You’ll have to forget banning guns. That seems the sane move to us, to many countries.. but America’s frontier sense of self is too sick and diseased, the gun lobby is too powerful and there’s too much money to be made to ever achieve it
As regular readers will know, I spent the first few months of this year in Los Angeles.
Because we were there so long, we enrolled our three-year-old daughter Alexandra in a pre-school class. She loved it there. Because of her accent, she was an exotic creature and we made good friends with some of the other parents. We’ve been back over a month now but we still get emails from the school, giving us updates on trips and fundraisers and stuff. This week we got a different kind of email. One that told us of “child psychologists” and how parents were “having difficult conversations” with their children and how to “listen to your child and how THEY are feeling regarding all this” and how “some children may fear going to school”.
Because the ink was barely dry on my last column about the massacre in Buffalo, upstate New York, when America was plunged into an even darker horror story with the murder of 19 children and two members of staff at a school in Texas.
But this time it looks like things are going to be different. The Republicans are finally swinging into action with powerful new ideas to combat America’s gun problem.
How about more armed guards at schools? How about home schooling children and doing away with schools altogether? (Let’s face it – they’re just too tempting a target for madmen.)
How about (and we’ve heard this one before) tackling America’s mental health problems?
How about – and this is my favourite – schools only have one door? This was from Senator and Trump lackey Ted Cruz, who went on at length about how schools should only have one door and all the other doors are locked at all times and you put heavily armed guards on that one door and then no killer could ever enter the building again. Well, clearly old Ted isn’t familiar with the concept of a fire department. Or, indeed, familiar with sanity.
Yes, there were lots of suggestions about how to keep kids safe in an America where firearms are now the number one cause of death among children and teenagers. Within
24 hours of the shooting, Fox News had suggested 51 ways to improve the gun situation in America.
Not one of these ideas involved stricter gun controls.
Let’s be clear, you’ll have to forget banning guns. Although that seems the sane move to us and to every other developed country that’s been touched by a massacre, it will never fly in America.
You will never get the guns out. The country’s frontier sense of self is too sick and diseased, the gun lobby is too powerful and there’s too much money to be made to ever achieve that.
No. We’re just talking about baby steps, the smallest, most innocuous improvements. Like maybe more thorough background checks when people who might not be sane try to buy firearms. And perhaps banning assault weapons like the AR-15, the gun that was used this week at Uvalde in Texas. And last week in Buffalo. And in Boulder, Orlando, Parkland, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook and on and on and on. Maybe ban those types of guns to start with?
Not a chance. Not as long as the National Rifle Association, the most powerful lobby in the USA, have breath in their body.
But don’t worry. Because the Republicans have got your back again, American parents.
In the wake of the latest shooting, here came the “thoughts and prayers” from Senator Mike Braun (who took $1.2million in donations from the National Rifle Association), Senator Mitch McConnell ($1.2million from the NRA), Senator Marsha Blackburn ($1.3million from the NRA), Senator Tom Cotton ($1.9million from the NRA), Senator Todd Young ($2.8million from the NRA), Senator Rob Portman ($3million from the NRA), Senator Joni Ernst ($3.1million from the
NRA) and Senator Mitt Romney (a staggering $13million from the NRA).
It’s almost like there’s a pattern here…
And what do the NRA want these guys to do for their money? Just what they have been doing – nothing. Just keep sending the “thoughts and prayers”. It soon transpired that many of the parents of the murdered 10-year-olds in Texas were having to give DNA swabs in order to identify the bodies of their children, because they had been damaged beyond recognition by the high-velocity bullets fired by the killer.
And I wondered – how much comfort will these people find in the “thoughts and prayers” of a bunch of crooked politicians who have been paid by an organisation specifically to thwart any meaningful gun control? Who have literally been paid to make sure the children of America remain unsafe.
And I thought of that email from Alexandra’s pre-school. And of the parents we’d gotten to know there, who were now having to have conversations with their four-yearolds about what they should do if a madman with a machine gun comes into their school to kill them. The children who, like millions of other American kids, will be wetting the bed and developing twitches and tics and all the other signs of infant anxiety.
And I thought of how very glad I was to be home.