I Prublema put i Paki

One of the drawbacks to seeing your country as the most powerful in the world, or the greatest in the world, or even worse the greatest country in history, is that it makes changing yourself almost impossible. Your country will change, all countries are changing, often times whether the people want it to or not. But the larger your national ego is, the more difficult  it is to organize the chaotic coalition that is your national innards in order to solve basic problems. A smaller country, a less nationally narcissistic nation, which is less enamored with its own overblown and self-aggrandized image can have difficulties as well. But the "greatness" doesn't get in the way as much. Part of the problem if you think far too highly of yourself in this way is that your problems go from being unsolvable or impossible, to irrelevant, especially from those who may be standing in the way of any change, large or small, that could take place. The "greatness" of the country doesn't become such an obtrusive and overwhelming presence, so that basic commonsensical problems, can appear as issues to be taken up, instead of appearing like things to be avoided, irrelevant concerns, or attacks on the "core" of what makes the nation great. Nowhere is this more true than in terms of America's unique problem with gun violence. People die around the world in wars and in battles, but in the United States, enough people die from gun violence each year, that you could easily classify it as a civil war, a war within. But, just as with health care problems, soaring military spending, America's empire, climate change, the crumbling of America's infrastructure, this is something which America seems powerless to solve, as a significant enough of people and political leaders, see this as a potential weakening of America's greatness. That acting to hopefully limit the ability for people to obtain guns in the greater interest of curbing the epidemic of violence would mean destroying something that makes America great. It could be argued it does make America great, but great in a notorious or frightening sense, not the type of thing that you would want to put on campaign buttons or bumper stickers. These the pratfalls and the problems of exceptionalism. Is that while you live in this aura which makes it seem like you can do whatever you like and that the world exists to do as you please, it can also inhibit you, because anything which might seem like a problem, can somehow be explained away as just another part of your greatness. The exceptionalism extends even into being unable to see yourself reflected in the realities of others, to learn from them and just find some more certain truth in that way.

Part of the greatness delusion is that you lack the basic ability to see in another the potential for improvement. That you have trouble looking to others to see a better way of doing things or being yourself. When Michael Moore released the film Bowling for Columbine, that the basic premise for his film. America should look to other countries in order to see ways of preventing this problem, but also for ways of understanding how terrifying of a problem it is. In Bowling for Columbine he took a cursory look at other countries who have similar histories as the US or levels of gun ownership and argued America should learn from their examples. The continuing wave of gun violence and mass shootings clearly shows that little to nothing was learned from this film or the realities of American violence today.

Moore would repeat this type of critical narrative gesture, this revealing of alternatives in his other films Sicko and Capitalism: A Love Story. In both films he looked at how other countries lived with different health care or economic systems, and that America shouldn't look down on them, simply because they aren't part of our current God given or Uncle Sam copyrighted greatness. America should humble itself, set aside its facile delusions of grandeur and uniqueness and perhaps try to do things differently. In his current film Where to Invade Next, he keeps moving in this direction by visiting countries and offering to invade them and take the things from them that America desperately needs. Not land for bases, oil, gold, diamonds or slaves. But rather different ways of living, alternatives for health care or for education and so on. It is an important reminder that there is no point to so called "greatness" if it blinds you to everything around you and assures you that everything else must be beneath you.

One country that liberals and progressives have routinely looked to in terms of helping the United States get past this ego blindness and see the need and the potential for gun reform is Australia. I first watched John Oliver do a wonderfully scathing report on this for The Daily Show. The most telling part of it, which should at least give critics of gun control in any or most forms pause, is that the regulations and policies put into effect after the massacre at Port Arthur in 1996 were pushed through by conservatives in Australia, not the tree-hugging, peace-loving, Birkenstock-wearing liberals, but rather their conservative politicians. 

Here below is an insightful peace on the potential in looking to Australia as an example for the US to follow, but also some of the problems.

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How a Conservative-Led Australia Ended Mass Killings

by Austrin Ramzy, Michelle Innis and Patrick Boehler
The New York Times
December 4, 2015

In the continuing debate over how to stop mass killings in the United States, Australia has become a familiar touchstone.

President Obama has cited the country’s gun laws as a model for the United States, calling Australia a nation “like ours.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has said the Australian approach is “worth considering.” The National Rifle Association has dismissed the policies, contending that they “robbed Australians of their right to self-defense and empowered criminals” without reducing violent crime.

The oft-cited statistic in Australia is a simple one: There have been no mass killings — defined by experts there as a gunman killing five or more people besides himself — since the nation significantly tightened its gun control laws almost 20 years ago.

Mass shootings in Australia were rare anyway. But after a gunman massacred 35 people in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur in 1996, a public outcry spurred a national consensus to severely restrict firearms. The tightened laws, which were standardized across Australia, are more stringent than those of any state in the United States, including California.

Pushed through by John Howard, the conservative prime minister at the time, the National Firearms Agreement prohibited automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles and pump shotguns in all but unusual cases. It tightened licensing rules, established a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases, created a national gun registry and instituted a temporary buyback program that removed more than 20 percent of firearms from public circulation.

Several of the measures, including waiting periods and background checks, have been adopted piecemeal by different states in America. But the United States has never tried a national gun buyback program; in Australia, that required raising taxes. And the United States has never been able to do what Mr. Howard did: forge a broad agreement on a sweeping set of gun control measures that applies to the entire nation.

A test of those laws came in December 2014, when a gunman who had expressed sympathy for Islamic extremism took hostages in a cafe in Sydney. The assailant, Man Haron Monis, brandished a sawed-off pump action shotgun that he had obtained illegally.

An inquest said the gun may have been in circulation before pump action shotguns were essentially banned in 1996 and was never confiscated in the buyback. According to the inquest, his shells were 15 to 20 years old.

During the 17-hour siege of the cafe, Mr. Monis fired several times, once into a wall, before killing the cafe manager. At that point, the police stormed in, killing the gunman and another hostage in the crossfire.

It is impossible to say whether gun restrictions saved lives in the siege, but some politicians say they believe so.

“It is the ready availability of weapons, particularly those that are automatic or semiautomatic, that increases the likelihood that people in a moment of madness, or malice, or hatred, will kill a lot of people,” Mr. Howard said in October, after a man opened fire on a community college campus in Oregon, killing nine.

Measuring the broad effectiveness of Australia’s gun control laws is complicated. Australians themselves continue to debate their impact, and some have sought to loosen restrictions on gun ownership.

Critics have argued that gun violence was falling in Australia before 1996 and would have continued to fall even without the gun control measures. Others have suggested that even as gun-related deaths fell, people in Australia may have resorted to using other weapons to kill.

To assess these claims, scholars have examined not just mass shootings, but also all intentional deaths caused by firearms, adjusting for population growth.

Total intentional gun deaths fell by half in the decade after the 1996 restrictions were put in place, even as Australia’s population grew nearly 14 percent. The rate of gun suicides per 100,000 people dropped 65 percent from 1995 to 2006, and the rate of gun homicides fell 59 percent, according to a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University.

When the data in that study is updated to include the latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as well as the numbers going back to 1968, several facts emerge.

First, the rates of intentional firearm deaths were substantially higher in the 28 years before the gun control measures were adopted in 1996 than in the 17 years after. How much of that decline can be attributed to the new policies can be debated, but the difference is clear.

Second, the initial drop in firearm deaths in the decade after the 1996 restrictions were enacted appears to have leveled off. In 2013, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were 200 gun-related homicides and suicides, for a rate of 0.87 deaths per 100,000 residents. That is up slightly from the low in 2005, when 0.82 deaths per 100,000 residents were recorded, but still far below the 2.71 deaths per 100,000 residents in 1996.

The data confirms that gun deaths were already falling before the National Firearms Agreement. The rate of intentional gun deaths fell about 33 percent from 1986 to 1996. The decline accelerated, however, under the new gun control measures, with the rate dropping about 60 percent from 1996 to 2006.

The impact of the gun laws is difficult to assess partly because of the low rates of intentional firearms deaths in Australia. Gun-related homicide rates are even lower, because suicides make up about 80 percent of all gun deaths. Looking at gun-related suicides and homicides separately shows similar trends — higher rates of both before 1996 than after, declines in the decade before 1996 but sharper declines in the decade after, and a leveling off in recent years.

Mr. Leigh and Ms. Neill tried to measure the effect of the 1996 measures across Australian states and territories to see whether different levels of gun confiscation led to different results. They found that the places where the most guns were removed from public circulation also experienced the largest drops in intentional gun deaths.

The impact of the buyback appeared more pronounced on suicides.

“Firearm suicides fell more in states that had more guns bought back than in states with fewer guns bought back,” Ms. Neill said in an email. “Firearm homicides also fell more in states with more guns bought back, but the effect was smaller than for firearm suicides.”

The data also indicates that overall homicide and suicide rates fell in the decade after 1996, meaning Australians did not respond to the gun control measures by killing one another or themselves using other weapons at higher rates.

Over all, Mr. Leigh and Ms. Neill estimate that at least 200 lives are saved annually because of Australia’s gun buyback program.

The introduction to the Australian market this year of a shotgun that allows rapid fire using a lever action rekindled debate over the restrictions, with some enthusiasts arguing that they felt cheated out of owning a gun. The government banned a version of the shotgun that holds seven rounds but approved a five-round version. There are also efforts to lower the legal age of supervised shooters in Tasmania, to 15 from 16.

Senator David Leyonhjelm, who supports easing gun controls, said Australia resembled Britain, Canada and New Zealand, where mass shootings are infrequent. “America is an outlier,” he said. “We are not like America.”

In the 18 years before the Port Arthur massacre, there were 12 mass shootings in Australia, according to a 2006 study in the journal Injury Prevention. The deadliest shooting since 1996 occurred last year, when a farmer in New South Wales fatally shot his wife and three children before killing himself.

Tasmania’s former premier, Tony Rundle, said reaching the 1996 agreement was difficult and warned against revising it. “I told people all over the country, in town hall meetings, we don’t want to go down the path that America has traveled,” said Mr. Rundle, who is now retired. “Eroding those laws now, chipping away at the edges, would be a folly.”

Mr. Howard, the prime minister who pushed through the measures, agreed. “There should be no relaxation, complacency or compromise,” he said in an interview. “That is the view of people all around Australia.”

Austin Ramzy and Patrick Boehler reported from Hong Kong, and Michelle Innis from Sydney, Australia.

A version of this article appears in print on December 5, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: A Deterrent to Mass Killings in Australia.