For generations, Australians and Americans shared similar attitudes to the ownership of guns. Yet they have responded very differently to incidents of mass shootings

In the wake of last week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two of their teachers died, Cardinal Blase Cupich declared: “The second amendment did not come down from Sinai.” The tragedy came less than a month after 10 people were killed in another mass shooting in Buffalo, New York. The 18-year-old Uvalde gunman is reported to have bought the two assault rifles and the ammunition used in the attack legally in the days after his birthday. “The right to bear arms will never be more important than human life,” Cupich said. “Our children have rights too. And our elected officials have a moral duty to protect them.”

Obviously, the cardinal is right. The 1791 Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States – “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” – came not from heaven, but from concerns at the time about collective defence. The historical circumstance of its writing has a closer modern parallel in Ukraine than Uvalde or Buffalo.
The original National Rifle Association was founded in Britain in 1859 to encourage rifle shooting, explicitly readying the nation’s shooters for times of war. Britain’s colonies swiftly followed suit with the establishment of local national rifle associations and, eventually, a former colony adopted the idea, with the foundation of the American NRA in 1871. The delayed start was, of course, in part the result of its citizens being preoccupied in the early 1860s with a civil war that left between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead.