Shooting horror
The killing of nineteen children and two teachers in Texas has again focused attention on the need for gun control, in America but also elsewhere in the world, because guns are being used every day by people with a variety of gripes to unleash grief and terror.
When these incidents occur the debate quickly turns to possible causes, such as mental health issues, radicalisation, racism etc. But it’s about time we addressed an enormous elephant in the room that is carefully concealed and disguised lest it brings the debate in another direction: I refer to the widespread use of guns to kill birds and animals for so-called recreational or ‘sporting’ purposes.
The internet abounds with images of hunters gloating over the carcasses of dead, bleeding, mutilated creatures, animals that posed no threat to them and that, in many cases, enhanced the natural environment.
Gun sites lavish praise on people who whoop with delight at the sight of birds falling to earth, not as raw meat to be utilised for human consumption, but as living beings whose hearts have stopped and whose shattered bodies litter the countryside in the wake of these sportspeople having their fun.
People no longer shoot ‘ for the pot’, but simply to savour the pleasure of squeezing the trigger and turning a living creature into a dead one.
There has to be something unhealthy and potentially dangerous about somebody getting his kicks out of pumping lead into an unthreatening fellow creature.
Studies have pointed to a link between the torture of animals and crimes against humans. Two notorious instances come to mind. The gangster duo Bonnie and Clyde committed acts of cruelty to animals before embarking on their gun-killing spree, and the infamous teenage killers of Jamie Bulger in England stared their descent into violence by shooting cats with an air rifle.
I’m not suggesting that everyone who shoots animal or birds will make the quantum leap into the kind of horror that visited Texas on Wednesday, but I’d think twice before, to quote a tasteless pro-hunting slogan I came across last year, ‘making fiends with guns’.
Thanking you,
John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street, Callan, Co. Kilkenny.