SHOOTY BANG STICKS

Words cannot adequately describe the depression I feel upon hearing about yet another gunman committing yet another hideous crime in a country where the “right to bear arms” is so enshrined in the Constitution that far too many people seem unable to make the connection with the amount of nutters able to get hold of the wretched things and the now fairly regular mass and utterly irrational slaughter of the innocents any more…

I don’t claim to have any answers, just a lot of awful questions about why, in a civilised country, it’s just so damned easy for people to go out and buy seriously powerful weapons and why so many of them feel that the option to do this plays such an important part in their own sense of personal freedom that they’re prepared to sacrifice the lives of so many of their fellow citizens each year in order to protect that right.

Unless you are a hunter (and if you are, presumably you can get some kind of a licence for your shooting sticks) what the hell do you need to have a gun for…?

You could argue that the need to have the things comes down to the need to protect yourself simply because the other guy is more than likely to have one, although the number of people who fail to survive a face-off with an armed intruder who happened to know how to handle their weapon I would imagine is likely to be at least similar to those who don’t try it.

You could argue that “taking a knife to a gun-fight” is a very quick way to get yourself killed, but I would maintain that the vast majority of gun owners have guns because they’re afraid that the other guy is also likely to have one.

And if you live in a vast, open country full of bad guys, the police aren’t able to be everywhere all the time, are they…?

“If some guy comes at me with an automatic, I do at least want to give myself a fair chance…”

In that scenario, usually as the song puts it, “Somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail…”

But just supposing that they weren’t allowed to have them…?

Would that really make any difference at all…?

Just because something is made illegal doesn’t stop the bad guys from doing it anyway, does it? And the sheer number of weapons out there means that anyone with half a mind to is going to know how to get hold of one.

What it does prevent, however, is the moral majority from crossing a line. The people who ordinarily wouldn’t have a thing like a killing machine in the house, but who are wavering because of all the fear of what they know is out there…

And it might stop the brooding psychopath from crossing over from anger to madness and ordering up their assault rifles and plotting to take down anyone and everyone (who might perhaps be no-one at all but turns out to be any random passer-by) in revenge for some imagined slight or injustice or other.

It probably wouldn’t. Someone that damaged is never going to be stopped by mere legislation, but it sure as hell makes it slightly more difficult for them and surely that all helps, doesn’t it…?

Of course, Pandora’s Box is already open and it’s very hard to put all of the weapons back inside the box, but is it really impossible to imagine a scenario where you might at least try to…?

Well, probably, to be perfectly honest with you…

You’re never going to stop a nutter with a gun doing these things, but, statistically, fewer guns reduces the chances of it happening as often, and it’s a start, surely, because you’ve really got to start doing something about it, otherwise this is just going to keep on happening again and again and again, and mostly because a highly vocal group of you want the retain the right to own a shooty bang stick as if taking it from you will emasculate you in some way.

Although I always believed that it takes a bigger person to make the first move, or, in their minds, perhaps that is just a sign of my inherent weakness which proves that I’d be the first to get blown away if it ever came to the crunch…?

Living in the UK it is far too easy to criticise US Gun Policy, and we don’t really have any right to, apart from the usual instinct to try and help a friend to see the mistakes they’re making in a time of distress, but, because we can step away from the problem and look at it from the outside, the rest of us can clearly see this “right to bear arms” thing is anachronistic at best and murderous at worst...

And yes, mass slaughter of innocent lives has happened here despite our stricter gun control laws. Place names like Dunblane, Whitehaven, Hungerford resonate with all of us and stain our lives, but we can only be thankful that they don’t happen more regularly.

Recently, two police officers were killed in the line of duty within twenty miles of my home and it was a tragedy, and possibly a misjudgment of the situation, but some American police officers were amazed when they heard about this and discovered that our police aren’t ordinarily armed as a matter of course. But, you see having armed police increases the amount of guns being put into a situation and it’s bound to escalate. If the first approach is the assumption that this can be negotiated, the opening approach is calmer and more restrained and, yes, unfortunately it does lead to the occasional tragedy, but more often than not, the “softly softly” approach pays dividends.

In the past there have been many criticisms of the occasions when armed responses have been necessary in the UK and, as we saw in the tube and in court only this week, terrible mistakes can and do happen whenever anyone decides to point a weapon at another human being and makes that split-second decision to perhaps end a life. Of course, as a society, you don’t want to put unarmed people up against heavily armed ones but there has to be a balance, surely?

And presumably the simple fact of there being fewer guns out there would just save some lives and help prevent innocent children from having the last thing they ever see be a gun barrel pointing at their face as their friends die all around them.