America's Obsession with the Gun.

Thomas Hamilton

Michael Ryan

In my lifetime, there have been three instances of deranged individuals going on a shooting spree on a large scale in the UK, massacring many innocent individuals. In Hungerford in 1987, Michael Ryan murdered 16 people and wounded 15 more before killing himself. The year 1996 in Dunblane saw the monster Thomas Hamilton shoot dead 16 children and 1 adult, and wounding 17 others before committing suicide. In 2010, Derrick Bird killed 12 people and wounded 11 others before killing himself.

Derrick bird

Yet, reports come from across The Pond of innocent persons being killed or maimed by someone with a gun at what seems to be an alarmingly regular rate. A look at the interactive map published in  The Guardian  gives a detailed breakdown of the murders in the USA for 2011; it's startling how many of these killings were carried out using a firearm of some sort. Interactive Map - Murders in the USA 2011

The recent killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut bears similar circumstances to the massacre at Dunblane. In both cases the monster involved targeted young children for whatever sick reason they had in their warped and evil minds. When the Dunblane massacre happened, my eldest child was of the same age as the children who died and it had a profound effect on me; how can anyone get their head around the rationale for a fully grown man taking guns into a primary school and killing toddlers who, full of innocence, had yet to learn the ills of the world? The children who died at Sandy Hook were the same age as my youngest child and the same thoughts are back in my mind.

The National Rifle Association (the NRA) in America guards jealously the right of its members to own guns . This right, it is argued, stems from the Second Amendment of the American Constitution (Bill of Rights) which states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.




The interpretation of this simple sentence by the NRA is obtuse in the extreme as they use it to give credence for their raison d'être. It is obvious when one reads the Second Amendment that the authors intended that a Militia, or the people, should be given an unalienable right to bear arms rather than the individual. The context in which this amendment was written is off the back of what was really the first American Civil War, rather than the War of Independence, as the immigrant British subjects rebelled against the rule of the King and Parliament over the American colonies. At the time, even though the rebels had been victorious with the help of France, there was no standing army of note and this part of the Bill of Rights intended that all males of military age had access to arms if at any time they were called to be part of the local militia in time of any future war. This rationale served well for a democracy in its infancy during the later stages of the 18th century, but it is an irrelevance in the early 21st century where that fledgling country is now the foremost military power in the world. The need for all males of military age to be able to bear arms disappeared long ago.

Having studied the laws each state has put in place in order to regulate gun ownership in the USA, the one thing that comes to mind to someone who lives over The Pond is that the rules are complex and disparate from state to state. The one thing that needs to come from the tragedy in Newtown is a complete overhaul of the American gun laws and a uniform approach across the whole country. As an outsider looking in, this is what I would do:

1. Repeal the Second Amendment - it is archaic and irrelevant to American society today
2. Have an amnesty whereby gun owners are given a finite amount of time in which to hand in their weapons
3. Compensate gun owners for their loss in the form of tax breaks or government bonds

There will be exceptions to the blanket ban as some persons will need to have firearms as part of their job - farmers, forest rangers, etc, but anyone found to be in possession of a firearm after the amnesty will be breaking the law and subject to arrest.

With regards to Wayne La Pierre's recent comments on behalf of the NRA (put an armed guard in every school), this would simply raise American children in a climate of fear from the day they start school. Who really wants their four year old to see firearms on display as they enter the school system for the first time in the autumn?