A GUNMAN trains his rifle’s telescopic sight on shoppers, chooses one at random and pulls the trigger. A man crumples to the ground, killed with a single bullet. As the days go by in the nation’s capital, the gunman kills eight more bystanders with eight more bullets. The police and the FBI are at a loss. One of the few clues this serial killer leaves is a “Death” tarot card at the scene of one attack. Washington is under siege, held hostage by a single sniper.
It could so easily be the plot of a film. And of course Hollywood has been there already. Peter Bogdanovich’s 1967 film, Targets, featured a suburban sniper on a random killing spree. The similarities with the modus operandi of the Beltway Sniper are striking: Targets was inspired by Charles Whitman who, two years earlier, picked off victims from the top of a tower at the University of Texas, leaving 46 people dead or wounded.
Snipers also provide the main theme of The Day of the Jackal, in which a would-be assassin targets President de Gaulle of France; of Rogue Male, in which an English game hunter trains his sights on Hitler; and of Enemy at the Gates, in which the battle of Stalingrad is reduced to a duel between two snipers. The hunt for a sniper also forms the final, gruelling scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. If it is marksmen you are looking for, Hollywood can provide them.
Much of the history of Hollywood is the retelling of America’s experience with guns — in countless war films, Westerns and gangster movies. Since the world’s first feature film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903, which opened with a villain firing point blank into the audience, film-makers have told the blood-spattered history of America with relish while the rest of the world has looked on in appalled awe. Killing can be fun, at least the way Americans tell it.
The country was peppered with gunfire from the start. The first settlers brought superior firepower to ensure the “pacification” of the natives. In 1779 Major James Norris, a pioneer of the American frontier, declared: “Civilisation or death to all American savages.” The slaughter of native Americans continued until the end of the 19th century.
The prairies were brought under the plough by farmers who hunted game with guns. Alone and isolated in a lawless land, they kept their weapons close at hand as protection against Indians or passing thieves.
In the West, revolvers replaced the rule of law and even today the law overwhelmingly backs someone who shoots another dead in protection of his property, in response to a threat of violence or a knock at the door in the dead of night.
A National Rifle Association bumpersticker says: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”, which a cartoonist this week changed to “Guns don’t kill people. Snipers kill people.”
The clear separation between the right to own guns and how they are used is a simplification, but one which is heartfelt by many who profess a love of liberty. Their passion stems from a fierce and longstanding libertarian tradition that is largely absent in Europe.
The American nation was founded upon a revolution against the British, made possible by the fact that most of the population were armed. Today libertarians consider the ownership of guns to be a guarantee against a return of despotism from abroad or, perhaps more importantly, from within America.
Gun ownership is central to a cult of individualism at any cost, which believes that Big Brother works at the local post office.
It picks up speed with states’ rights, wrenching power back from the federal Government, and ends in the bloody siege of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians at Waco, the Oklahoma City bomber and backwoods militiamen who believe that civil society itself is tyrannical.
Liberals, preoccupied with the latent authoritarianism found in all government, often add their weight to the libertarians’ cause.
This week Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, put an aircraft capable of recognising the heat emitted by a firing rifle at the disposal of those hunting the Beltway Sniper. The first to complain was the American Civil Liberties Union, ever on the lookout for creeping surveillance of citizens by agents of the state.
Liberals and libertarians alike enjoy dreaming up conspiracy theories, a pastime which became a national obsession after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, the sniper’s sniper, in 1963.
To this day it is possible to bring a dinner party in America to a halt by asking whether Kennedy’s death was inspired by the CIA, the KGB, Lyndon Johnson, Texas oilmen, organised crime or — the official verdict — by Oswald acting alone.
The death of Kennedy caused worldwide outrage, brought to an abrupt end a period of general optimism in America and sparked a wave of national mourning not seen since Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theatre in Washington DC just as the civil war was ending in 1865.
Assassination as a means of removing a successful politician became commonplace. In April 1968, Martin Luther King, the moderate black rights leader, was shot dead in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later President Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was shot dead in Los Angeles while campaigning to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In March 1981 in Washington DC, President Reagan and three others were shot and injured. None of these deaths or attempted murders of American heroes resulted in restrictions on gun ownership.
With Washington in the grip of sniper fever, President Bush, whose allies include the gun lobby, has become embroiled in the debate about guns. He at first rejected out of hand a system whereby guns could be identified by the bullets they fire. Then, in response to local outrage, he said he would assess the efficiency of the technology before deciding.
That may take some time. It will take at least until the Beltway Sniper is caught and convicted or, like many serial killers, has simply melted away, by which time public outrage will have dimmed.
Many more may have died by then. But one thing is certain: however many victims, there will be no gun control.
