Preppers

Preppers are about as American as apple pie is commonly asserted to be (albeit falsely). Like Tea-Baggers, Mormons, the Amish and the National Rifle Association (NRA), I doubt preppers could have developed - let alone thrived - anywhere but in the self-styled Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Fiercely independent, deeply patriotic yet doggedly suspicious of authority in general and government in particular, preppers tend to be politically conservative white Christians from low-income backgrounds. As such, they are like the distillation of the American psyche.

So what are they? Preppers believe that a catastrophic natural disaster or foreign invasion is just around the corner. Or, as they like to put it, "the shit is about to hit the fan" (SHTF). Convinced that the US economy, society and possibly civilisation itself are in imminent danger of destruction and/or collapse, they prepare - hence the name - for their chosen nightmare scenario by

• Hoarding food
• Stockpiling weapons and ammunition
• Training in armed combat
• Learning survival skills
• Building emergency shelters
• Disconnecting from the power grid and
• Buying gold and silver, typically in the form of coins.

Although there may not be the 4 million or more preppers claimed by some of the myriad "survivalist" Web sites, they certainly are far more than a handful of paranoid gun-nuts. In fact there are so many serious preppers in America that Costco (a nationwide chain of wholesale stores open to the public) stocks a large selection of what it terms "emergency kits", ranging from water storage and filtration systems to a year's supply of food for four people, comprising 30,144 servings of freeze-dried and dehydrated meals (yours for only $3,999.99).

Preppers even have their own reality-TV show (sponsored, tellingly enough, by the Wise Food Storage Company and the United States Gold Bureau). Entitled 'Doomsday Preppers', the documentary series charts how various people are getting ready for what they see is inevitable: an all-out assault on the American way of life, be it man-made or environmental. 

Unfortunately, preppers are not simply wacky loners content to play out their apocalyptic or Chinese-invasion fantasies in their own basements or woods in the same way that people used to gather for weekend 'Dungeons and Dragons' sessions. Often enough, their paranoia spills over into violent confrontations with the law.

Only last week, police arrested a 45-year-old survivalist who had spent 5-6 years breaking into cabins in the Utah mountains to steal food and guns. And almost exactly a year ago, police in Washington state hunted a 41-year-old man who had allegedly shot dead his wife and daughter. They eventually tracked him down in a sophisticated fortified underground bunker in the forest, where a SWAT team had to blast its way through the roof. When they got inside, they found the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as well as 13 guns and shelves neatly piled with ammunition, food and other supplies.

Guns

According to the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". Partly as a result of this, America has by far the world's highest per-capita rate of gun ownership, with 300 million guns distributed among 311 million inhabitants. That's nearly 89 guns for every 100 people. It's nearest rival, Yemen, is at almost 55. Put another way, the US has 4.5 percent of the world's population, but accounts for 40 percent of all civilian guns.

The United States ranks 10th in the global league table of per-capita gun-related deaths, topped only by  central and south American countries and Swaziland, whose small populations (with the exception of Brazil) skew their ranking. The rate of death from firearms in the United States is eight times higher than that in its economic counterparts in other parts of the world. Indeed, the overall firearm-related death rate among US children under 15 years old is nearly a dozen times higher than among children in 25 other industrialised countries combined.

Last December, a young man went into a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut and shot dead 20 six- and seven-year-old children and seven staff members before turning one of his guns on himself. As a visibly moved President Obama subsequently pointed out, this was already the fourth mass shooting in his first term in office, and the second such incident that year. A rampage at a cinema in July left 12 dead and 58 injured. Two shootings in 2009 resulted in 27 deaths and 34 injuries.

Since 1990, there have been 55 mass shootings in the US, yet there have been few if any calls for tighter gun control. In 1994, Bill Clinton enacted a federal ban on semi-automatic firearms (though only those manufactured after the law was enforced) and high-capacity magazines. This ban, which many claimed was in any case easy to circumvent, expired in 2004. All efforts to renew it have failed.

The reason for this is the National Rifle Association, arguably the most powerful lobby group in Washington. The NRA vets political candidates for their pro-gun stance and has vehemently argued against any limits on gun ownership, asserting - so far successfully - that it is the constitutionally-decreed 2nd-Amendment right of every American to have a gun. As a result, it is legal in most states to buy and own so-called "assault weapons" that are made specifically for killing many people quickly, but which serve no purpose whatsoever for hunting or fishing. Consequently, the vast majority of massacres are committed with legally-owned guns.

Americans are inherently suspicious of state authority and feel passionately about upholding what they see as their "freedoms" (i.e. rights) - including gun ownership. The Wild West, log-cabin, pioneering, every-man-for-himself mentality runs incredibly deep. This plus the NRA's stranglehold on the weapons debate and scaremongering that "the Government wants to take your guns away" means politicians automatically shy away from the issue. Just the hint of a desire to limit gun ownership can be political suicide. In the 2012 presidential election, neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama proposed limiting firearms.

Fortunately, the Newtown massacre has horrified Americans to such an extent that the debate finally seems to be on the table and tighter gun-control has a chance of success in Congress, albeit a slim one. Even the NRA is scared this time, though its proposed solution would be to permit people to carry guns in schools, claiming that armed teachers would be able to stop armed crazies.

President Obama has asked Vice-President Joe Biden to put together a report on possible changes to the law. Although it is likely that Obama will limit the controls on who can buy or own certain guns (there are, for example, currently almost no restrictions on gun purchasing at trade shows, which account for 50-75% of all sales), it won't affect those weapons already in circulation. Because of this, there has been a run on the purchase of especially assault weapons since immediately after December's bloodbath, with people desperate to get their hands on one of these insanely deadly guns in case the regulations are tightened. Indeed, gun shops are complaining that they sell out the moment they get a delivery, and gun manufacturers are working flat out to meet demand.

Last week it was reported that a man in Minnesota pointed a gun at his daughter following an argument about her grades at school. She had two got Bs instead of As. The man had only just bought the AK-47 assault rifle - and another rifle - because he had feared looming restrictions on gun purchasing.

The US may be the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave, but in terms of guns it is truly the Home of the Dangerous and the Land of the Psychotic. I therefore sincerely hope that my family and I can avoid being involved in a shooting before we return to the relative safety of the Old World.

Election unwords

With the presidential election finally over, Chads throughout the United States are breathing a collective sigh of relief that they were not left hanging or even pregnant this time round. And although Floridians once again took three days longer than everyone else to count their votes, they did not hold the entire country to ransom as they had back in 2000.

We may not have had a Sarah Palin or a George "Dubya" Bush to mangle their words, but this election cycle spawned its own set of neologisms and odd terms, which I would like to take this opportunity to share with you:

• Job-creators: A euphemism coined by the right-wing Republicans to describe the rich in a more positive light;
• Soon-to-haves: No longer is America a country of haves and have-nots. Republican spin-doctors also recast the poor in a bald-faced attempt to win them over to pro-business ideologies;
• Historian: The job-description preferred by would-be Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich to refute claims that the millions he had earned from the pharmaceutical industry were the fruits of lobbying;
• Clean coal: A tautological concept dreamt up by the coal industry to counter the backlash against fossil fuels and moves to search for cleaner sources of energy, the suggestion being that you could burn coal without producing all that environmentally unfriendly soot;
• Caucus (v): I think this means to canvas for a caucus, though it could mean to hold a caucus. Confused? So am I;
• Mainstream media (MSM) or elite media: A favourite expression of Sarah Palin back in 2008, this resurfaced again as a quasi-swearword to describe the non-conservative media - in other words, all media bar Fox News;
• Washington insider: Another "four-letter word" used to dismiss any politician except yourself. Used, bizarrely enough, especially by those who have held political office for decades to put down their opponents. Although this expression was used more widely in '08 and by the TEA ("Taxed Enough Already") Party movement during the 2010 mid-term elections, it featured particularly during the Republican primaries.
• Forcible/legitimate rape: Terms used by senatorial candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who vehemently oppose abortion, even following incest or rape. Makes you wonder what the opposite is - consensual rape? Their controversial views on the topic resulted in both men being soundly defeated at the polls;
• Romnesia: A neologism coined by Barack Obama (or his speech-writers) to describe a person's ability to forget what he stated one day and espouse views often diametrically opposed to these when seeking the backing of a different group of voters. Think Mitt Romney's "flip-flopping" on abortion, gun control, coal, immigration, healthcare reform, welfare, the auto-industry bailout ...

Freedoms

People in the UK may complain about the "nanny state", yet this mumbled dissension is typically British in its muted amateurism. Not so in the US, where the fight for much-vaunted "freedoms" and "liberty" can be and often is taken into every corner of life.

Americans - or rather, a proportion of said people - are obsessed with their freedoms and the supposed, alleged or feared restriction thereof by "Big Government".

Americans have resisted taxation ever since the Boston Tea Party, when disgruntled New Worlders were so incensed by the fact that they were "taxed without representation" (i.e. supported the British crown financially, but couldn't vote - a situation in which, by a quirk of fate, I too find myself, albeit in my case I pay the IRS) that they threw some leaves off a ship. Scary, eh? The current "Tea Party" is simply an extension of this, a movement who claim they have been Taxed Enough Already - hence TEA - and assert the "freedom" to pay less, thus scuppering any attempts to balance the US budget and rein in the national debt.

Another "freedom" vehemently and vociferously defended is the so-called "right to bear arms" based on the rather ambiguous Second Amendment of the Constitution, which reads:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed"

Gun-lobbyists like the National Rifle Association believe this permits people to own even assault rifles. As a result, 40-50% of Americans have one or more guns, although only 11% use them for hunting. In all, there are about 190 million guns in circulation spread between a total population of about 310 million.

One of the dafter "liberties" currently under dispute is the argument against the recently implemented healthcare reforms, which demand that everyone must have healthcare coverage. At last count, as many as 15% of Americans - 46 million people - were without health insurance. But now (wealthy) people are demanding the "right" to opt out, claiming mandatory coverage constitutes an infringement of their liberties. Although the case is still going through the courts, it's possible the nay-sayers could yet scupper what was a bold attempt to give more people access to medical treatment.

Finally, I want to mention a "freedom" that is being argued over here in Michigan: the right not to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. At present, all bikers have to wear a helmet. But "freedom-loving people" now want to repeal the 40-year-old legislation on the spurious grounds that, because there is no such law in neighbouring states, Michigan could lose valuable tourism revenues if bikers chose to vacation elsewhere.

"Helmets don't prevent accidents," says the president of the American Bikers Aiming Toward Education Michigan, echoing the NRA's "Guns don't kill, people do" mantra. Seatbelts don't prevent accidents either, but nobody's suggesting we scrap them too - or are they?

Shooting Simulation

A local school carried out a shooting simulation this week. According to the article in the newspaper, 

"Six months of planning and a federal grant went into the simulation, starting with the gunman's alarming behavior to administrators and escalating to him firing shots and wounding students at the high school"

The following picture appeared alongside the article:

Two things strike me about the simulation.

Firstly, it's sad that school shootings have increased to such an extent that people need to prepare for such an eventuality (rather than wondering if lax gun laws and the alleged right to bear arms might contribute to this).

Secondly, it's interesting to note the "costume" they've put the gunman in: he's wearing explosives. As far as I am aware, no previous school shooter - usually disgruntled former pupils - has ever come armed with more than guns. What we have here is the blending of two primal American fears: shooters and suicide bombers. Apart from the fact that I very much doubt that Al Quaeda would target schools, I can't quite imagine that would-be bombers would waste their time arguing with school authorities first, as the article seems to suggest.

In case you are wondering how the story ends, the shooter was cleanly shot dead before he could blow up himself and his 25 hostages - just like in all the best Hollywood movies.