Skip to main content

How can they? Another rant - and no, I'm not apologising for writing this one.

How can they - again and again - attempt to justify the unjustifiable? To claim that they are safer exercising their right to bear arms.

America's gun control legislation - or lack of gun control legislation - is again to blame for a mass shooting on American soil. Not religion, not extremism, not hatred, not mental illness. All implicated, yes,  but all underpinned by the ready and easy access to lethal weapons. What stands at the root of all blame? Guns. Just guns.

Another mass execution has happened. In Florida, this time. It will happen again. Somewhere else. And again. In another place. And again. Over and over. It will continue until politicians muscle up against the NRA and call an end to laws that put lethal weapons in the hands of American citizens. Yes - American citizens. Americans killing each other. Because their interpretation of the Second Amendment says they can carry arms. It is their right, as written by the founding fathers, to do so. Written at a time when their fledgling country was reeling from a civil war that had pitted states against neighbouring states and against federal government and where the people both demanded and given their recent history, very reasonably needed legislation to protect themselves from any future vagaries of an oppressive government power. In an internally peaceful USA (the clue being in the word United, perhaps) this is, arguably, no longer the case. When will they see that carrying arms is but a short step away from using those arms and when you use those arms, people - brothers, sisters, mothers, sons, fathers and, in Sandy Hook, children - are slaughtered?

Man up against the NRA bullies and gun obsessives and just stop it. Stop the killing. Otherwise, it will happen again. Next week, it will be somewhere else. Yes, next week. And the week after that. And the one after that. There have been over 130 mass shootings in America already this year (gunviolencearchive). That is about four a week. Four occasions in which four or more people were shot (injured or killed). Sixteen Americans involved in mass shootings, on average, each week. Sixteen. If you add to this all those involved in gun-incidents of any size this grows to a staggering 100,000 people shot dead or injured by guns, each year, on American soil. If that figure isn't shocking enough, try this one - in the USA, in 2007, more pre-school children than serving police officers, were shot or injured by firearms. Or this one, among 23 high income countries all across the world (including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK), 80% of all firearm deaths at any age  and 87% of firearm deaths in children, under the age of 14, occur in the USA. Also children in the USA are 10 times more likely to die from an accidental shooting than children in the other 22 countries studied. (Firearm Fatalities) Why? Because a third of all Americans own guns, perhaps? If they own guns, then it is no surprise that their children will sometimes find them. And play with them. And accidentally shoot themselves and each other and their parents.

Why don't Americans do something to stop this annual cull?

Because the NRA is too powerful; it has a lot to answer for. As for Trump - there, I've avoided naming him directly in recent blogs but today, out pops his name for all to see - yoo hoo, here I am, Mr I-told-you-so. Mr Aren't-I-the-clever-one? Mr Thank-you-for-congratulating-me-for-my-foresight. Mr You-see!-The-sooner-we-ban-Muslims-and-Mexicans-from-entering-America-the-safer-we'll-be. How can he attempt to spin such atrocity into political gain? What part of him thinks that's appropriate?

It must stop.

President Obama wants to stop it. But he doesn't have the clout to do so. Because too many senators sit in the money-lined pockets of the NRA. Obama looked sad and angry and defeated in his news statement yesterday. How else could he look? What else could he possibly say? Here we are again - expressing condolences, again, naming innocent victims again. It does not matter who they were, nor what they were; nor what was the colour of their skin; nor what was their politics; nor what was their sexuality. They were human beings like you and like me. Bullets are blind. They kill those they hit. All that matters is that the victims were innocents. Innocent. Obama asked of Americans, What sort of a country do you want to live in? That quietly asked question demands an answer.

I fear it won't get one. And the slaughter of innocents will continue. Fail to protect and you fail all future victims. Fail to protect and heap guilt upon your own shoulders when the families of future victims look around for someone to blame. Could failure to protect be the basis of a mass action against a state system handcuffed to gun-rights activists? I don't know why I am writing this but, like my angry words after Charlie Hebdo and the Paris attacks of last year, I feel that to say nothing would be wrong. And I don't know what else I can do. I hope that someone out there, across the pond, is brave enough to do something to stop it now. I wish them luck.

America; please, stop it. Now. What on earth is stopping you?


(Americans and their guns)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn&#

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful.  Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten!

Tut, Tut, soggy feet again

"Tut, Tut, looks like rain." Tut, Tut probably isn't the first thing that springs to mind when viewing this picture. And faced with bleak weather and a sad-looking symbol of national pride it is unlikely that many would consider a small bear  a personage of sufficient gravitas to quote. However, Walking the Dog was in Scotland ( was rather than is, because was there last week without internet). And Walking the Dog likes Pooh. That sort of Pooh - the sort with an 'h' at the end. A. A. Milne had a lot to say about the weather. He gave Eeyore my favourite weather-related observation , "The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually." And last Thursday, it did stop. Long enough for Littlest and I to walk to our pooh-sticks bridge. Long enough for us to get half way there, along the grassy path. Long enough for us to chat to the cows (we had to shout as they stubbornly stayed at the distant end of the fie