This is a cross-post by Marc Goldberg
Dear America
Perhaps you are aware, perhaps you’re not but the rest of the world is looking at your country with an all too common mixture of sadness and dismay as yet another appalling massacre takes place, once again in a school. It feels as though the psychopaths who seem to take such delight in murdering innocent people are competing with one another to make their slaughter even more despicable than the one before.
It is so incredibly obvious, so blindingly ridiculously clear that if firearms weren’t being sold over the counter then the number of murders would drop that it beggars belief that I need to sit here and spell it out.
I know that there are people reading this article thinking that I don’t understand the extent to which guns play a part in American culture. I hope they are right because it looks to me as though guns are such a deep part of American culture because people just like shooting. People like taking a rifle out into the woods and firing off loads of bullets. Even the former Vice President of your great country, Dick Cheney managed to shoot a friend in the back while out hunting. At what point do you breath a collective sigh and say, what’s fun isn’t necessarily good for you and let it go.
Other than the victims and relatives of the victims who have been killed in these massacres I feel bad for the tens of millions of Americans who are in favour of greater gun control and have been ignored for decades in their struggle to ensure that the only people able to legally obtain weapons are those working in law enforcement or the military. The truth is it’s not just Americans who love their guns, it’s everyone but the rest of the civilised world seems able, at the level of government, to recognise that an armed populace is at best a necessary evil at worst a recipe for anarchy.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime there have been 9,146 homicides with a firearm in the USA in 2012, compare that with 42 in England. Now clearly there are more people in the USA than England, about 6 times more, lets be generous and pretend that there are 10 times more and the number still doesn’t come close. Should we believe that Americans are just more inherently violent or unstable than Brits? Or maybe, just maybe the radical difference has something to do with the much stricter gun control laws in the UK.
Come on America, it’s time to end the love affair with guns!
With all Due Respect
The Sane People of the World
