Guns

Guns are a religion in America.  It is amazing how second amendment faith does not get shaken by these mass shootings.  They shake their heads reassuring themselves “It’s not the guns that kill, it’s people that kill people.”

If you allow broad proliferation of weapons, then people will die.  And, if you don’t the same thing may happen, anyway.  The act of one individual with a particular distorted view of the world developed by obsessive behaviour and at a particular revision or developmental stage can have an impact that is amplified and acted upon to an extent of terrible violence and unbelievable harm.  Or without the weapons would it just be a lunatic waving his arms around and disturbing cinema goers?

We have evolved fiction as a means to understand the more difficult parts of human nature. These thoughts exist already, the fiction does not inform, it may provide a storyline but so does Crime and Punishment, and The Bible, and we do not see these works as informing murderers to murder.  Our fiction is our strength.  It allows us to learn consequence without hurting ourselves.

It is not the gun that kills.  It is not the snake that bites.  It is not the disease I will catch.  The safety hymns of reassurance we need to remember to stay sane.  Of course over 99.99% of the people we know will probably survive the week and if we all behave, well and good.  Violence is visible in a moderate environment.  We believe outbreaks can be quickly contained, quelled and increasingly these days crave harsh decisive treatment by the police.

The London Olympics.  Isn’t it nice for the Tory government to be seen by the world for the next few weeks having the military providing a security presence.  It is seem almost logical to get them dressed in mufti.  No!  That would be even creepier.  The cameras of the world will record the UK in the guise of a military dictatorship.  And maybe that’s fair.  It has been hard to discern Osbornomics as much apart from a grand Malthusian erosion of the needs of the state by shipping the poor off to forgotten council estates to fend for their financial existence he is exerting a kind of social totalitarianism.  But now they exert a show of the military for the most watched World gathering of sports.  I think that it is a Government ploy, a kind of show-piece Falklands – a Thatcherite glow of austerity for people and freedom of the corporate monster to consume them.

Countries survived on bluster backed by destructive power and domination.  Bluster is only useful if it can be backed by military force.  Something Britain had talent for.  It is a dishonest assessment of our safety and economic state.

It guns become part of the culture, when citizens bear deadly force, you probably need a functioning social infrastructure without the usual feeders of crime.  It still does not stop those with emotional demons or subverted realities from acting out drama with a deadly set of consequences.

 

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