When you move to America from a country with more effective gun control laws,canl? pornu one of the first things you learn is how hard it is to talk to Americans -- even on the sympathetic side of the political divide -- about the gun issue.
It was particularly difficult when I arrived on these shores in 1996, direct from living in Scotland during its (and Britain's) worst-ever school shooting. In the tiny town of Dunblane, a 43-year old former shopkeeper and scoutmaster brought four handguns to a school gymnasium full of five-year-olds. He shot and killed 16 of them and their teacher, then turned his handgun on himself.
SEE ALSO: These books will make you think differently about the gun control debateAfter Dunblane, the British plunged into a state of collective mourning that was at least as widespread as the better-known grieving process for Princess Diana the following year. (Americans don't always believe that part, to which I usually say: the kids were five, for crying out loud. Five.)
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In a country where nobody would dream of pulling public funding for studies into gun violence, the solution was amazingly rational and bipartisan. After a year, and an official inquiry into Dunblane, the Conservative government passed a sweeping piece of legislation restricting handguns. Then after Labour won the 1997 election, it passed another. Britain hasn't seen a school shooting since. (Same with Australia, which also passed major gun control legislation in 1996).
But trying to talk about all that in America over the last two decades, I've learned from experience, has been like touching the proverbial third rail: only tourists would be dumb enough to try it. Even gun control advocates now think they're dealing with an intractable, generational problem. Many tell me that we need to tackle mental health services or gun fetishization in Hollywood movies first. The legislation route couldn't possibly be that easy, they say.
But what if it isthat easy? What if the rest of the world also loves Hollywood action movies and has mental health problems, but manages to have fewer shootings simply because it has fewer guns available? What if the rest of the world has been shouting at America for years that gun control is less intractable than you think -- you just have to vote in large numbers for the politicians that favor it, and keep doing so at every election?
If that's the case, then perhaps some powerful, leveling international marketplace of ideas could help the U.S. see what everyone else has already seen. Something like social media.
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In one sense, Wednesday's massacre in Parkland, Florida -- a school shooting as shocking and senseless as Dunblane -- was evidence that America was further away from a gun control solution than ever. In 1996, buying an AR-15 assault rifle was illegal under federal law. Now, in Florida and many other states, a 19-year old can walk into any gun store and walk out with this military-grade weapon of mass destruction.
Yet anecdotally, I have noticed one glimmer of hope. Since the last American gun massacre that got everyone talking, there has been a small shift in the online conversation. It has become a little more global. The students of Parkland have been broadcasting to the world via social media, and the world is taking notice.
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I'm not suggesting some kind of slam-dunk situation where every American on Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat has an epiphany about gun control because they're more frequently interacting with people from other nations with different laws.
But I am saying it's noticeably harder for pro-gun accounts to spread lies about the situation in other countries without people from those countries chiming in.
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Meanwhile, there is a mountain of evidence that Russian bots and troll accounts are attempting to hijack the online conversation using the same playbook from the 2016 elections -- manufacture conflict to destabilize American discourse. That means taking the most trollishly pro-NRA position they can think of, in a bid to counteract the large majority of Americans who want sensible gun control.
So the voices from other countries are chiming in just in time. If anything, we need more of them to balance out cynical foreign influence in a pro-gun direction.
How effective gun control can happen
Twenty years of trying to have this debate in the U.S. have worn me down. As you might expect, I've been on the receiving end of a lot of Second Amendment-splaining from the pro-gun lobby. (Yep, I'm very familiar with the two centuries of debate over the militia clause, thanks.) I've been told I didn't understand the power of the NRA (which, again, I'm quite familiar with: the organization supported sensible gun restrictions until it was radicalized in 1977).
I've heard every argument you could imagine: the notion that British police must now be lording it over the poor defenseless population; the blinkered insistence that there must have been a rise in crime with illegal guns and legal knives now all the good people with guns have been taken out of the equation. (Violent crime is still too high in the UK, but it is a fraction of America's total -- and has declined significantly since 1996.)
I no longer have the dream that a UK-Australia-style handgun ban would work here. There are as many as 300 million firearms in private hands, according to a 2012 Congressional estimate; even though most of them are concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of owners, it's simply impractical to talk about removing a significant percentage of them from the equation.
But if anything, I'm more aware of creative legal solutions: laws that require gun insurance the way we require car insurance, or tax ammunition, or hold manufacturers responsible for gun deaths. I've seen my adopted state of California implement some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, laws that just went into effect. The fight to prevent future massacres is just getting started.
And any time you want to talk about how it can happen, the rest of a shrinking world is listening -- and ready to talk.