November 8, 2020

Janna Ramadan

On March 15, 2019, New Zealand experienced its first mass shooting in almost 30 years at two mosques in Christchurch. In the immediate aftermath, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Parliament passed legislation to ban semi-automatic grade weapons and implemented a buyback program to purchase the now-illegal weapons from citizens. In addition to the passed legislation, Prime Minister Ardern was purposeful in the rhetoric used to react to the massacre, treating it as a national tragedy. In contrast, the United States experienced 417 mass shootings in 2019. In response, legislation has been proposed at the federal level, but without legislation passing, the response is opposite of New Zealand’s. Assessing the differing state attributes, I argue that New Zealand’s cultural attitude towards guns, the absence of a gun lobby, and the legitimized use of coercion by law enforcement and the judicial system enabled the New Zealand government to create legislative change and a buyback program in response to Christchurch. In comparison, the United States’ lack of such attributes has prevented a legislative response to the multitude of mass shootings in the United States.

I. Civilian Gun Culture

Civilian gun culture has a direct impact on the state capacity to legislatively respond to mass shootings. New Zealand civilian culture largely views guns as objects used mainly for recreational activities, limiting the possibility of symbolizing guns beyond utility for hobbies. As a result, although some New Zealand citizens view themselves as responsible, law-abiding gun owners, they are willing to follow state legislation on gun ownership in response to Christchurch, putting national benefit before individual interests. 

In stark contrast, in the United States guns are symbolically representative of American individual rights and identity. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that 74% of gun owners perceive the right to own guns as essential to their personal sense of freedom. This perceived sense of freedom alludes to the American value of freedom of expression as a protected right. Of those same gun owners, half say that being a gun owner is either somewhat or very important to their overall identity. Sampling national public opinion, it is evident that American gun owners elevate guns from mere tools to a mechanism of enacting their freedom and of personal identification. 

The gravity of cultural perspective on guns as a personal matter can be understood through Seymour Martin Lipset’s perception of America as ideologically grounded and individualistic, a modernist take on its establishment as a nation. Lipset argues that being American is an “ideological commitment” and that those who reject or deviate from adherence to American values are effectively un-American. A nationally ascribed value is the perception of a right to personal freedoms. In the case of the United States, one such personal freedom is gun ownership. Committing guns to a symbol of the American value of personal freedom makes it such that threats to gun ownership in America amount to deviations from this national set of values and can be called a threat to American freedom. Being in favor of gun legislation reform becomes un-American. Likewise, American individualism prevents action on a broad scale by prioritizing individual rights. Lipset argues that the American Creed is made up of anti-statism, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism. The concept of individualism impacts American gun culture as it prioritizes individual access to and ownership of guns over national interests. Despite the tragedy of mass shootings, the individual right and freedom to gun ownership remains paramount, preventing legislative action. 

It is in this way that the national gun culture in New Zealand and the United States directly impacts the ability of the government to respond to mass shootings with legislation. While New Zealand culture was amenable to legislative action because the national view on guns was limited to use for recreational activities, the American citizens’ elevation of the role of guns to a representation of individual freedoms and identity created barriers to legislative action. However, it is overly simplistic to attribute the attitudes of American gun-owners to the entire population and to extrapolate that to result in the entire blocking of gun reform legislation. Gun owners only make up 30% of U.S. adults . Of non-gun-owners, only 35% associate their right to own guns with their personal sense of freedom. Thus, with respect to the total American population, those viewing gun ownership as a proxy for personal freedom are a fraction of the population. Findings from an August 2019 Fox News poll of registered voters found that 90% of respondents favored universal background checks and 67% favored banning assault weapons, indicating that a majority of Americans favor some form of gun reform legislation. Yet due to the American gun lobby, the symbolic value of guns permeates the national dialogue on gun legislation. 

II. Gun Lobbies and Federal Influence

Beyond the impact of gun culture on attempts at legislative gun reform, gun lobbies, as a special interest group, are in position to further direct the conversation and resulting legislation. As an example of John Gaventa’s Faces of Power theory, lobbies, as a Third Face of Power, can utilize their position to impact the government such that the government acts contrary to its interest. In New Zealand, the gun lobbies take form as pro-gun rights organizations akin to outdoor clubs. New Zealand gun lobbies consist of hunting and rifle associations working to protect the recreational use of guns, catering to an activity-based interest group. As a result, they cater to a smaller audience and are unable to connect their interests with a broader identification category, such as economic class. The New Zealand gun lobby industry also lacks substantial financial power. As a result of the specific arena of gun ownership retention promoted and the lack of financial influence, New Zealand gun lobbies do not exert significant influence on New Zealand’s legislative government. Thus, the government is able to make decisions on gun reform, approaching the gun lobby as a constituency rather than a dictating voice.

The American gun lobby is treated in an entirely different manner, as lobbies are essentially given authority and legitimacy resulting in the power to block legislation. Lobbies in the United States are characterized by their significant financial power and their capacity to utilize those finances to both dictate the conversations and legislation seen in government. Whereas gun culture reflects the role of guns in the American daily life, lobbies reflect the priorities of the business and corporation interest groups. They are responsible for gaining benefits in the form of regulations and legislation for the constituency they represent. William Domhoff explains that their influential power “is based on a great amount of personal contact, but its most important ingredients are the information and financial support that lobbyists have to offer.” Unlike New Zealand, American lobbies hold substantial wealth that is distributed according to how the lobby throws its weight. Thus, despite the niche status of interest groups lobbying legislators, the groups’ financial influence empowers them to manipulate their social and political networks for their benefit.

The American gun lobby operates exactly in this capacity. It amplifies the gun culture of gun-owners, a minority population in the U.S., to create a perception of a national culture that views guns as a means of freedom. Using its financial power, the gun lobby contributes to the campaigns of incumbents or challengers sympathetic to their views. Catering to the public and aiming to sway public opinion, the gun lobby also pays for pro-gun and Constitution-focused advertisements. Additionally, the lobby contributes to advocacy against legislation that negatively impacts gun manufacturers and the commercial gun industry by engaging with members of congressional subcommittees and providing generous donations to members of Congress. High-spending lobbies, such as the gun lobby, generally succeed in their efforts, as policy outcomes have a modest tendency of reflecting the side with greater expenditures. In reflecting the interests of economic beneficiaries of the commercial gun industry as expressed through the gun lobby, the government’s actions digress from the displayed public opinion of the majority of Americans. Despite a climbing increase in gun violence, the U.S. government does not display an active effort to ensure the safety of Americans through gun legislation (“Gun Deaths Are on the Rise Nationally”). Thus, the American gun lobby’s exercise of power presents a greater obstacle to enacting restrictive gun reform legislation compared to New Zealand, where the gun lobby did not inhibit gun reform legislation from being presented and passed. 

III. Legitimate Use of Coercive Powers of The State 

Further allowing or preventing concrete government action following mass shootings are differing levels of legitimacy of law enforcement and the judicial system as they exercise their coercive powers. Following the Christchurch shooting, the New Zealand government passed legislation to ban many semi-automatic weapons and set up a gun buyback program with overwhelming support of legislators, a display of the legitimacy of the use of coercion by law enforcement and the judicial system. Six weeks after the implementation of New Zealand’s semi-automatic weapon buyback program, over 15,000 weapons and 64,000 parts and accessories had been purchased from New Zealanders by the State. In an incredible display of the legitimacy of state coercive power, New Zealanders on the whole trust the government’s use of violence so much so that they returned their weapons to the government. Part of this national trust in State coercive apparatuses, such as the police, is New Zealand’s history of policing with limited firearms. New Zealand’s policing system does have a history of patrolling brown communities, specifically the indigenous Maori and Pacific people of New Zealand. However, the unequal patrolling of brown communities is not coupled with violence towards those communities, as, through a recently continued pilot program, officers are not routinely armed. If police have weapons they are kept in the police car, rather than on the physical body of the police officer. Such state systems provide an elite cue that security is not equivalent to the holding of firearms and provides a basis for trust that the state will not abuse returned weapons.

Should the United States be able to work against gun culture and the weight of the gun lobby to pass gun reform legislation, it would remain unable to create a similar concrete program due to the illegitimacy of the use of violence by law enforcement in the United States. The history of law enforcement and the manipulation of the judicial system to target and disenfranchise minority communities has reduced trust in the State’s coercive power. In their writing on racial and legal exclusion in the United States, Mary Waters and Philip Kasinitz argue that although the United States has granted minorities U.S. citizenship as a way to grant them equality in the eyes of the State, “the designation has not served as a meaningful guarantee of civil or social rights in practice.” Such designation did not protect African Americans and their right to vote during the Jim Crow era. This designation did not prevent the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, nor did this designation protect Arabs, South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs from acts of prejudice following the September 11^th Attacks. As a result, public trust and buy-in to the judicial system has been breached. Likewise, legitimacy of the United States’ coercive mechanism, law enforcement, has been crippled following the War on Drugs. Routine incarceration of the Black population was not a result of rising crime rates but rather a political act in response to changing race relations in the United States. In utilizing crime control the United States turned the use of its law enforcement from a neutral body meant to locate violators of the law to a mechanism of a carceral state, choosing to incarcerate minorities rather than provide support to such minorities through welfare. This occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations, extending the impact across all of American government rather than associating it with a single administration. As a result, the United States has delegitimized its law enforcement and judicial system through historical targeting of minority communities. 

Weak public trust in coercive state mechanisms on gun legislation limits the range of action the United States may take following gun violence and mass shootings. In the case of New Zealand, guns are seen as an element of public safety allowing legislators to pass both a law banning the semi-automatic weapons used during the Christchurch shooting and establish a buy-back program. The historical and present use of guns as part of U.S. state violence, largely harming minority communities, establishes guns as harmful to public safety. As a result, the U.S. is incapable of establishing a buyback program similar to that of New Zealand because of the lack of public trust in the State’s use of armed forces. To make progress to that end, the United States must take action to explicitly address the concern that the government will not abuse the weaponry it acquires through a buyback program. 

IV. Conclusion

On the whole, New Zealand and the United States respond to mass shootings from two very different standpoints. Where New Zealand has a gun culture that views guns as tools, American gun culture elevates the view of guns from tools to a proxy for freedom and individual rights. Where New Zealand’s gun lobby lacks the financial capacity to influence the government, its American counterpart is financially backed and maintains personal connections allowing it to prevent gun reform legislation. Where New Zealanders trust state use of arms, the United States has yet to reckon with its historical and present state violence against minorities. The contextual differences between the U.S. and New Zealand halt attempts to graft New Zealand’s successful responses to gun violence in the United States. The American gun lobby’s financial influence makes gun control legislation more difficult to pass, but there remains potential in an American buyback program. Regaining trust in state institutions through reconciliation and recognition of historical malpractice may have a positive effect on passing buyback legislation. Further research is needed on the potential feasibility, but the value of such a reconciliation expands beyond the scope of responses to gun violence alone. Although the exact responses to gun violence that proved effective in New Zealand may not translate to the U.S. directly, the New Zealand example of trust in state mechanisms and the buyback program offers energizing new prospects for ways the United States may consider reacting to gun violence beyond solely a debate on gun control legislation.

Janna Ramadan is a sophomore at Harvard College studying Government and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She is a first-generation Arab-American college student interested in international relations, particularly related to decolonization and the Middle East, and community activism in her hometown of Boston, MA.