullet holes where the men were killed. You can stand in the church where the women and children were killed with grenades and fire. You can see the partly melted pram in there, and the doctor's car in the square where he died.

When I visited this site alone, some years before, I tried to mourn for each man, woman and child and found it unbearable. It makes any writing about it seem so inadequate, any emotion that I can express so futile. It's a toughie: it's probably well known that Theodor Adorno, who wrote that "After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric," subsequently admitted that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream." So I said to my daughter, as we walked around Orador on my second visit, "This is not about some crazed fanatics. This is not about evil Germans. This is our failure to remember to love and respect each other."

The friend of ours who served in Bosnia has also served in Kosovo and Basra, in a similar role, in similar ruins. And every time, it's our failure to treat our fellow men and women as sharing our divine humanity. I say divine with a small "d" as it needs no external, supernatural validation.

Which gets me back to the language. Yes, if it helps, look each of these victims in Virginia in their photographed eyes and imagine them, mourn for them. And the media have allowed us the opportunity to engage in that way - unlike the millions who go unmourned elsewhere.

The singular "you" is important; the conflated "we", "You" or "they" is potentially lethal.

So what? Number one: don't demonise the killer. It avoids confronting the potential evil in any of us or our loved ones. And number two: just live a good life and love where hate would be an easier option.

A big challenge that I try to live up to and almost always fail to achieve.