Barrel of deaths

Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives. By Gary Younge. Nation Books; 267 pages; $25.99. Guardian Faber; £16.99.

Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings. By Louis Klarevas. Prometheus; 397 pages; $25.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free. By Cody Wilson. Gallery Books; 320 pages; $26.

ONE of the peculiar things about America is the extraordinary frequency with which people who live there are shot to death. There are well over 30,000 gun deaths in America each year, roughly two-thirds of them suicides and one-third murders. This firearm homicide rate, 3.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2014, is more than five times that of any other developed country. Yet America’s political system steadfastly rejects every attempt to do anything about it. Massacres in schools have become regular occurrences, yet Congress has consistently voted down even weak gun-control measures. The Supreme Court decided in 2008 that the constitution’s Second Amendment, which begins with a clause about militias, gives individuals the right to own guns. Many Americans have come to embrace a novel political ideology, concocted by pro-gun lobbying groups, which holds that firearms are the cornerstone of political liberty and that restricting them would cause more crime.

Other Americans find such reasoning absurd. But the country already has over 300m firearms in private hands. For those who see America’s high rates of gun murder as largely caused by its high rates of gun ownership, this leads to a sense of acute despair. Faced with a situation they find morally unacceptable and practically unsolvable, many prefer not to think about it.

The approach adopted by Gary Younge, a journalist on the Guardian, is to immerse himself in the misery. In “Another Day in the Death of America”, Mr Younge examines the most excruciating gun casualties of all: children and teenagers. The book recounts the stories of the ten young people, aged 19 or under, who were shot and killed on the arbitrarily selected date of Saturday November 23rd 2013.

The result is a sharp portrait of America, painted in blood. The victims are white, black and Latino (though mainly the latter two), from all over the country. Nine-year-old Jaiden Dixon was shot at his home in a small-town Ohio subdivision by his mother’s vengeful ex-boyfriend. Tyler Dunn, 11, was shot in the head by a friend as they played with a rifle in rural Michigan. In an apartment complex in Houston, a friend killed Edwin Rajo, 16, while goofing around with a pistol they had bought.

Mr Younge’s determination to give a chapter to every victim, in chronological order, inevitably strains the narrative a bit. Some of the chapters are thin: when the deceased had a criminal record or ties to gangs, relatives were often unwilling to talk. But the random tragedy of the stories he encounters underlines the intractability of the problem. As Mr Younge writes, his book is not so much a plea for gun control as a “long, doleful, piercing cry” in a country so overwhelmed by gun violence that it has almost given up trying to stop it.

Those who still hope to make progress must break off a piece small enough to chew. In “Rampage Nation”, Louis Klarevas, a security expert, looks at what could be done to stop just one type of gun violence: mass shootings, such as the school massacres at Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook. These attacks account for a tiny fraction of firearm homicides (904 deaths in 111 incidents since 1966, by Mr Klarevas’s count), but they spread fear out of all proportion to their numbers.

All violent crimes, Mr Klarevas notes, are composed of a perpetrator, a target and a weapon. Preventing them involves removing at least one of those elements. But the perpetrators of gun massacres cannot be deterred (most already plan to die); anyone can be a target, and protecting everyone all the time is impossible. Thus the only plausible strategy is to restrict the weapons that let shooters rapidly fire large numbers of bullets. Mr Klarevas debunks the claims of John Lott, a conservative gun researcher, that laws allowing citizens to carry guns openly reduce the number of massacres. His own statistics are more convincing: in the four years after the American government passed a ban on so-called assault weapons in 1994, there was not a single mass shooting.

That ban expired in 2004, and mass shootings are on the rise again. Politics will probably doom Mr Klarevas’s recommendations, including banning the extended-capacity magazines that allow shooters to fire dozens of bullets without reloading, and barring those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns. Such reforms require Americans to trust their government and public institutions. Unfortunately, many people in America revile them. And this hatred is bound up with their desire to own guns—as becomes clear in Cody Wilson’s strange memoir, “Come and Take It”.

Mr Wilson is famous for one reason: in 2013 he dropped out of law school at the University of Texas having designed a gun that could be made with a 3D printer, with code that could be leaked on the internet. It was a clever idea, fusing libertarian pro-gun ideology with libertarian tech-world Utopianism, and it gained him attention from media outlets like Wired and Vice. He used this to raise money for his project, and managed to print a prototype handgun soon after.

In “Come and Take It” Mr Wilson tries to extend his moment of fame by recounting, in tedious detail, the process of creating his gun. This entails a great deal of overwritten diary material punctuated by resentful libertarian screeds. Mr Wilson’s slacker gun-enthusiast friends, all male, are described reverently (“a practising Buddhist and an urban guerrilla”). Women, when they appear, are a collection of physical attributes (blonde hair, nose rings, “she wore fur boots for me”). Corporations, schools and, above all, government organisations are invoked with contempt throughout. (Amusingly, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives turn out to be quite friendly.)

There is an unbridgeable gap between the ways Mr Younge and Mr Klarevas think about guns, and the way Mr Wilson does. For the first two, guns are public-health threats or devices of pointless tragedy. For Mr Wilson, they are agents of masculine power and violent freedom. Addressing a campus libertarian group, Mr Wilson claims that the Second Amendment, the text of which extols “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”, in fact enshrines “a citizen’s right to violently abolish the law”. True revolutionary thought, he continues, requires “a passion for a real and virtuous terror”. This is a horrifying passage. In the season of Trump, it feels like a warning of madness and violence to come.