You can imagine lots of countries where a candidate for the presidency might lie about owning a gun so as not to alienate the voters, but only in the US would he lie and say he does own a gun when he doesn’t. That was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s sin earlier this year — and he compounded it by claiming that he was a lifelong hunter. Diligent reporters checked and found that Romney had never taken out a hunting licence anywhere.

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a political reality in the US. That’s why hardly anybody there is using the latest mass slaughter, by some enraged loser, at Virginia Tech to argue for more gun control. There’s not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse. Gun control is a dead issue in the US, and it isn’t coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (and the two aren’t the same thing).

The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realized that it wasn’t going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn’t stop talking about gun control. The party leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election — a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast — and realized that their problem was more than just George W. Bush’s fatal charm. They weren’t winning in “heartland” states because they were seen as trying to take the Americans’ guns away.

Killing fields

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care so passionately about their guns there that it’s hard to get elected if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party’s national platform commits itself to uphold the Second Amendment — the right to keep and bear arms — and in the 2006 election it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would “stand up to anyone — Republican or Democratic — who tries to take away Montanans’ gun rights.” The new Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has “more guns than I need but not as many as I want...I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I'll control mine.” It’s a whole new image for the Democrats, and it helped them win control of both houses of Congress in 2006.

There is another, quite rational, reason why gun control doesn’t get much traction in American politics any more. It’s simply too late. This is a society that owns approximately equal numbers of wrist-watches and guns: around a quarter-billion of each. There’s no going back — and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one too.

More fundamentally, the gun control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of 18 and 45 also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilization model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don’t murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries like Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organization in the US. But it’s really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet-holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: “Guns don’t kill Americans; Americans kill Americans.”