As long as Firearms circulate in the U.S., Mass Murder will continue
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr
What are stricter gun laws supposed to accomplish? Weapons are in circulation in the USA like toothbrushes. On that note, any restriction of certain types of weapons will not solve the deadly problem – unless the rate of fire leads to the macabre conclusion that the Boulder murderer merely would have had enough time to shoot “only” five people instead of ten.
Only a single, unambiguous and uninterpretable law could at least curtail these acts – an absolute ban on firearms to tackle the profusion of any kind of guns in private hands. But such a common sense step will never happen in a country with a culture of shooting and killing, framed as a fundamental right to self-defense – not even in the light of supposed Christianity and the unspeakable suffering of victims and their relatives.
There is no other modern western country where people shoot each other to such an extent as in the United States. This is not related to the reasonableness of the people in other civilized parts of the world, but rather to the existing legal order. If something is found to be wrong, then a government must implement laws that at least provide relief. That is what a democratically elected parliament and the executive authority are for. These mass killings in the USA are not only gruesome – they are also an expression of an all too liberal, flawed system of justice.
Yet, President Biden once again wants to regulate firearms ownership more strictly, including certain types of guns, but this sounds more like an act of stalling perplexity. Someone who intends to go to a shopping mall to shoot people has very likely finished with himself and the rest of the world; in any case, he will no longer be bothered by any restrictive laws. Much less will he have trouble getting a gun in the U.S., even if he has failed every background check.
Nearly unbridled support for the weapons insanity also arrives from the same side, which later officially laments the victims: There are public backyard areas in the U.S. where elected officials in neighborhoods with pure poverty not only spend vast sums of tax money on a shooting range, but seriously agree to demands that their county should be declared a “Second Amendment Sanctuary.” Any attempt to convince people with such a disrupted mindset of the opposite is likely to be in vain.
Some particularly highly intelligent people manage to argue as follows: It is not the gun that kills, but the person who handles it. This eminently remarkable view is as ingenious as it is undoubtedly correct. For the very same reason, firearms do not belong in private hands – particularly not in a country in which an obviously not insignificant ratio of the population exhibits mental deficits.
But, nothing will change to prevent the gruesome consequences of gun insanity in the future. The lobby of profit-seeking gun advocates, like the National Rifle Association (NRA), is too powerful. Human life, on the other hand, does not count. As long as that doesn’t change, it will be the same as always.
And thus, when the almost routine horror and grief have given way to everyday life, it will continue as before and straight on to the next massacre. And the blather of tougher gun laws will erupt again.
It almost looks like a calculated strategy.
The Wind of Change 