Guns and Other Great Cons in American Business and Culture

A con artist is a confidence man. American culture is full of them. And some of them are literally killing us with their slick sells and slicker lies.

Perhaps the most preposterous con ever worked on Americans is still alive and suckering a whole political party and many more into actually believing that “guns don’t kill people, people do,” and that having nearly 400 million guns in circulation in our country has nothing to do with the alarming reality pointed out recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that 74% of all homicides in the United States are gun related. In 2018, that would be 14,414 of the 19,141 homicides reported in the country, according to the National Vital Statistical System.

A few weeks ago in Albuquerque when a 13-year-old Washington Middle School student was shot to death by a fellow student, and another young man was murdered with a gun in a sports bar, our city buckled once again under the tragic weight of useless deaths caused directly by people using the easiest method of killing another person, a gun.

And just last week, three police officers were shot, one critically, and another injured by shrapnel during a shootout in the northeast heights with armed robbers who had just stuck someone up in a drive-through coffee bar.

We’ve had more than 84 homicides already this year, the vast majority with guns. We are all in danger of getting in someone’s crosshairs.

This terrible truth is directly related to the raw number of guns available to anyone — sane or insane — including children, in the United States and New Mexico. The Land of Enchantment ranks 4^th in the nation in registered gun ownership, with more than 80,000 guns. And again according to the CDC, New Mexico has 22.3 gun deaths for every 100,000 people, among the highest in the country.

The more guns, the more gun-related deaths. It’s as simple as that.

As the New York Times reports, “gun deaths remain extremely rare in Britain and very few people, even police offices, carry firearms.” Last year and the first half of 2021, 600 people were murdered in Britain and Wales and “only” 33 were killed with a gun. Fewer guns, fewer gun related deaths.

The American gun lobby, serving the firearm industry under the guise of the Second Amendment, joins with the American tobacco industry and the American fossil fuels industry in being complicit in millions of unnecessary deaths a year. One is tempted to say that death, for them, is a side effect of profit.

The confidence men who operate these industries have lulled Americans into believing their products are wholly beneficent and harmless, with no side effects, no unintended consequences and no hidden price to pay. But most of us know where vast numbers of cancers come from, where the floods and droughts and storms of climate change come from and where all gun deaths in America come from. One could almost say that death rates from their products were indications of the profitability of their business strategies.

It’s tempting to toss all the great cons and confidence men into the conservative melting pot along with anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, climate change deniers, the massive Second Amendment lobby, the Republican Party itself, not to mention the Big Lie con of “stop the steal,” the January 6 storming of Congress and Trumpism in general. There’s a family resemblance, of course.

But we don’t want to mix up the con artists with their victims.

Smokers (I was a three packs a day guy myself), many Trump supporters, Republican voters, COVID hoaxers and even the legions of gun owners afraid of the government have been sold a bill of goods. They’ve been tricked into suspending their better judgment, and it hasn’t been hard to do.

Virtually our whole economy — and supply and demand economic theory — is undergirded by a web of deception that uses commercial propaganda to stimulate fear, envy, conformity and simple greed as the driving forces of the consumer economy.

The “demand side” of the economy is an induced demand, induced by public relations tactics and advertising trickery. It is not a spontaneous or, one might say, honest demand. People clamor for guns in America because the gun industry has set them up to think guns are going to protect them from crime and even from the government. It’s grown into a death scam, one that could take out any one of us at any time.

When police officers are shot and armed robbers stick people up in broad daylight, the gun culture is so deeply embedded in even me, I think about going out and buying a gun, just as I might have when I was a kid playing cowboy with a cap pistol holstered at my side. But I don’t know how to use a gun properly, and no amount of training would give me the skills to coolly aim and fire in a stressful situation. I’d be a frightful danger to myself and to everyone else around me if I tried. I’ll have to stick to a baseball bat and bear repellent by the bedside table, no matter how many guns are in the hands of robbers and home invaders.

But there is hope on the horizon. It’s not much, but since guns are not going away anytime soon, any incremental regulation to make them harder to access helps. In the wake of the Washington Middle School killing, New Mexico Democrats are once again floating possible legislation for next year that will penalize parents who do not safely store their guns under lock and key and away from their children. The victim of the middle school shooting was allegedly killed by a boy who took his father’s unsecured gun.

Guns aren’t going to go away. The government is not going to take them. Their potential victims — that’s all of us — will just have to support laws that hem them in, curtail their use even in minor ways. The confidence men of the gun industry have made any other approach impossible, for now.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it