Celebrations in Boston after the capture of the second suspect of the Marathon bombings. Photo by Grk1011 via Wikimedia Commons.

In my last article for The Oxonian Globalist, I considered whether the Sandy Hook massacre of last December might provide the critical mass necessary to bring about serious changes to gun law in the United States. Change, of course, did not occur.

Yet, following the shootout between the police and the perpetrators of the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings, there is hope that the impasse on gun control legislation might finally be confronted.

Powerful as the bombings proved to be in bringing together not only the residents of Boston but also the citizens of wider America, unprecedented pressure from the public means that there is new impetus for a move in Congress.

Any potential for changes in legislation initially seemed to have been laid to rest within just 48 hours of the attacks in Boston. A bill that would require background checks on all gun purchases, described by Nancy Pelosi as a “watered-down version of a watered-down bill”, failed to acquire the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, a legislative procedure used by the Republican-dominated pro-gun lobby to delay voting on the bill.

President Obama commented at the time, “All in all, this is a pretty shameful day for Washington”, while Senator Dianne Feinstein implored her colleagues to “show some guts”. Instead, in what has been portrayed as a gutless nod to the financial might of pressure groups such as the National Rifle Association, they voted down even this most basic of measures. This, before the dust from the bombs that killed three and injured 281 had even had a chance to settle. In failing to muster enough votes for the background checks bill to pass, the Washington congressmen missed an opportunity to address both the concerns felt by countless Americans and the grief experienced by the families of those who perished in Boston, in Sandy Hook, and in countless other killings.

Yet the nature of the bombings indicates that there might be change on the horizon. In his New Yorker column on April 25th, “What if the Tsarnaevs had been the Boston shooters?”, John Cassidy observed: “Set off in public a couple of crude, homemade bombs that you appear to have made using a recipe on the Web, and the state will make you Public Enemy Number One.” But, according to Cassidy, “If you systematically shoot a classroom full of defenceless six-year-olds and blow off your own head, things proceed rather differently… The political system, in hock to the N.R.A., will classify you as a nut whose deadly actions have few or no policy implications. Life and politics will go on as normal.”

Cassidy’s anger is very easy to understand: the lack of a policy response to Sandy Hook was depressing to no end, while the siege laid by security forces to Boston in the hunt for the amateurish Tsarnaev brothers was brutal, with armoured personnel carriers patrolling the streets of one of America’s safer large cities. But we might hope that the extreme reaction to the Boston bombings will make sure that life and politics do not “go on as normal”.

Certainly, there is a divorce between American society and politics. It was clear for all to see in the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook, and in the bitter reaction to the failure of the background checks bill in April. After Sandy Hook, television talk shows and radio phone-ins were awash with furious inquests into what the shootings meant, and what should be done about it. Some politicians – notably Vice President Joe Biden – forcefully called for alterations to be made to existing gun laws, while parts of the Congress in Washington revealed themselves to be beholden to the National Rife Association. Four months and the Boston tragedy later, Washington politicians, still paying heed to interest groups rather than the population that they are elected to represent, did not pass the bill for background checks on guns purchasing.

Yet a general consensus has emerged among the American public that something has to be done to prevent further massacres. As President Obama demanded to know, shortly after the bill’s failure was announced, “How can something that has 90% support not happen?” For these Americans, enough has finally proved to be enough: Sandy Hook was the gun massacre to end all gun massacres. This public unity has been carried over to the reaction to the Boston bombings.

Rather than retreating behind their garden fences and stocking up their pantries and gun cupboards, as happened after 9/11 and also after Sandy Hook, the people of Boston and wider society endured this hardship together. Street parties emerged all over the city when Dzhokar Tsarnaev’s arrest was announced, while the hashtag #Bostonstrong has been used as many as half a million times per day. Unity in the face of violence is hardly a new trend, but it is the positive nature that it has taken which is most remarkable: donations have flooded in to the One Fund, set up to help those affected by the bombings, while retaliation has generally remained off the agenda. There was the grotesquely comedic minority who mistook the Czech Republic for Chechnya, where the Tsarnaev brothers were born. But that minority received its just desserts.

Remarkably, the response from Washington looks to be taking its lead from the reaction of its subjects, with White House Spokesman Jay Carney announcing the decision to try Dzhokar Tsarnaev under federal law and not as an enemy combatant. In the weeks after the marathon bombings, it looks like the response could form a new unity within society and between society and the government, the latter in a way that Sandy Hook was unable to do. This unity was not evident two days after the bombings, as the bill failed despite the outrage and distress of shooting survivors.

Yet developments in the Boston case demand that gun control legislation be addressed. These include the killing of MIT policeman Sean Collier as the two perpetrators evaded arrest, and the discovery that one of the brothers had been added to a database of terror suspects in 2011. Without background checks on gun purchases, this potential terrorist was able to obtain a gun. The question is whether this will prove enough to shake politicians out of the grasp of interest groups such as the N.R.A..