American gun use is out of control. Shouldn't the world intervene?

The death toll from firearms in the US suggests that the country is gripped by civil war

• 
• • Henry Porter
  • The Observer, Saturday 21 September 2013 22.12 BST

A man on a rifle range: 'More Americans lost their lives from firearms in the past 45 years than in all wars involving the US.' Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company's concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald's case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America's recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.

Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company's chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.

That's America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC's navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

The annual toll from firearms in the US is running at 32,000 deaths and climbing, even though the general crime rate is on a downward path (it is 40% lower than in 1980). If this perennial slaughter doesn't qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.

To absorb the scale of the mayhem, it's worth trying to guess the death toll of all the wars in American history since the War of Independence began in 1775, and follow that by estimating the number killed by firearms in the US since the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 by a .22 Iver-Johnson handgun, wielded by Sirhan Sirhan. The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics fromicasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact, particularly when you place it in the context of the safety-conscious, "secondary smoke" obsessions that characterise so much of American life.

Everywhere you look in America, people are trying to make life safer. On roads, for example, there has been a huge effort in the past 50 years to enforce speed limits, crack down on drink/drug driving and build safety features into highways, as well as vehicles. The result is a steadily improving record; by 2015, forecasters predict that for first time road deaths will be fewer than those caused by firearms (32,036 to 32,929).

Plainly, there's no equivalent effort in the area of privately owned firearms. Indeed, most politicians do everything they can to make the country less safe. Recently, a Democrat senator from Arkansas named Mark Pryor ran a TV ad against the gun-control campaign funded by NY mayor Michael Bloomberg – one of the few politicians to stand up to the NRA lobby – explaining why he was against enhanced background checks on gun owners yet was committed to "finding real solutions to violence".

About their own safety, Americans often have an unusual ability to hold two utterly opposed ideas in their heads simultaneously. That can only explain the past decade in which the fear of terror has cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in wars, surveillance and intelligence programmes and homeland security. Ten years after 9/11, homeland security spending doubled to $69bn . The total bill since the attacks is more than $649bn.

One more figure. There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

But no nation sees itself as outsiders do. Half the country is sane and rational while the other half simply doesn't grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunacy of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery. Astonishingly, when owning a gun is not about ludicrous macho fantasy, it is mostly seen as a matter of personal safety, like the airbag in the new Ford pick-up or avoiding secondary smoke, despite conclusive evidence that people become less safe as gun ownership rises.

Last week, I happened to be in New York for the 9/11 anniversary: it occurs to me now that the city that suffered most dreadfully in the attacks and has the greatest reason for jumpiness is also among the places where you find most sense on the gun issue in America. New Yorkers understand that fear breeds peril and, regardless of tragedies such as Sandy Hook and the DC naval yard, the NRA, the gun manufacturers, conservative-inclined politicians and parts of the media will continue to advocate a right, which, at base, is as archaic as a witch trial.

Talking to American friends, I always sense a kind of despair that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge and that nothing will ever change. The same resignation was evident in President Obama's rather lifeless reaction to the Washington shooting last week. There is absolutely nothing he can do, which underscores the fact that America is in a jam and that international pressure may be one way of reducing the slaughter over the next generation. This has reached the point where it has ceased to be a domestic issue. The world cannot stand idly by.

Texas secession petition reaches 25,000 signatures.

 Even Obama doesn't warrant this conservative pessimism

By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: November 13th, 2012

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Texans have provided enough signatures to demand an official White House response

If at first you don’t succeed … secede! That seems to be the attitude of the folks in 20 states who have reacted to the re-election of Barack Obama by petitioning for independence from the United States. Anyone over thirteen can sign up on the White House website and it requires only a first name and last initial to do so. The petitioners in Texas have reached the threshold of 25,000 signatures necessary to trigger an official response from the administration. The answer will doubtless be a big fat "no" – and Governor Rick Perry has affirmed that Texas should stay in the Union. But it’s interesting to note just how many in the Lone Star state would rather go it alone than suffer "four more years".

The mood on much of the Right is pure Götterdämmerung – as if America had just elected Lenin himself. [Mark Steyn: “Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn.” Charles Cooke: “If we are to lose America as it has been, could we not ask that it be lost to something better than this?”] A common theme is that the only way a candidate as radical as Barack Obama could have won is because the tipping point has been reached and America has tipped beyond redemption. The old values of self-reliance and moral liberty are out; the welfare state and youthful permissiveness are in. Given such fatalism, who can blame the conservatives of Texas for wanting to break away and start all over again? Who hasn’t felt the desire to secede from everybody else – to ride off in to the sunset with nothing but a gun for company? Ah, to live in a righteous republic of one…

Some of those signing the petition will be libertarians, others will be Confederate chauvinists. But I also detect the lingering influence of Calvinist pessimism. When John Winthrop told the Puritans of the 17th century that they had come to the New World to build a city upon a hill, he warned that it was possible that they would fail. It didn’t take long for the Puritans to decide that they had. Two generations later and they were writing Jeremiads complaining that the spirit of the early colony was lost; church attendance was declining, the children were rebelling and society was just hurtling towards destruction. The American experiment was over barely before it had begun.

So was born a common theme in American history: the declension from an honourable beginning to a dishonourable end. In the 1790s, partisan politics threatened to splinter the republic. In the early 19th century, industry destroyed the agrarian ideal. Catholic immigration undermined the Protestant hegemony. Alcohol promised apocalypse. Cults rose and fell that pledged to hold back the tide of progress and maybe even reverse it a little. Such was the static purity of the Shaker church that they eschewed breeding altogether and took children only through adoption. It was not a smart way to do business; today there are only three Shakers left.

The sheer number of Jeremiads testifies to the number of times that America has been predicted to die … and hasn’t. The Jeremiad is actually best understood as a challenge rather than a prediction of doom, but it is invariably defied by history. Of course, there is a temptation to add, “Until now.” After all, a country with so burdensome a debt and as large a government is more destined to fail than the patchwork of farms that made up the old colony (and to bring the rest of the world down with it).

But the reality is that 2012 is not the end of America. Obama's Hispanics will not always vote Democrat (the idea that they will borders on racist), gay people will form their own little nuclear units and become dully conservative, the young will mature into frugal taxpayers, and Texas will not secede. It's far more likely that liberalism shall dig its own grave. Recall that in 1964, the liberal pundits declared the death of conservatism because Goldwater lost the election so decisively. Four years later, and riots and war – fuelled by the over-extension of the welfare/warfare state – caused the election of Richard Nixon and the birth of the Silent Majority. Obamanomics will go the same way. It’s only a matter of time before the Silent Majority has cause to be heard again.

What conservatives must do in the meanwhile is convert their Calvinist pessimism into evangelical optimism. Ronald Reagan loved to quote John Winthrop and his idea that America could be a city upon a hill. But he put a Gipper spin on it: it was a shining city upon a hill that had both a figurative and a literal meaning: “a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” There’s a reason why Reagan won the presidency by two landslides. People vote for hymns of hope, not Jeremiads.

As for the conservatives of Texas, they should stop all this foolishness about quitting the Union. Don't secede, guys. Get even.

Why Kofi Annan had enough over Syria

The UN's special envoy and the Bric countries have got increasingly frustrated with the west's domineering consensus on Damascus

• 
• • Jonathan Steele
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 August 2012 21.00 BST

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Aleppo take a break from the fighting. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

When the history of Syria's catastrophic civil war comes to be written, 30 June 2012 will surely be recognised as the only true moment of hope. On that day in Geneva the five permanent members of the UN security council united behind a communique calling for a transition to a democratic system in Syria and the formation of a government of national unity in which opposition leaders and members of the current government would share power.

They called for a firm timetable for elections in a fair environment. And, with an eye on the chaos that followed the US-imposed scheme of de-Ba'athification in Iraq, said the continuity of government institutions and qualified staff in Syria's public services must be preserved. This included the military and security forces – though they must in future adhere to human rights standards.

They also called on the Syrian government and opposition groups to re-commit to a ceasefire. Sensible, detailed and constructive, the communique was also remarkable for what it did not contain. Although the call for a government of national unity meant Syria's authoritarian regime should be dismantled, the security council's permanent members did not mention the usual cliche of "regime change", which over-personalises complex issues by focusing on the removal of a single towering personality. There was no specific demand for Bashar al-Assad to resign, let alone as the precondition for negotiations between the government and its opponents, as western states and most Syrian opposition groups previously insisted.

In short, the communique appeared to move the US, Britain and France, as well as Turkey and Qatar, which also attended the Geneva meeting, to an even-handed stance at last. It marked Kofi Annan's finest hour as the UN and Arab League's special envoy.

A few days later, Russia circulated a draft resolution at the UN in New York to endorse the new approach. It urged member-states to work in the co-operative spirit of the Geneva text, extend the UN monitors' team in Syria and press for a ceasefire. Then came the spanner. Britain, France and the US proposed a rival resolution with the one-sided elements that provoked earlier Russian and Chinese vetoes – punishment of Assad if he did not comply, threats of new sanctions, no word of pressure on the opposition and veiled hints of eventual military force by referring to chapter seven of the UN charter.

The resolution was a disaster, and it is no wonder that in explaining his resignation (in a Financial Times article on Friday) Annan highlighted the security council's failure to endorse the Geneva recommendations. Annan remains too much of a diplomat to take sides openly but his disappointment with the big western states for their "finger-pointing and name-calling" of Russia and China over Syria is clear.

His frustration is shared by the new powers on the international stage that are increasingly angry with the domineering western consensus on many issues. When the UN general assembly debated a Saudi resolution last week that followed the west in calling for sanctions and Assad's departure, Brazil, India and South Africa all objected. In the west it is easy to pillory Russia for rejecting internationally imposed regime change by saying Vladimir Putin fears a "colour revolution" in Russia (even though there is no such prospect). China's democratic credentials can be sneered at. But when the three other Brics, which hold fair, orderly, and regular elections, object to the western line on Syria, it is time to take note. Indeed, the west did adjust. It got the Saudis to water down the draft lest it receive less than half the world's votes.

The retreat was only tactical. The Obama administration promptly announced it is "accelerating" its support to Syria's rebels by giving them intelligence and satellite data on troop movements. Annan's disappointment must be massive. Until he started work in February, the military pattern in Syria had been consistent for several months – occasional forays by rebels into urban areas followed by excessive reaction by government troops, with artillery, snipers, and mass arrests.

Since then, apart from a few days of relative quiet in April when a ceasefire partially held, Syria has seen a huge influx of arms to the rebels, growing involvement by foreign special forces, and the infiltration of al-Qaida jihadis and other Salafists. What began as a peaceful uprising and then became local self-defence has been hijacked. Under Saudi, Qatari and US leadership, and with British, French and Israeli approval, it has turned into an anti-Iranian proxy war.

This does not mean the democratic aspirations of Syria's original protesters should be abandoned, or that the Syrian government should not start to implement the Geneva principles for transition that Annan briefly persuaded the big powers to accept. The outlook is too desperate. As tens of thousands flee their homes, and the destruction of Aleppo – and perhaps soon of Damascus – looms ever closer, a ceasefire and political compromise have never been more urgent.