The concept of gun ownership as an entrenched civil right may go back to the history of
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
The concept of gun ownership as an entrenched civil right may go back to the history of America as a frontier society, but surely the police force of the most powerful democracy in the world can do its job unaided by armed freelancers.The problem is not so much what can or cannot be done It is what Americans want to be done. In those circumstances, it is difficult to be surprised when a crazy person – of which there is no shortage, in any country – takes a gun to set the world to rights. But, to misquote the slogan of the National Rifle Association: “Day trading doesn’t kill people; guns do.”The sheer quantity of guns is truly staggering – more than one per person across the entire country. That mentality is still embedded in much of the country.President Bill Clinton has continued to urge stricter legislation. Compulsory background checks before buying a gun may soon be on the statute books. But that would not have deterred a killer like Mark Barton, who might well have cleared such checks.
Questions were raised yesterday about day trading, and the dangers created by going mad in the upside-down world of the markets. Some years ago, when Virginia sought to introduce legislation that would restrict gun purchases to just one a month, opponents were enraged at this restriction on their civil liberties. When yet another gunman goes crazy in America, the connection between the quantity of guns and the armed violence is not generally seen as so obvious or immediate On the contrary. Yesterday, there were renewed calls for tighter legislation But we have been here before.
It was only three months ago that 15 were shot dead at a Colorado school; and, already, the drive to restrict handgun sales had begun to subside.
When a deranged gunman went on the rampage in Dunblane, the tight laws in Britain were tightened still further. We have seen crazed shootings in the US so many times in recent years – in schools, at prayer meetings, at the Capitol building – that the news of yet another massacre no longer comes as a surprise. Admittedly, Britain has had its own horrors, at Hungerford and Dunblane By any measure, however, America is something else. YET AGAIN, the same story A long list of dead after a lone gunman goes berserk. America wrings its hands; the rest of the world looks on in disbelief. The gambit has worked before; in 1994 it was promised peaceful nuclear reactors to ensure its energy supplies, on the condition that it abandoned its military nuclear pretensions But no one is sure it is fulfilling its end of the bargain.
This time the West must be clear: economic co-operation will continue, and may even grow, if the test is cancelled. If it goes ahead, then all economic development aid should be suspended.. Pyongyang may have the legal right to test missiles, but small wonder that the very talk of it is causing such agitation.In fact, the North is pursuing a tried tactic: first provoke a crisis, and then demand a reward for agreeing to defuse it. Its neighbours include an understandably edgy Japan, a touchy China, not to mention South Korea and the 37,000 American troops stationed on its soil. If North Korea, the last Communist state, is one day subsumed into the far wealthier South, reunification is unlikely to be the gentle affair it was in Germany. It supplies missile technology to such countries as Iran and Pakistan and, despite assurances to the contrary, almost certainly harbours nuclear ambitions of its own.