Is it easier to imagine the end of capitalism or the end of the world?
Another school shooting. Another message from our bleeding heart president, that’s what I yelled into the wind, F**k You Second Amendment, because I wanted the world, the wind, the universe, my legislators, my unborn grand children, the neighbor hunting in my woods, the 120 high school Freshmen in my county’s school, to listen up. What kind of people are we to sacrifice our freedom to be safe from asault rifle toting lunatics, even if they are teenagers, so that – OK, mostly men – can excercise their f**king freedom to own a gun. Whose freedom is important here? Boys, you don’t need a gun to be men. Really.
Then I thought, better go read the Second Amendment, so you have some idea what you’re yelling about.
Here it is: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
In my state of Vermont ,after Parkland, the legislature passed laws requiring background checks, raised age limits for owning guns and banned bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. Nice gesture, but none of these measures would have been effective against our latest 17 year oid mass murderer. He borrowed his dad’s weapons, thereby avoiding the raised age limits and background checks, he didn’t use either a bumpstock or high capacity magazine. He also had no mental health issues (until he shot up his classmates), so wouldn’t have been flagged as a potential killer, In other words, laudible as these gun control measures seem to be, they are ineffectiive.
There’s only one way out of this. No guns, period. The United States’s gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than other high-income countries, according to an article in the Guardian that takes a look at four countries with successful gun control.
In these four countries, action was taken immediately after a mass shooting, with various results. In Japan, guns and swords have been banned since the feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) unified Japan. In Germany, despite restrictions, there are guns in the country; but few killings; in Australia, there hasn’t been a mass shooting since the Port Arthur spree that led to stringent restrictions and a massive buy out. In 1946, after a school shooting in the UK, “gun control was in the cards” – escalating to the banning even of small-bore pistols used for target shooters.
It’s the middle of June. There have been 26,1300 incidents with 6,449 deaths so far, 1500 of these are teenagers or younger. The shooting at Santa Fe, Texas, marked the 101st mass shooting (although there is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting, the number is considerably more than zero.)