US must put money where its mouth is

AMERICANS love to do things in a big, showy way. Be it politics, commerce, science and technology, space, religion or show business, they often set the pace. The world’s biggest economy is also the only super power and flexes its muscles around the world.

It preaches peace and God to the world but loves the sound of gun fire, maiming and killing thousands in the name of freedom.

The atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima obliterated the two Japanese cities.

America’s obsession with guns goes back a long way to the Wild West days when gun slingers, riding into town with their guns blazing, were idolised and portrayed as heroes in Western films. Gun violence became entertainment.

But it was the massacre on the prairies that has come back to haunt modern-day America. In a senseless orgy of destruction, the settlers decimated the American Indian tribes and the buffalo.

But the bloodbath on the prairies would not go in vain. With no American Indians and buffalo to kill, Americans are now turning their guns on their fellow human beings.

Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock shocked the American nation when he became the biggest mass killer of all time. Living up to his name as a reckless gambler, he gunned down 59 people and injured more than 520 at a music festival.

Significantly, he owned 34 weapons, which speaks volumes about this gun-crazy nation where a staggering 33 000 people die through gun violence every year. We are not far behind. President Donald Trump called the Vegas massacre an “act of pure evil”. Ironically, the US pursues terrorists overseas but breeds killers. T MARKANDAN Silverglen