Thirty-two human beings are murdered, twenty more injured by yet another young male firing his pistols. And what’s on the news? A president defending the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
One has to be American to make sense out of that. One has to have grown up in this Great Nation to fully understand the meaning of its guiding norm: the rights of the individual which often prevail over those of the community.
It is a powerful principle that was given to us by the Founding Fathers as a bulwark against an all-powerful State, one that many of them and their families were escaping from when they came to the New World. It is the legacy brought forth with the coming of age of a young nation, a teenage nation. A nation that rebelled against oppressive tutelage and that finally managed to break away from an overpowering father: European Despotism.
But just like any young teenager, this nation has so far failed to shed its fear of the old patriarch. It is still haunted by the specter of the one who makes the decisions at the table, the one who decides who gets what and how much. That explains why Americans stubbornly defend the rights of the individual. It’s the teenager’s response to the family despot: “You can’t tell me what to do!!”
But as always when the underlying emotion is fear, there is irrationality. And often this manifests itself in extremism. In the case of the United States, one can easily name a few examples. But the one extreme principle that kills almost exclusively fellow Americans, the one that is the most absurd of all, is the right to bear arms.
One is inclined to wonder whether this Great Nation has not received enough mother love that it still needs guns to reassure itself.
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