The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

GRAY, ominous clouds hung low over the city’s hills and valleys, more than a hint of cold rain lingering in the still air. Trees stood bare and leafless against the bleak sky. Scranton was ready for the winter to come.

This northeast Pennsylvania city of 75,000 has lost half its population since US President Joe Biden was born there 80 years ago. The fact that Biden is a proud native son is just about the only thing that might tilt next year’s local election results to him. In virtually all other respects, the city could be expected to support Donald Trump.

Evidence abounds of the city’s overwhelmingly white population, Catholic faith and hardscrabble roots. Stone churches occupy many key locations in downtown as well as throughout the neighbourhoods of wood-sided narrow houses with hopeful stoops that predominate in this once-bustling industrial hub.

Until the middle of the 20th Century, Scranton was a regional powerhouse. It was the beating industrial heart of the Lackawanna River Valley, sustained largely by rich nearby deposits of the dependable coal that fueled America’s developing industrial revolution. Railroads competed to carry coal to the furnaces of the industrial east.

A local preacher coined the city’s nickname “Electric City” when electric lights were introduced in the late 19th Century at a local manufacturing company. The first American streetcars powered only by electricity began operating in the city at about the same time.

After World War II, however, Scranton and coal gave way to cheaper and more convenient oil and natural gas as heating fuel and as a ready energy source.

Jobs dried up. Workers and their families moved out, often to the south and west where the oil and gas industry beckoned. For those who remained, grievance seemed natural and appropriate against an economic system where trade unions no longer guaranteed well-paying jobs and the wealth gap between the rich and the middle classes widened. Scranton joined the ranks of decaying post-industrial cities, dotted with tumbled-down buildings, vacant lots and growing despair.

But there has been a significant saving grace that has kept part of Scranton’s decaying industrial base afloat. That is its major role in US Army weapons manufacturing. In fact, recent city data reveal that the largest employer in the city is the US Army. City factories make various armaments for the army, but most notably these days, its Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (SCAAP) makes lots and lots of heavy artillery shells.

The installation where this is done was originally constructed as a steam locomotive construction and repair facility in 1908. SCAAP was established in 1953 and has been operated by government contractors since then.

Huge defense contractor General Dynamics-Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GD-OTS) assumed operation of the facility in 2006, and is the current operating contractor.

SCAAP is housed on 15.3 acres, with seven buildings, totaling 495,000 square feet of production square footage.

Scranton has thus joined the short list of rust-belt cities that now thrive by making conventional military weaponry. Another example is the western Ohio city of Lima, which makes advanced battle tanks. As the US has continued to supply Ukraine with weapons systems and ammunition, these two cities have occasionally appeared in the news. They make much of what America is supplying to Ukraine’s armed forces.

Despite this government-spurred stimulus, Scranton has been sagging for decades. This created fertile ground for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and north-central and northeastern Pennsylvania has moved toward the GOP generally since then. In retrospect, the Keystone State’s support for Trump in 2016 should not have been a complete surprise.

But Scranton turned out for native son Biden three years ago, and Lackawanna County’s 20,000 vote majority for the Democrat provided almost one-third of his overall winning margin as Pennsylvania proved to be a blue swing state.

Biden will need Pennsylvania again this year. He will be helped by the fact that a key arterial highway has now been renamed the “President Joseph R Biden expressway.” A street named for Biden can also be found elsewhere in the city. Even in the city’s more depressed precincts, there are none of the scatological anti-Biden (and anti-vice president Harris) signs so prevalent in other depressed and rural parts of the state.

Biden often brags about his poor, Catholic family roots in Scranton. He will need the city’s faithful to remember that and again give him their votes next year in what may be another tantalizingly close election. There seems little possibility that Biden could win re-election without carrying Pennsylvania.

Gun deaths are a peculiar American issue

Gun violence in the US continues to baffle most Americans. Massacres by unstable citizens using easy-to-purchase military-grade assault weapons defy rationalisation. How in the world does a nation that regards itself as well-educated, idealistic and compassionate continue to tolerate such awesomely lawless, nihilistic behaviour?

Most people would probably answer that it’s the work of the National Rifle Association, its gun-manufacturing members and what have become its ideological fellow travellers among MAGAns and other conservative-leaning Republican Party members.

That’s facile. It is also partly true. That is the thesis of several recent books and a lot of extensive commentary in the mainstream press. The US has suffered from one tragic mass shooting after another in recent years.

Any list of these standout horrors always includes the murder of 20 primary school kids and 6 educators at Sandy Hook, Connecticut in December 2012. The other tragedy most often referenced in discussions of gun violence is the murder of 60 concert-goers and wounding of another 413 in Las Vegas in October 2017.

The well-respected Pew Research Centre reports that in 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the US, according to the CDC, which is the government agency that tracks this grisly statistic. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides.

In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the US were suicides (26,328), while 43 percent were murders (20,958). The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).

About eight-in-ten US murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81 percent – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55 percent – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.

The US gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the Pew study, which used a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6).

So gun deaths are a peculiar American problem. Part of the explanation, as noted above, is doubtless to be found in the current alliance-of-convenience forged by the gun lobby; alienated sectors of the population, particularly in deep red Western and Southern states and in the Republican Party, whose opportunistic interest coincides with the others’.

Such is the thesis of Gunfight, a 2021 polemic aimed at the politico-social alliance noted above. Several other recent books and magazine articles make the same point. Most also discuss the reality that most gun owners are responsible hunters and recreational shooters.

John Wayne’s Western heroes, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and recent caricatures played by Liam Neeson are all film fantasies. They mostly employ handguns on the screen.

The assassins who commit murders like Sandy Hook and Las Vegas, on the other hand, most often employ the now-infamous AR-15 and its various imitations. Where did this gun come from?

It was first developed by a Marine veteran in Los Angeles around 70 years ago, and the US military quickly adopted it as the M-16 automatic rifle, not least as a counterpoint to the infamous but ruthlessly efficient Soviet-made AK-47. John Wayne was reportedly the first person outside the gunmaker’s company to admire its firepower.

The M-16/AR-15 fires a smaller .223-caliber bullet that carries a higher velocity and “tears through the body, spiraling as it obliterates organs, blood vessels and bones,” according to industry experts.

It’s still not very difficult to purchase an AR-15 in the US. The news will likely remain full of tales of American gun-related tragedy.