As the soul-searching following the Virginia Tech massacre continues, we'll doubtless hear the US gun lobby trot out the facile old canard 'guns don't kill people, people do'. Very wise. But it's a damned sight easier to kill a lot of people with semi-automatic weapons than without them.
Surely it's time for even the most rabidly libertarian gun-toting redneck to realise that curbing access to guns would at least reduce the body-count whenever loner psychos decide to take their revenge upon the world?
I just cannot understand this US obsession with 'the right to bear arms'. It's an addiction, a fetish, a national psychosis. The nation needs therapy and part of the treatment must be an amendment to the Constitution. Less than 1% of all US homicides are in self-defence. Guns do not protect people from violence, they exacerbate it. The evidence is there for all to see. Yet the gun lobby stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Can the largest democracy in the world heal and reform itself? Will it finally see sense and choose the right to life over the right to kill? Perhaps, but I fear not. The addiction seems too strong and too ingrained.
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