Re: US Shootings : Sat Dec 15, 2012 5:49 am
At the risk of agreeing with some of the very people I can't stand - the presence of guns in a society is not a posteriori evidence of wide-scale gun violence. Canada has enough firearms in circulation to win half-a-dozen world wars and yet, despite its proximity to the States, doesn't suffer anywhere near the same number of casualties. Americans have always feared the untrammeled violence of the state and widespread circulation of firearms was meant to discourage anyone from curtailing those freedoms many of their European ancestors didn't enjoy. I think the fear was and remains reasonable and so was the solution. That said, whilst prior to WWI citizen militias could probably hold their own against armies of the state, pitted against satellite imagery, Apache "Longbow" helicopters and Hellfire missiles it's doubtful the Minutemen could offer anything more than token resistance.
It's very difficult to argue for gun ownership in Britain without keyboards being tossed into the air in horror and mothers ushering their kids out of the room. Invariably the response is "Guns kill people, duh!" and before long one or more people are being labeled Nazis. If you are lucky enough to get beyond first base and point out that against the British state we have almost no means of defence should we need it the reply then is something along the lines of "We're not likely to". Given this country's long and bloody history in addition to the huge number of problems which have broken on us or are about to (the current economic malaise, the far greater one when this last debt bubble we've created implodes on us, global warming, peak oil, global shortages of water, food and other finite resources, overpopulation etc.) I'd say this is a naive assumption.
Why it is that there is almost complete unanimity on the question of guns in society is an interesting question. After all, alcohol has always been a far bigger killer than firearms in Britain yet you don't see 95% of people arguing to ban it. I think it's no-coincidence that the government and the media combined (in one of those rare moments when both sing exclusively from the same hymn sheet, which should be suspicious in itself) to hit guns when they were at their weakest post-Hungerford following decades when civil unrest was a major political issue (the miners' strike, Poll Tax etc.)
Returning to the US, I'd argue that it is the proliferation of guns within a fundamentally corrupt and unjust, militaristic and economically polarised nation deeply divided along lines of race, religion and class that leads to widespread gun violence.
