In the wake of the latest (of sooooo many) high school shootings, last week in Florida, Trump has come up with a brilliant solution. And perfectly in keeping with the ‘old lady who swallowed a fly’ paradigm I mentioned last week. Let’s arm the teachers! Brilliant. And brilliantly American; the way to cope with too many guns is to increase the number of guns. Simple. You do the maths. And also increase ‘gun control’ by adding a new question to the pre-purchase questionaire: “are you a fucking nut-job or total psycho? (Answer Y/N)”.

The odd thing is that the rest of the world simply can’t understand the American obsession with its second amendment. We just don’t get it. And they, on the other hand, can’t understand how anyone wouldn’t want all the firepower they could wish to own.

They banned guns in Scotland after the Dunblaine massacre and since then there have been no mass shootings at schools. Same in Australia; guns banned, shoot-ups finished. But that is simply not an option in America. You hear gun lobbyists and they justify, they defend and they just live on another planet. One in which the possession of weapons does NOT in any way positively correlate to the amount of gun-crime generally and school shoot-ups specifically. “Naaaah, that’s NOTHING to do with people owning automatic rifles, bump-stocks, grenade launchers, armour piercing rocket shells, nothing whatsoever”. They make wonderful analogies like ‘YOU DON’T BAN CARS FROM SOBER DRIVERS JUST BECAUSE OF THE DRUNK ONES!!’ They simply don’t get the link.

Firstly because they’re all, effectively, paid handsomely to defend gun laws, by political donations from the NRA, and secondly because guns are not viewed over there in the same way as everywhere else. We would see ‘a gun’. They would see a ‘Colt 45; nice piece, high-powered, bit of kick on it, have one myself but mine’s gold-plated with a hide covered handle and cow horns on the front sight’. They live guns, which become something of a status symbol in certain parts, both the quality of weapon and the quantity and variety. ‘This is my deer-hunting rifle, this ones for boar, those 3 for high schools and that one there is for intruders, burglars, trespassers and ni- other things’. They clean them, count them, polish them, engrave them and have family trips to gun shops to buy, to look or to simply drool. And that is the environment that their kids grow up in. And really, unless that stops, or at least options become more limited in terms of assault rifles and automatic killing machines, then kids will continue to die for nothing.

Because Americans, it would appear, choose their right to hold guns over the lives of the nations’s children.

Happy Friday

A xxxx