You Can't Hug Your Children With Bear Arms

I have only the most fleeting interest in a multiple murder that occurred in Arizona and involved a politician. I have received what I have been told through ABC radio news and not gone looking for any more detail. I don’t feel my life would be improved with it.

One thing has stood out to me in the coverage I’ve heard, though: The hand-wringing within America has all been about the nastiness of political debate inciting this kind of crime.

To me that seems backwards. I want my political debate to be as nasty, seditious, illuminating, forward, unafraid, derogatory and honest as I would like my politicians to be. I would also like to know that it can be done without the danger of being shot.

Why has the gun debate not reared its head properly in the shake down after this? Isn’t the US sufficiently sick of its absolutely ridiculous gun homicide rate yet?

It’s a continuing collective madness that grips the US on gun ownership. I saw a guy in The States wearing a T-Shirt that said, “Blaming guns for crime is like blaming spoons for making Rosie O’Donnell fat”. It’s cute, but not actually an argument that survives inspection. (If you leave a spoon lying around and your kids start playing with it, you aren’t going to come home twenty minutes later to find one of them dead on the floor from cholesterol induced heart failure.)

You often hear the NRA say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. They sure help, right?

To be fair to the complexities of the argument we can’t just blame guns. Total gun ownership per capita does not have a direct relationship to total murders. Canadians own twice as many guns as Australians but murder each other in similar amounts. They own a third as many guns per capita as Americans but murder each other at only 0.05% the rate Americans are offing each other. What can we take away from this?

Well, firstly, Canadians are lousy shots, but secondly that Americans have got psychological problems and a lot of them seem to be enshrined in law. Here’s the thing, though, it’s just law. It’s artificial. You made it. You can change it. Just ‘cause it’s old, doesn’t make it right or good.

It’s interesting to note that the murder rate in Washington DC is the highest in the country, so you’d think that’d be ample incentive for the pollies to go and make some sensible law around gun ownership, if only to save their own hides. (Speaking of the right to bear arms, ol’ Mama Grizzly’s home state, Alaska is number two with a bullet, there on the chart. Arizona - number 5.)