Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
Guns, slaughter and denial. Just another day in the life of America. What other wealthy, ‘civilized’ democratic nation on earth would continue to tolerate the slaughter of its children by its own citizens?
The sickeningly perverse universe of guns in the United States goes far, far beyond the pale. It is simply beyond comprehension. It’s barbarous lunacy.
But yet it says much about the country’s political system and its politicians. The rot is real. The American people – the majority of which (anywhere from 50-odd per cent up to 60+ per cent depending on the time period, according to Gallup) – consistently support stricter gun controls.
The American public is being betrayed by a large number of their elected officials in the most heinous, sinister and cowardly way. Their ignorance and corruption – after all their snouts are firmly embedded in the trough of the gun lobbyists – continues to ensure that no meaningful progress can be made on America’s gun problem. Admitting they even have a problem is a big problem.
Republican politicians attending the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting recently couldn’t even find it within themselves to publicly utter words expressing the horror of what happened at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Simply pathetic.
And then there is the dysfunctional despot of disinformation Donald Trump who offered what one observer described as a “grotesque caricature of sympathy”. Trump’s typically infantile ideas revolve around a combination of more ‘good guys’ with guns than ‘bad guys’ alongside arming teachers with guns. Nope, not even going to go there.
I hate to state the obvious, but it’s clearly time for less guns, not more.
And I would be remiss to not mention the American fascination with their Second Amendment that is repeated ad nauseum at the first wiff of gun control. But in the face of children being slaughtered in their classrooms this historically dated bit of wordage no longer holds any moral authority.
This unfortunately has gotten all tangled up with confused notions of freedom. I would argue that the US is not nearly as ‘free’ as it purports to be. Highly surveiled by their own government, stricken by deeply embedded racism, vast disparities between rich and poor, an uneven education system, lack of universal health care and an civil society terrorised by guns does not meet the acid test for freedom.
Maintaining the rights of a few overconfident but optimistic individuals with all manner of guns including hardcore military hardware seems a steep price to pay for a complete lack of control over a tool that is persistently used improperly killing thousands each year and terrorizing millions more.
What does this all mean for Canada? It matters significantly what happens in the US because the majority of guns used in crime in Canada originate in the US. And as a culture we have over time incrementally become more like our American cousins. This was made startlingly clear in the so-called ‘freedom protests’ which wreaked of the dull unthinking far-right rhetoric coursing through the US body politic. If we let our guard down, if we become complacent this slow slide into an American-style culture could mean our already far too prevalent gun deaths could worsen.
It may surprise many readers to know that in Canada we have a total of approximately 1.1 million registered firearms, and 96.7 per cent of them are handguns. And these approximately one million handguns belong to 276,000 registered owners.
I, like the majority of Canadians, support an ongoing tightening of gun control within this country – particularly with regard to military-style weapons. They simply have no place in our society. Recent federal government recent moves to tighten up the hand gun situation are minimal but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
Just please don’t let Canadians down like American politicians are letting their citizens down. . . with heart-breaking consequences.
