Guns Don’t Kill People, People Do

There’s a number of things that I want to write about regarding the tragic incidents at Virginia Tech on Monday. I don’t have quite enough time to do them full justice at the moment, but I do want to commit to writing a few preliminary thoughts. It didn’t take long at all before the news of the massacre in Blacksburg sparked off a heavily political debate regarding the right to bear arms. It’s only natural that such a debate is re-ignited at a time like this, but at the same time, I can’t help but feel that it’s counter-productive.

The fact, as regrettable as it is, is that someone who is sufficiently determined to cause the sort of carnage seen on Monday will be able to get their hands on some kind of deadly weapon. It’s only those with significant mental health problems who do cause such tragic occurrences. And, unless the world is suddenly going to stop arms production and concrete over its existing weaponry, then these things will occur. Moreover, even if guns were banned, similar atrocities could be caused with all kinds of other weapons – some (like knives) easier to stop; others (like poison gas or bombs) even more potentially deadly and indiscriminate in their effects. Suggesting that gun control would stop these atrocities is a false argument; it might make them harder, but people as disturbed as the Blacksburg killer evidently was will find a way. Moreover, gun control in Britain, tightened further since the Dunblane tragedy, has persecuted those who want to use guns for legitimate recreational purposes whilst doing little to stop their increased use in organised crime. Laws, particularly general laws made in response to particular circumstances, can have unintentional consequences.

The other difficulty in thinking about gun control at a time like this is that it is easy to see our cultural norms as “superior” because tragedies like this seem less common; because the carrying of a gun in America is visible and, in many cases, almost ubiquitous. That doesn’t mean that portraying Americans as backward or wrong for their desire to carry guns is fair; nor does it mean that legislation that makes perfect sense in a largely urban European setting can fit easily upon gun culture in America. Yes, American belief in the freedom of gun ownership is very definitely an exceptionalist part of their character. That doesn’t mean it is per se wrong. Goldie Lookin’ Chain may have been satirical when saying guns don’t kill people, rappers do. But guns don’t kill people on their own – they need someone pulling the trigger.

Saul Cornell, in his superb recent book “A Well Regulated Militia” (which I’ll refer to later in the week, too), writes:

It is unrealistic to imagine a gun-free America. Nor is it realistic to expect Americans simply to accept that inordinately high levels of gun violence are simply the price of freedom. 

As hard as it is to not have a knee-jerk emotional response when you consider the human tragedy that unfolded in the classrooms of Virginia this week, there is a real need to step back from the emotional excesses of the debate. Gun control advocates must be careful not to portray all gun users as evil. The vast majority aren’t. Nor should the gun rights lobby be averse to having to prove a little more about their background, and have a little more regulation on what guns they are allowed to use. After all, just as the desire to use guns is perfectly legitimate, so are anxieties about not being on the receiving end of a stray bullet. The debate needs a little bit of perspective.

I guess it won’t surprise you to learn that I think a bit more thinking historically about the subject would go a long way. But that’s something that will be discussed later in the week here.

The Tragedy of British Education

Alan Johnson has recently announced plans to increase the school leaving age to 18. The announcement has been widely trailed, and is being backed up by research that has suggested half of school leavers at 16 later regret their decision to drop out. The decision is not just significant for the change in lifestyle that it will bring about for many; nor for the added cost that having more young adults in full-time education will bring to the government budget. If the transition to education until 18 is handled correctly, it may well sort out the problem that has hampered the British education system for over 100 years.

The 1902 Education Act set the tone for the way Britain has thought of education throughout the 20th century. Balfour conceived of the Act as a means of giving state funding to prop up church schools; politically it was a disaster, as many believe that it led Joe Chamberlain to launch his tariff reform campaign that split the Tory Party. More significantly, though, it failed to take the rising fields of technical education seriously, and entrenched in the British psyche that the only kind of education that was of real value was a classical, academic education. That led to the failure of the grammar school system; it is the reason behind the devaluing of A-Levels to a ridiculous extent today. Yet the 1900s had a great opportunity to expand and formalise a system of technical education that would have rivalled any in the world.

Local authorities in the 1900s were only allowed to provide an elementary education for all students; thereafter they were expected to go to work or, if exceptional, could get to grammar school (assuming, of course, that parents could afford fees and uniform). It quickly became obvious, however, that children’s capacity for learning – even if not good enough for entry to grammar school – did not end when government decreed it should, and many local authorities developed junior technical schools (JTSs) that provided training in the sciences after the basic elementary education had finished – and some of these were strikingly successful in the education they provided.

Nevertheless, the policy of successive governments was to close these operations down. They were using money that was given for one express purpose, and anything beyond that was illegal. These actions were backed up by the attitude of Morant, the Permanent Secretary to the Board of Education, who believed in a classical education, and that the entire education policy should be geared towards encouraging grammar schools, which in turn should train their pupils to read Classics at university.

The British view of a scientist, too, remained hopelessly out of date – the enthusiastic amateur working alone in academic endeavour, waiting for his big breakthrough. No wonder that the big German and American universities quickly started outstripping us in emerging fields like Chemistry. They invested in them heavily; there were huge numbers of students studying sciences, especially in comparison with Britain where, as ever, they trained their classicists in huge numbers.

This had a knock-on effect on the Butler Education Act of 1944, in that although the grammar school system was always intended to be tri-partite, the prevailing attitude meant that the 11-plus became a mere pass/fail exam. The third option – the development of technical schools for greater vocational education – never really came to pass. Why? Because there was only one kind of education worth investing in. And it didn’t involve equipping those who weren’t the most academically able with the skills to go out and make a trade.

The mindset still continues today. There’s a recognition that Britain hasn’t done enough to encourage the development of vocational education. But rather than building up a genuinely high-quality vocational system, every step taken has to compare vocational qualifications to academic ones – hence the notion that a GNVQ is worth 4 GCSE passes at grade C, or the absolutely stark raving bonkers idea that Vocational A-Levels are appropriate training for university, counting as ‘double A-Levels’ under the UCAS system. The attempt to frame vocational qualifications in academic concerns only undermines both – no-one seriously thinks the vocational qualifications live up to their billing, yet in attempting to make the skills examined more analogous, academic qualifications lose much of their rigour.

So how might increasing the school-leaving age to 18 help solve this problem? Well, it would be a catastrophic mistake to try and force those who don’t want to be at school to stay in formal, classroom education full-time. That’s a recipe for problems in the classroom, and increasingly stressed-out sixth form teachers who will have to deal with people who actively resent still being at school.

Moreover, many leave school because they found GCSEs or equivalents hard to deal with – so it makes no sense to try and cram them in to the next level of education. No, if the move to raise the school leaving age is to work, then it will need to be modelled on something like the German system. Rather than spending all school hours in the classroom, students are free to start apprenticeships or other technical schemes of education, returning to the classroom only for a day or two a week. In Britain, that would allow a focus on the key skills such as English and Maths, while allowing most of the student’s time to be spent on practical tasks.

The government needs to reverse the policies that have failed Britain for over a hundred years, and take vocational and technical education outside of the academic classroom. And in demanding the school leaving age be raised to 18, they may just have found the formula that can help them.

State Interference

Thelondonpaper ran a centre-page spread earlier this week about Bollywood’s leading actresses. Not being a film buff by any stretch of the imagination, the subject matter failed to grab my interest. Yet my gaze was averted long enough to note that in informing us about each of the leading stars, they made a comparison with a leading Hollywood lady. Shilpa Shetty was Sandra Bullock – rich and famous, without doubt, but last made a big film in the 90s. Another was compared to Renee Zellweger – not a traditional beauty, but my goodness, can she act. When trying to explore a new subject, there’s an undeniable tendency for us to relate knowledge to things of which we have a far better understanding. And that is where the most interesting story to come from this week’s Big Brother racism row lies.

Within the past 12 months, there have been three major news stories that have two main features in common: that they are primarily cultural in nature, and that they involve Westerners making negative portrayals of non-Western countries. I refer, of course, to the ‘cartoon wars’, to Borat, and to Big Brother. There’s a third thing that unites these stories, too – in every single case, the government of the denigrated country (or countries, in the case of the cartoon wars) has appealed to the Western governments to take action against the companies responsible for the cultural slight.

There’s a certain irony in seeing our political leaders being forced to comment on TV programmes which they almost certainly have no interest in. In particular, there’s an irony in Gordon Brown travelling to India to present himself as a statesman, and instead finding himself harangued at every turn by angry Bollywood fans, and having to find soundbites on Big Brother. But there’s also something unfamiliar about it. Politicians like to show they have the common touch by commenting on popular culture – although if this has any effect at all, it is normally to come back and haunt them.

Yet we would never, ever expect politicians to take an active role intervening in these matters. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, earned a great deal of respect when he refused to bow to international pressure and take action against the editor of Jyllands-Posten over the printed cartoons, saying that as long as the newspaper stayed within libel laws, what it printed was a matter of editorial policy, and so it should remain. Nor did we ever expect George Bush or Tony Blair to take the Kazakhstani authorities seriously when they asked for Borat to be banned for the negative portrayal of their own country.

Perhaps we could understand the sensitivity of Kazakhstan in these matters, though. After all, its democracy is in its earliest stages; it has never experienced a transfer of presidential power since independence, and it had years of existing as one of the poorest relations of the USSR. This week, however, India’s government felt compelled to speak out on the supposed racist treatment of one of its national icons, making official representations from Cabinet Ministers to Gordon Brown in relation to the Big Brother affair. India, despite having a thriving cultural industry, despite having a stable democracy, still saw matters of broadcasting as something that should be subject to governmental interference.

This raises broader issues about the specific features of Western democracy and the legacies of colonialism. Here in the West, we’re more than used to the existence of repositories of power and culture existing outside of directly political structures. Indeed, it is the notions of an independent press, of the rights of people to have the freedom of speech, of very specific limits being placed upon the operation of political power, that define the Western notion of democracy.

How different is that outside of the Western world? As noted above, the traditions of democracy, and the traditions that inform the content of Western democracy, have far weaker roots. The legacy of colonialism, too, is one where an outside power exerted considerable authority. Military strength alone was not sufficient to perpetuate such control – there was a need to co-opt local elites and power groups into the ruling classes as well, so that colonial rule had a local power structure on which to lean on (for example, it is notable that when Saddam was emasculated militarily after the Gulf War, he increased the role that religious leaders played in Iraq).

The knock-on effect of all of this is a different conception of power relations. Where local control of the political system has arrived only recently, there’s an understandable desire for total control of the apparatus of the state. Whether this proves feasible in practice or not is a somewhat moot point – the fact is, by appealing on a government-to-government level, they reveal the attitude that they believe that cultural matters are an appropriate area for that sort of intervention. In the West, while I’d expect politicians in Britain to comment on, say, the racist taunts endured by England players in football matches abroad, I’d be very surprised if they were to appeal to the Spanish government to take action.

Of course, there is a model through which government can make a positive intervention on these cultural affairs. What it involves is an understanding of the way politics operates in the West – that is, that it keeps its nose out of trying to run the press. Instead, it plays along with the media game, exploiting opportunities for favourable write-ups. One government of the three I mention realised the error of its ways, and managed to win considerable support and publicity by playing the media exposure for all it was worth.

Kazakhstan’s government quickly realised that it was making no headway with its complaints against Borat – and worse still, it was committing the heinous crime of being unable to take a joke. So it turned away from railing against Western authorities for not listening to their concerns, and instead took the opportunity to send their ambassadors on goodwill missions, writing editorials and giving interviews in which they extolled the virtues of their country. Which, by and large, had the effect of making Borat appear the boor. Ultimately, their decision to fight a media war, not a diplomatic one, paid off handsomely.

India’s government could learn a lot from the approach. Rather than haranguing Gordon Brown as he attempts to establish strong links with an emerging economy, they would do much better by approaching Channel 4 for a right of reply, at the same time as launching a cultural mission to bring greater awareness of India’s heritage. Maybe they could even invite Jade Goody to spend some time travelling the country and opening her eyes to a culture that is more than just poppadoms. If they really want to influence coverage of the media row around Big Brother, they’ve got to understand the political culture in which they operate. Britain will respond far better to an information campaign than they will to any diktat from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.