Shares in American gun companies dropped yesterday. Smith & Wesson (as was) fell by 7%. And anywhere else this would be a good thing. Ahhhh, people are getting the message: guns kill. Horrible things, mass murders, evil, wicked, blah, blah, blah.

But this isn’t anywhere else, this is America. (Well, ‘there’ is America, strictly speaking but ya know what I mean.) And the message is a completely different one.

Traditionally, after a(nother) mass shooting murder, shares rise. Because Americans panic that new gun legislation might be introduced and they’re down to their last 17 rifles, pistols and anti-tank missile launchers. So better go and buy quick, before them lily-livered-liberal-lefties start making life difficult. Like making us fill in a form before buying a cannon powerful enough to take out a 15-storey office block. And that fear, that buying guns might be harder, creates a panic buying spree. After every shooting in the Obama years. Making the shares rise.

Not so under Trump. Relax, dude, pass me another Coors and we’ll finish up the carbs on the Camaro before we go to the gun-shop. Maybe burn a few crosses on the way over. Because Trump will never do anything to improve gun control. He promised it at the hustings and he’s promised it since. “The eight year assault on our second amendment rights is over” he stated when he came to power, referring to Obama’s constant attempts to bring a little sanity to the nation of the insane. Which never made it past congress or the senate because the gun lobby in America is all-powerful. And all-murdering.

Guns don’t kill. People do. That’s the party line. But guns do make it so much easier. Particularly to reach the big numbers. Like the 59 killed in Las Vegas yesterday. Making it another boom year (no pun… well, not much of a pun) for ammunition makers. And keeping up the average in the States of over 30,000 people killed every year by guns over there. In the total years of US and British ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were 7,500 deaths of troops.

So when Donald puts his hand on where his heart used to live when he had one, and goes into ‘sincere’ mode to mourn the loss of those fine individuals, he doesn’t mention the agency of those deaths. Nor the fact that as president, he could actually try and do something. He would fail, like Obama did because most of the Republican Senators are funded by guns. So he’ll just put that ‘sincere and devastated’ facade back on the shelf today, ready to fish it out when he next needs it. The risk of it getting cobwebs are minimal.

Happy (ish) Tuesday

A xxxx