The OK Corral was no massacre

Professor Peter Squires, the University of Brighton’s Professor of Criminology, drew the analogy as he prepared to travel to Las Vegas, scene of the latest shooting in which 58 people died and hundreds were injured.

Professor Squires, who has advised Home Office researchers on gun crime, was in great demand from the world’s media after the shootings and conducted no fewer than 14 interviews. Here, he gives his thoughts on the latest carnage.

“So far this year in the USA, there have been 282 mass shootings – defined by the FBI as incidents involving four or more gunshot casualties, and these do not include the perpetrators who may have been shot by police or committed suicide.

This latest massacre grabbed my attention like no other by marking a new level of indiscriminate gun violence.

Another reason it caught my attention was because I am flying to Vegas in a few days, en route to a ‘Critical Firearm Studies’ conference at the University of Arizona’s Tucson campus. Every TV image of broken windows at the Mandalay Bay hotel where the shooter launched his deadly attack, revealed the profile of the hotel next door where I will be staying.

Professor Peter Squires

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

I wondered if the conference might be cancelled. At least part of the dominant news discourse in the USA – witness Trump’s initial response ‘we won’t be talking about gun policy’ – is to talk as if the incident was a natural disaster, a freak of nature, just a tragedy, and nothing to do with the lax gun laws with which the US and some states in particular has become known.

I could well imagine that university administrators might think twice about holding a gun conference a mere 14 days after the country’s worst-ever modern mass shooting incident; the US gun debate often tends to generate more heat than light. But it seems we are still on.

The conference has been planned for almost 18 months and began as an idea arising during an international symposium on ‘Firearms and Emotions’ at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. A number of researchers were gathered to explore social and psychological aspects of gun culture and it seemed very topical to launch what we called a ‘critical firearm studies’ research platform to investigate the impact of firearms and armed societies upon social relations, identities, and communities.

And so the conference idea began to take shape. Many social and psychological dimensions pertaining to ‘firearms and society’ are to be explored. As one of relatively few Europeans taking part, my contribution will be exploring the ways in which firearm industry marketing has contributed to a significant increase in the firepower available in the US private citizens – all sold, over the counter, to citizens. Controversial issues, no doubt, in a culture where owning a military specification assault rifle is defended as a ‘human right’.

While staying in Tucson, I’m aiming to drive the 45 minutes to the former Western Frontier town of Tombstone. This was where, in 1881, Marshall Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had their infamous ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ against the Clanton gang.

This was the archetypal Wild West frontier gunfight, celebrated throughout over a century of ‘cowboy tradition’, and the subject of several Hollywood westerns. The irony is, it wouldn’t even make today's FBI ‘mass shooting’ database because only three people were killed.

Civilisation has become so much more dangerous!”