Like an alcoholic who tells you that what he really needs to sort himself out is just one more drink - you can only shake your head in despair when you hear that the NRA's response to the Newtown school shooting and the murder of twenty young children and six of their teachers is a call for armed guards at schools.
What the fuck is with Americans and their guns ?
I'm as much a willing victim of American cultural imperialism as the next man. I have two American motorcycles, I'm told that I dress like a redneck trucker. I listen to alt-country. If I could afford a pick-up truck I'd have one of those too. But still I can't understand the idea that gun ownership is somehow the soul of the nation. I've even studied American history: I get the obsession was the constitution as a sacred text. I get the need to define the nation in terms of a frontier - either real or metaphorical.
Even so. We can contextualize as much as me like - it's time to just say for fuck's sake grow up and end this bollocks - and join the rest of the modern world in the sanity of gun control.
4 comments:
I don't wish to criticise your account of the US. Clearly there is a need to combat gun crime and I have yet to discover an organisation that supports random killing with guns.There are many reasons why some Americans want to keep their guns, the Second and Tenth Amendments are often cited, self defence in a violent society is another. A maniac earlier this week went to kill his ex girlfriend in a cinema. He was shot by a cinema worker first.It seems that too many people turn to murder as a first option and others want self protection. My puzzle is why so many on the left hold the view that only that state should possess lethal weapons. So far most of the arguments for gun control assume that the state can be trusted in this area. Now I am worried about that, as much as I am worried about looneys attacking kids in schools.
Sorry to come on twice. This text is from a right wing source so it can be dismissed. The point is that the armed guards are not there because the President has his kids at the school. Security can deal with that. The guards are there period. Which is why rich people send their kids to that school. Have a good new year.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/23/School-Obama-s-Daughters-Attend-Has-11-Armed-Guards-Not-Counting-Secret-Service
The argument that arming up is necessary to stop the 'bad guys' has been behind every arms race. It creates a situation where a society as a whole has its finger literally or metaphorically on a hair-trigger. In part my argument for gun control is out of self-interest. I am no pacifist and I can well imagine that if I lived in a society with easy access to guns I would get sucked into that and may well have shot someone by now.
As for the Left not allowing the state to have a monopoly on weapons - I have some sympathy with that line of argument.
But history does tend to show that come the hour, revolutionary movements tend to be able to lay hands on the weapons they need largely because the forces of the state start to crumble and defect. Hicksville in the Mid-West is not quite in the same position as Petrograd in 1917. Not yet anyway.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt
to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. ” – Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
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