Opinion/Editorial
GUNS KILL PEOPLE
Guns don’t kill people, People kill people…except, actually, guns do kill people. People, however, lie, and they will keep on lying as long as the public will support and approve of such duplicity. What is Trump, and the Republican Party in cahoots with the NRA, lying about? Guns. They do not want a diminishment of the gun supply or a diminution of the ability to purchase or trade in them. They don’t care about the kinds of guns or types of ammunition. They care about making sure that everyone has guns. With an exception that they feel they can give in on in order to turn the public’s mind away from the staggering number and open availability of guns. It is not the guns, it is the people who use the guns. That is their mantra, and that is the only solution they are offering in hopes of keeping what happened in Australia from happening in the U.S. In Australia, there was a giant gun buyback that involved hundreds of thousands of guns being purchased back, and allowed the authorities to destroy them. The violence rate in Australia dropped precipitously, along with the rate of suicides. The NRA and the Republicans do not want to see that happen in the U.S.
They, instead, want more investigations of anyone buying a gun (not those already owning those armories of guns). They want background checks on a much more intensive and intrusive basis, that will do nothing. Most gun crimes and suicides are not committed by mentally ill people or former criminals. Ninety percent of those acts are committed by people who would pass any background check. The right-wingers know that, and that’s why they want to place their chips on that bet while taking the attention away from the simple fact that America has a colossal gun possession and supply problem. The media waxes and wanes right now because it does not know where these kids (getting attention in the media) are likely to pursue their agenda. The mass media has no more morality or integrity than the Republicans and Trump. There is evil out here roaming the earth, and you are able to see a whole load of it swirling around this very issue.
To even approach the gun issue requires deciphering deliberate and cunningly placed human logic. The NRA, and the gun supporters that pay them have very cleverly substituted the innate danger and fundamental purpose of firearms with the people who may, and do use them. The expression: “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” is the very popular expression used to turn the public’s attention aside from going after the number of guns being manufactured and stored. Guns kill people because they are intended to extend the ability of men and women to reach out and strike objects at a distance. That striking quality means everything. Cars and other objects invented, and used to compare with guns, are not created to strike anything. In fact, most other things are designed to keep them from striking anything (including cars). The nations of the world that have few guns have much less gun violence. You might say “duh” to hearing that conclusion if you have not been completely suffused with the ‘people kill people’ slogans and philosophy. America was not built using guns. Guns were there at the start and they were used to affect the freedom of everyone then living in this country, but they were intended, at that point, to be used to fight oppression and to affect freedom. They were never a part of defining an individual man’s power until the late 1800s when pulp fiction began building the myth of the lone cowboy with a gun, supported by Samuel Colt. He was trying to sell revolvers. The pulp media was selling pulp media. America got sold an entire male macho load of mostly pure garbage and then ran with it. Consequently, men, and many women, of today feel that they must either commit some sort of terminal violence, or be ready to perpetuate it, or they are not powerful members of our society and culture.
People do kill people and they do it with guns. But it is also a very real fact that people who support the saturating supply and spread of firearms do a lot more indirect killing than any face off on Main Street with six-shooters would ever result in. Until the nation begins a steady withdrawal of all kinds of weaponry from the possession by so many out in the public, there is going to be no lessening of deaths by firearms. All of Europe has a population greater than the USA. The combined countries that make up Europe, allowing one-one hundredth of the guns Americans possess had less than 1000 deaths by guns in 2017.
The USA had over ten thousand! Guns kill people.
~~James Strauss
