1152 ★ CHAPTER 28 A New Century and New Crises
nationalism reinforced one another far more powerfully in the United States
than in the more secular nations of western Europe.
Other forms of American exceptionalism had a darker side. Among
advanced countries, the United States has by far the highest rate of murder
using guns. In 2012, the last year for which comparative statistics are available,
there were 9,146 murders with guns in the United States, as opposed to 158 in
Germany, 173 in Canada, and 11 in Japan.
Indeed, in the last years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty- first, the United States was the scene of a horrifying number of mass
murders, often committed at schools. In 1999, two students killed twelve stu-
dents and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. In 2007, a student
at Virginia Tech University shot and killed thirty- two people. Five years later,
a lone gunman killed twenty children aged five and six, and seven adults at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the 1950s,
schools across the country had conducted drills to enable students to survive a
nuclear attack. Now they trained pupils in seeking shelter if a gunman entered
the building. There were also mass killings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo-
rado, and at the Washington Navy Yard. In 2015, a gunman influenced by racist
Internet sites murdered nine black participants in a Bible study group, includ-
ing the minister, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charles-
ton. Other countries also experienced instances of mass violence, but not with
the frequency of the United States. While each of these events led to calls for
stricter regulations on the purchase of firearms, the strong commitment of
many Americans to the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear
arms, coupled with the remarkable power of the National Rifle Association,
one of the country’s most influential lobbies, ensured that no new regulations
were enacted.
The United States continued to lag behind other countries in providing
social rights to its citizens. In Europe, workers are guaranteed by law a paid
vacation each year and a number of paid sick days. American employers are
not required to offer either to their workers. Only four countries in the world
have no national provision for paid maternity leave after a woman gives birth
to a child: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and the United States. And as
noted in the previous chapter, the United States has by far the world’s highest
rate of imprisonment.
Varieties of Freedom
In the early twenty- first century, Americans were increasingly tolerant of diver-
gent personal lifestyles, cultural backgrounds, and religious persuasions. They
enjoyed a degree of freedom of expression unmatched in virtually any country
in the world. Thanks to the rights revolution and the political ascendancy of